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Opinion | ‘Code red’ climate crisis: leaders must wake up to the real threat to maritime security
- Geopolitics and geoeconomics have dominated the discourse on maritime security for 500 years. But the latest UN report on global warming and irreversible ocean damage shows where true priorities lie
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Global warming, the world’s most serious existential challenge, is poised to morph into an irreversible threat to Planet Earth’s diverse life forms. Yet humans, ostensibly the most evolved type of mammal, seem oblivious to this.
This is the stark summary of the sixth assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last Monday, a large and detailed report of 13 chapters totalling almost 4,000 pages, distilled from 14,000 scientific studies and papers.
Justifying the “code red” warning by the United Nations is this bleak conclusion: “Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered.”
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Hence, global warming of “1.5 degrees and 2 degrees Celsius will be exceeded during the 21st century”. The slender caveat is that this exigency will unfold “unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades”.
The rise in global surface temperature is a slow development and has been aggravated by human activity that includes the burning of fossil fuels and other forms of greenhouse gas emissions.
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Global warming dangerously close to being out of control: US climate report
Global warming dangerously close to being out of control: US climate report
To place this increase in context, global average temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees since the pre-industrial age (1850-1900) and this occurred over a century. Now, the temperature rise could reach or exceed 1.5 degrees over the next 20 years.
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