New UN Climate Report Calls For End Of Fossil Fuel Use By 2100

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The unrestricted use of fossil fuels should be phased out by the end of the century, and the majority of the world’s electricity can and should be produced by low-carbon sources by 2050, according to a new report released Sunday by a United Nation’s panel.
If those goals are not met, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report warned that planet Earth faces “severe, pervasive and irreversible” harm, BBC News reporter Matt McGrath said. The report, published Sunday following a week’s worth of intense debate between scientists and government officials, warned that failing to act would be far more costly than taking the necessary steps.
Furthermore, the report said that reducing emissions is vital if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius, a target set forth by climate experts in 2009, and that the use of renewable resources would have to increase from their current 30 percent share of the power sector to 80 percent by 2050, the British news agency added.
According to Doyle Rice of USA Today, the 116-page report, which was compiled by representatives from 80 countries who had gathered together in Copenhagen over the past week, also said that human activity and greenhouse gas emissions were primarily to blame for climate change with a 95 percent degree of certainty.
The IPCC report comes at a time when the planet is in the midst of what is expected to be its hottest year ever recorded, as well as the highest atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in at least 800,000 years, Rice said. The authors also said that it was likely that heat waves would occur more often and last longer, and that extreme weather events would become more intense and more frequent in some regions of the world, according to NBC News.
While the study recommends the contribution of financial resources to people and governments to develop new ideas to deal with the problem of climate change, Reuters reporter Alister Doyle said that the paper itself is “vague” about what countries should specifically do in order to reach the report’s stated goals.
“Governments feel more comfortable setting long-term goals for the planet than targets for themselves,” Doyle said, and Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists told the Reuters reporter that “no one wants to admit how much they will have to do” in order to meet the two degree Celsius target. A previous report, Doyle said, called for wealthy nations to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in order to achieve that goal.
According to BBC News, the newest IPCC report, the fifth released since 1990, also stated that the period between 1983 and 2012 was probably the warmest 30 year period of the past 1,400 years, and that the impact of increasing temperatures has already been seen in such places as the acidification of the oceans and reduction in crop yields. Without concerted action on carbon, temperatures will continue to increase in the decades ahead, the report said.
“We can’t prevent a large scale disaster if we don’t heed this kind of hard science. The longer we are stuck in a debate over ideology and politics, the more the costs of inaction grow and grow,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said in response to the report, according to various media outlets. “Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids.”
UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey added that the report was the “most comprehensive, thorough and robust assessment of climate change ever produced,” telling BBC News that it “sends a clear message that should be heard across the world – we must act on climate change now. It’s now up to the politicians – we must safeguard the world for future generations by striking a new climate deal in Paris next year.”

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