London, Europe Brief News – Scientists have seriously warned that they are ‘scared’ about the climate crisis.
Record high temperatures this summer in the UK alone prompted scientists Hannah Cloke, from Reading University, to say: ‘We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.’
This language was echoed by Professor Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey. Temperatures in the Antarctic of 40C above the seasonal norm have been measured, and 30C above in the Arctic.
Francis was alarmed most of all by a recent report warning that if the 1.5C threshold were exceeded, now regarded as almost inevitable, it ‘could trigger multiple climate tipping points: abrupt, irreversible and with dangerous impacts.’
She said: ‘It’s really scary. It seems some of [these trends] are already under way.’
Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, wrote that humanity has: ‘to accept that we are going to crash through the 1.5C climate breakdown guardrail, so that we are forced to face the brutal reality of desperately challenging climate conditions in the decades to come. This means facing the fact that we have no choice but to adapt rapidly to a very different world, one that our grandparents would struggle to recognise.’
He added: ‘Only if Cop acknowledges that 1.5C is now lost, and that dangerous, all-pervasive climate breakdown is unavoidable, will corporations and governments no longer have anywhere to hide, and no safety net that they can use as an excuse to do little or nothing.’
