Leaders of vulnerable countries, as well as activists, said Monday’s blistering United Nations report must galvanize global action. But major emitters are dragging their heels.
When some 200 scientists convened by the United Nations all but demanded on Monday that the nations immediately band together to cut emissions, they portrayed it as a brief window to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. But as their call ricocheted around the planet, it only underscored the challenge ahead: getting the world’s biggest polluters and its most vulnerable countries to cooperate against a grave global threat. In unequivocal terms, the new United Nations report said that the world has been so slow to cut emissions, it was certain to miss one of its basic goals to limit warming. It said atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide had not been this high in at least 2 million years, and the past decade is likely the hottest the planet has been in 125,000 years. And in unusually direct terms, it said that human activity — burning oil, gas and coal — was squarely to blame. The report prompted outrage among some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, whose leaders demanded that rich, industrialized powers immediately reduce their planet-warming pollution, compensate poor countries for the damages caused and help fund their preparations for a perilous future. “What science is now saying is actually happening in front of our eyes,” said Malik Amin Aslam, special assistant on climate change to the prime minister of Pakistan, where temperatures exceeded 122 degrees Fahrenheit last year. “It’s like a hammer hitting us on the head every day.” Tensions over the report’s findings are likely to course through negotiations taking place ahead of a major U.N. climate conference set for November in Glasgow. The report concluded that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by humans burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat. Environmental groups said those findings will bolster international legal strategies to try to hold fossil fuel companies and governments accountable. The report may prove particularly valuable because, unlike previous reports, it focuses extensively on regional effects of climate change. That may allow environmental groups to fashion stronger, more specific legal arguments. “It’s like a turbocharge” for some of the legal strategies that Greenpeace and other organizations have been pursuing in courts for years, said Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International. Earlier this year, Greenpeace successfully sued Royal Dutch Shell in a Dutch court using evidence from an earlier U.N. report. “I just expect the pace and the scale of the calls for action, whether they be in the courtrooms or on the streets or in the committee hearing rooms, to be clearer louder, bigger than ever before,” Ms. Morgan said. Hours after the report was published, demonstrations were being planned for later this month in London and other cities. The report shows that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue at the same levels or are only slightly reduced, the outcome will be continued warming and worsening effects for at least the rest of the century.
