More than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries endorsed a new paper offering six areas of action for climate change mitigation based on analysis of 40 years of data.
By Brooks Hays, UPI
After compiling 40-years worth of publicly available climate change data, scientists have declared a climate emergency.
The climate scientists responsible for the declaration, published Tuesday in the journal BioScience, say experts have been sounding the alarm for decades.
"Yet greenhouse gas emissions are still rapidly rising, with
increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate," scientists wrote
in their paper. "An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve
our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate
crisis."
The newly published paper was signed by 11,000 scientists from 153 countries.
"We have continued to conduct business as usual and have failed to address this crisis," William Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University, said in a news release.
Before making their declaration, scientists analyzed a variety of
models and data sets related to energy use, surface temperature,
population growth, land-use changes, deforestation, polar ice melting,
carbon emissions and more.
"Global surface temperature, ocean heat content, extreme weather and
its costs, sea level, ocean acidity and land area are all rising,"
Ripple said. "Ice is rapidly disappearing as shown by declining trends
in minimum summer Arctic sea ice, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,
and glacier thickness. All of these rapid changes highlight the urgent
need for action."
Thomas Newsome, from the University of Sydney, said scientists have a
moral obligation to warn the planet's citizens about the threat of
catastrophic climate change.
"From the data we have, it is clear we are facing a climate emergency," Newsome said.
According to the new paper, world leaders and policy makers should
focus their climate change mitigation efforts on six fronts: energy,
short-lived pollutants, nature, food, the economy and population.
"The world must quickly implement massive energy efficiency and
conservation practices and must replace fossil fuels with low-carbon
renewables," researchers wrote in their paper.
In addition to quickly curbing CO2 emissions, the study's authors
called on the world's governments to enact policies that dramatically
reduce short-lived pollutants like methane, black carbon and
hydrofluorocarbons.
"Doing this could slow climate feedback loops and potentially reduce the short-term warming trend," researchers wrote.
According to the study, a concerted effort to protect nature and
restore ecosystems, including coral reefs, forests, wetlands and more
would boost the planet's natural carbon absorption and sequestration
abilities.
Additionally, study authors called on policy makers to transform the planet's economic and agriculture systems.
"Excessive extraction of materials and overexploitation of
ecosystems, driven by economic growth, must be quickly curtailed to
maintain long-term sustainability of the biosphere," scientists wrote.
Perhaps most controversially, the newly published paper also calls on
world leaders to address population growth. Specifically, scientists
suggest developing a framework for population stabilization -- and
eventually, world population reduction -- that simultaneously boosts
human rights while lowering fertility rates.
Several recent reports have highlighted similar strategies for
climate change mitigation. According to one report by United Nations
scientists, carbon emissions need to be halved in the next decade and
reduced to zero by 2040.
Authors of the latest paper are hopeful that the world's governments and its populations can enact the necessary changes.
"Mitigating and adapting to climate change while honoring the
diversity of humans entails major transformations in the ways our global
society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems," researchers
wrote. "We are encouraged by a recent surge of concern. Governmental
bodies are making climate emergency declarations. Schoolchildren are
striking. Ecocide lawsuits are proceeding in the courts. Grassroots
citizen movements are demanding change, and many countries, states and
provinces, cities, and businesses are responding. As an Alliance of
World Scientists, we stand ready to assist decision makers in a just
transition to a sustainable and equitable future."
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