Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In 2019 WUWT celebrated the 30th anniversary of the 1989 10 years to save the world UN climate emergency declaration. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is showing real determination to keep this proud tradition alive, by escalating the emergency to a “code red”.
Landmark United Nations report finds the world is running out of time to slow down climate change, humans ‘unequivocally’ to blame
Nina Chestney and Andrea Januta
Published: 09/08/2021
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has described the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a ‘code red for humanity’.
The report released on Monday warns the world is dangerously close to runaway warming – and that humans are “unequivocally” to blame.
Already, greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are high enough to guarantee climate disruption for decades if not centuries, the scientists conclude.
The UN chief urged an immediate end to coal energy and other high-polluting fossil fuels.
“The alarm bells are deafening,” Guterres said in a statement. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
…
Read more: https://7news.com.au/weather/climate-change/code-red-for-humanityguterres-c-3637453
The 1989 climate emergency promised entire nations would be engulfed by rising seas by the year 2000.
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 30, 1989UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.…
Read more: https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 (PDF backup)
Interestingly it looks like the AP digital copy of the 1989 warning has been damaged, the title is missing when I view it. Possibly someone tried to delete it, and hit the wrong button.
I have to say Guteres has been a little selfish with his use of language, and left a real head scratcher for the organisers of the next COP conference. I mean, how do you top a “code red”?
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“This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
Coal use is going, and will continue to go……up..
The concentration of ozone and GCR in regions of weaker geomagnetic field in high latitudes is responsible for blocking circulation in the lower stratosphere, which is especially important during the winter season.
During times of low solar wind magnetic activity, a weakening of the jet current (slowing of the zonal circulation) is observed. Why does this happen? When the solar wind is weak there is an increase in galactic radiation (primary and secondary) at high latitudes. The distribution of this radiation depends closely on the geomagnetic field. Similarly, the distribution of ozone, as a diamagnetic, is highly dependent on the geomagnetic field. The geomagnetic field over the Arctic changes very rapidly. There are two geomagnetic field maxima at the moment, one over northern Canada (weakening rapidly), the other over Siberia (strengthening). Where the geomagnetic field is weaker the concentration of both GCR and ozone increases.
“A map of cutoff energies as calculated in real time at the University of Bern is shown in this Figure. Red shading at the borders of the map is for regions where protons with energy below 125 MeV can penetrate to the atmosphere (20 km above the ground), while energies above 15 GeV (green colour within the closed contour) are required in equatorial regions above southern Asia. The contours of equal cutoff energy are curved, because the axis of the terrestrial magnetic field is inclined with respect to the rotation axis. Overall one notes that the closer one approaches the magnetic equator, the higher the minimum energy required for cosmic rays to reach the atmosphere. The cutoff energies are higher within the closed contour above southern Asia, because the Earth’s dipole is located somewhat outside the centre of the Earth, closer to southern Asia than to the region on the opposite side of the Earth above the western Atlantic Ocean.”
I’m still trying to get my head around all this, but that explanation helped a lot. Thanks.
Galactic cosmic rays. Who would have thought, years ago! Now, we think about it, as we come to a greater understanding of what is going on around us.
Someone should tell China of the impending doom caused largely by their coal plants.
As of 2021, there were 1,082 operational coal power plants in China. China approved the construction of an additional 36.9 GW of coal-fired capacity last year, three times more than a year earlier, bringing the total under construction to 88.1 GW. It now has 247 GW of coal power under development, enough to power all of Germany.
You are going to get Griff riled up saying things like that.
Think the number might actually be higher, but get the point for sure.
A few years back, because of an economic slowdown, China announced that they were reducing the number of planned coal plants over the next three years from something like 600 to somewhere around 550. (Numbers from memory)
For weeks griff screamed at anyone who would listen that China had announced they were getting out of the coal business.
Likewise, a few years ago, GM announced that every one of their product lines was going to have an electric version.
Various EV enthusiasts form months were proclaiming that GM had announced that they were only going to make electrics from now on.
To me it is scary that the UN tells its population such hopeless and dangerous bull shit.
H2O and CO2 are the building blocks of life. Obviously there is a large window for both in which life thrives on this planet, otherwise it would be dead !
I appreciate the UN as the USA federal government would have no competition on most corrupt agency in the world without them.
But this time they REALLY REALLY mean it!
Time to move the UN to Hong Kong where it belongs, and stop clicking their stories… we don’t want to encourage them.
I’d rather move them to N. Korea, so they can start living the life they want for the rest of us.
How do you top “code red”? How about “code plaid” – yeah, that’ll get their attention!
Yeah, but which clan?
Does your family know you stopped taking your meds?
Questions about the UN logo. Is North America really the smallest continent on earth or is the logo a codified index of how China sees it’s imperialistic marketeering future in the world. How nationalistic of them! Watch out Australia, South America and Africa! LOL
Just look how our planet is being destroyed (-:
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/69258/
This seems a deal breaker …
Marijuana has never been more popular in the U.S. — and its carbon emissions have never posed a bigger threat to the climate.
America’s patchwork approach to legalizing weed has helped make cannabis cultivation one of the most energy-intensive crops in the nation. And as states increasingly embrace marijuana, a growing source of greenhouse gases is going essentially unnoticed by climate hawks on Capitol Hill.