WHY CLIMATE CHANGE
IS AN EMERGENCY

Global climate change has become a real and increasing threat
to the very survival of humanity.

It is already a growing emergency for regionally
vulnerable populations.

Click on the picture to download the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Guide.

Reasons Why Climate Change is an Emergency

• Greenhouse gas (GHG) molecules radiate heat for as long as they last in the atmosphere. Around 50% of emitted carbon dioxide (CO2) lasts for 50 years, but 25% lasts for thousands of years and it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the planet to permanently sink CO2 emissions.


• Methane lasts 12 years in the atmosphere, with a heat forcing more than 70 times greater than carbon dioxide, after which it is converted to other GHGs, notably CO2.


• Global warming, at any increased GHG level, lasts for over 1000 years.


• The rate of global warming exceeds anything in the past 10,000 years, over which time human agriculture and civilization developed.



• Greenhouse gas emissions are still accelerating.


• Global warming is accelerating.


• CO2 level is the highest it has been in millions of years.


• Since 2005, CO2 emissions have been higher than in the IPCC worst case scenario and are still accelerating.


• Levels of methane in the atmosphere are on the rise again, after a 10-year stable period that followed a 150% increase between 1990 and 1998.


• Methane level is the highest it has been in at least 800,000 years.

A very small disturbance of gas hydrates could cause catastrophic consequences within a few decades. Shallow bottom sediment and underlying permafrost have warmed approximately 15°C since the time they originated. The implications of this trend are that shallow off-shore gas hydrate deposits could become vulnerable.... Methane plumes found in the East-Siberian Sea (ESS) during the 1st and 2nd Russian-U.S. joint cruises during September of 2003 and 2004 may indicate decaying gas hydrates in thawing undersea permafrost.

— Natalia Shakhova, Methane in the Arctic and its Role in Global Climate Change, 3 February 2005, IARC Research Highlight

• Atmospheric levels of methane are spiking (accelerating suddenly) since 2005 due to northern carbon feedbacks.


• By far the most dangerous of all global warming effects and all carbon feedbacks, ocean methane hydrates are emitting to the atmosphere off the Arctic Siberian coast. This has huge significance because it is assumed that methane hydrates would only emit methane into the atmosphere (in addition to dissolving in the ocean water) by a massive methane hydrate destabilization (Archer, 2007). Evidence shows that in the past, this has led to rapid runaway global heating and mass extinctions of life on the planet.


• Terrestrial and ocean carbon sink failures have begun, which will add to carbon feedbacks.


• Arctic ocean ice is at or is close to irreversible meltdown, increasing the regional rate of Arctic warming with the loss of reflective cooling (the albedo effect).


• The oceans have been acidified by an extra 30% since 1900, at a rate that not experienced for at least 400,000 years, probably for the last 20 million years, and possibly ever.



---



We have analyzed the transition from the last glacial period until our present warm interglacial period, and the climate shifts are happening suddenly, as if someone had pushed a button.
— Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

---



• Humanity's current economic trajectory is a global warming of 6ºC or more by 2100 (lasting for hundreds of years, adding another 3ºC), which is a threat to the survival of humanity and most life on Earth.


• Even if the world stopped burning fossil fuels now, today's warming of 0.78ºC actually equals a warming of 1.4ºC by 2100 (because of the ocean heat lag effect of +0.6ºC).


• The fossil-fueled global economy is on track for growth in world energy consumption that will increase global GHG emissions up to 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

See more details and references on the
State of the Global Climate webpage.

Two More Reasons Why Climate Change is an Emergency

• The climate change models (2007-2008) tell us that due to the long atmospheric life time of CO2, it will now take "negative" GHG emissions to stop global warming. In other words, humanity must reach virtual net zero carbon emissions AND start taking GHGs out of the air through artificial carbon sinks.


• We are have barely begun to convert from fossil fuels to renewable energy technologies, and have not yet started to develop artificial carbon sinks.

Climate Emergency: No more business as usual!

A presentation by Professor Barry Brook
Director, Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Adelaide, Australia

(Click link or image to launch Powerpoint presentation.)

Return from Why Climate Change is an Emergency to Evidence

Go to Climate Change Emergency Homepage