- Title: WRAP: IPCC report says human activity 'indisputible' cause of climate change
- Date: 9th August 2021
- Summary: BAYIRKOY, MARMARIS, TURKEY (FILE) (REUTERS) (MUTE) FILE DRONE FOOTAGE OF TREES AND VILLAGE HOUSES
- Embargoed: 23rd August 2021 16:33
- Keywords: Green Peace Greta Thunberg IPCC Intergovernmental panel on climate change U.N. climate report climate change drought extreme weather flooding forest fires ice melting scientists
- Location: VARIOUS
- City: VARIOUS
- Country: Various
- Topics: Climate Change,Environment,General News,Government / Politics,Editors' Choice,Climate Politics
- Reuters ID: LVA00BEPK6LVR
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A WRAP OF HIGHLIGHTS OF EDITS THAT HAVE ALREADY MOVED. THERE IS NO NEW MATERIAL IN THIS EDIT
Wildfires ravaged many parts of Greece and Turkey on Monday (August 9) as the United Nations panel on climate change told the world that global warming was dangerously close to being out of control - and that humans were "unequivocally" to blame.
Already, greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are high enough to guarantee climate disruption for decades if not centuries, the report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned.
In other words, the deadly heat waves, gargantuan hurricanes and other weather extremes that are already happening will only become more severe.
Fires that broke out during Greece's worst heatwave in three decades last week burned unabated in many parts of the country on Monday.
In the last two weeks, fires have wrought damage on tens of thousands of hectares of forest in Turkey's Mediterranean and Aegean provinces, killed eight people and forced thousands of people including tourists to flee.
Monday alone saw 500,000 acres of forest burning in California, while in Venice tourists waded through ankle-deep water in St Mark's Square.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a "code red for humanity."
"The alarm bells are deafening," he said in a statement. "This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet."
"The only way that we can prevent these symptoms from happening is to actually go to the root cause," activist Greta Thunberg said in an interview with Reuters.
In three months' time, the U.N. COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, will try to wring much more ambitious climate action out of the nations of the world, and the money to go with it.
Drawing on more than 14,000 scientific studies, the IPCC report gives the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of how climate change is altering the natural world - and what could still be ahead.
Unless immediate, rapid and large-scale action is taken to reduce emissions, the report says, the average global temperature is likely to reach or cross the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold within 20 years.
The pledges to cut emissions made so far are nowhere near enough to start reducing level of greenhouse gases - mostly carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels - accumulated in the atmosphere.
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