climate change worse than thought?

[12/1/18] What climate change will do region by region

[11/24/18] National Climate Assessment contradicts Trump / impact on Hawaii

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INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.

Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.

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HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Climate change is often described as one problem, but it’s actually many.

Hotter temperatures are melting glaciers, causing sea levels to rise, triggering droughts, increasing the risk for more frequent and stronger cyclones, and making wildfires more likely, scientists say.

All those climate hazards add up.

And an expansive new report from a team of 23 scientists — led by a University of Hawaii professor — predicts that together those hazards mean that society “faces a much larger threat from climate change than previous studies have suggested.”

“Overall, our analysis shows that ongoing climate change will pose a heightened threat to humanity that will be greatly aggravated if substantial and timely reductions of greenhouse gas emissions are not achieved," the scientists concluded, while urging society to take steps now to prevent the worst-case scenarios of climate change.