The Current State of Our Environment
Last updated
Last updated
Under the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, nations agreed that they would take actions to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels while striving for the even tougher target of 1.5°C. To contain warming at 1.5C, manmade global net carbon dioxide emissions would need to fall by about 45% by 2030 from 2010 levels and reach “net zero” by 2050.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, produced their latest climate change report in August 2021. The report provided its assessment of the current and foreseeable global climate situation, demonstrating that the world has warmed by 1.2°C compared to preindustrial levels and predicting it will have increased to 1.5°C by the early 2030s. The rise in temperature is correlated to the increase of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
We can expect more extreme weather conditions in the future. Severe heat waves that once happened every 50 years are now happening roughly once a decade. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger. Most land areas are seeing more rain or snow fall in a year, and fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Sea levels are sure to keep rising and have picked up speed recently, as polar ice sheets melt and warming ocean water expands.
