Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Hoesung Lee. PHOTO/UN
By PATRICK MAYOYO
There is continuing coverage of the release of the latest IPCC report, that warns of a catastrophic future unless adequate measures are taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
Scientists are warning in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that rising greenhouse gas emissions are pushing the world to the brink of irrevocable damage unless drastic action is taken to avert it as per the Paris Agreement.
The central aim of the Paris Agreement that entered into force on 4 November 2016 is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Coal like oil or natural gas is a fossil fuel which produces carbon dioxide and other Greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. Greenhouse gas emissions result in climate change which is blamed for causing droughts, floods, diseases, food shortages and water scarcity among other environmental and health complications.
Climate Home News reveals how government negotiators “fought bitterly last week [at the closing plenary of the IPCC meeting) over which groups and regions are defined as particularly vulnerable to climate change”.
The outlet adds: “Representatives of countries from an array of different regions, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and small island states, pushed to be singled out as particularly vulnerable.
Tanzania and Timor-Leste asked that the world’s poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs), be added to a list of impacted communities, according to a report of the meeting by thinktank IISD.”
Tim McDonnell in Semafor writes that “international climate negotiators are divided over key elements of a United Nations fund they’re creating to distribute financial resources from richer nations to low-income countries impacted by climate change, negotiators and observers told me this week”.
He adds: “With eight months left before the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, two dozen delegates from a range of countries are scrambling to lay out rules for the ‘loss and damage’ fund adopted at COP27 in Egypt last year, that summit’s biggest accomplishment. They have just three scheduled meetings before COP28, the first of which is next week in Egypt, to agree on essential details of how the fund may be accessed and where the money will come from. As talks begin, negotiators say they face steep odds of getting cash flowing soon.”
Returning to the IPCC report, freelance journalist Rishika Pardikar argues in India’s Carbon Copy that it “reveals an unequal science”, adding: “Its climate models fail to reflect and preserve the principles of equity and rights to development while charting decarbonisation pathways.”
Mongabay carries an interview with IPCC author Aditi Mukherji “on energy transition in agriculture and water security”. Media Matters for America reveals that the new IPCC report has “garner[ed] just 14 minutes of corporate broadcast and cable TV news coverage” in the US. And Bloomberg’s Lara Williams uses the report’s release to argue that the “climate crisis is coming for your children”.
