The Climate Emergency Report - a wakeup call - Part I

Sometimes it takes a shock to get things to move in the right direction. This is especially true when coordinated public action is needed. May be this was the aim of the 11,258 scientists who came together to publish a report on climate change in November 2019. The report touches on a broad range of disciplines and warns of severe consequences if climatic conditions are allowed to deteriorate any further..

This is the first time that such a report has been published by a large number of scientists coming together. They say it is an emergency. The report is headed by two scientists from Oregon State University, Bill Ripple and Christopher Wolf along with William Moomaw from Tufts University joined by other scientists from Australia and South Africa.

What the Climate Emergency Report says is that humans on earth have to change the way they live, and immediately. There is no time frame for this. Man has to act now. The scientists have given some policy goals for the governments of countries and for the people of the world in general.

The scientists say that 40 years of climate negotiations have not yielded any substantial gains as far as reducing pollution is concerned. Now matters have gone to the extent that the authors decided to put the word ‘emergency’ in the report heading.  Till to date none of the climate reports go to this extent to highlight the urgency of the matter. As to how soon action should be taken, the report is unequivocal. The policy implementation has to be done immediately. For the duration of the climate negotiations the governments did not take this crisis seriously as economics always carried greater weight than physics or science. Governments are concerned with the here and now rather than what happens 10 years or more in the future.  And while the governments were dithering on taking difficult decisions, the process of climate change has accelerated. Authors of the climate report say that disaster will be upon us in a short time. There will be untold suffering and the world will never be the same again.

Over the years numerous studies were done to gauge the impact of human progress on the environment. To illustrate just how human activity has affected the earth adversely, we can take an example. The report says that three main gases in the atmosphere which have caused the most damage are Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide. There is a cascading effect due to the rise in level of these gases as compared to others, and one thing has led to another. The higher proportion of these gases has led to an increase in global surface temperature, which has caused the polar ice caps to start to melt. This is going to play havoc with marine life. Melting polar icecaps have caused ocean temperatures to rise. Sea plankton which is crucial to the ocean food chain is very sensitive to changes in water temperatures. If the plankton is affected adversely by temperature changes, marine life will follow suit. A small imbalance in the proportion of atmospheric gases leads to a major adverse impact on the environment.   

The climate emergency report is an unprecedented action taken by scientists on a global scale. Scientists were known to just advise the government on climate change. It was left to the governments to take any action they saw fit. This is the first time scientists have taken governments to task regarding action to be taken. In the face of this report everything has to take a back seat. Politics and economics will have to give way to science. Climate change is an existential threat, the report says. The report has caused the general public to sit up and take notice. Besides their studies, this is probably the biggest achievement of the scientists involved in this emergency report.