Photo courtesy of Alexius Horatius
HYANNIS – The UN recently released a report from their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has officials stating the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that changes could help the situation.
This is the sixth assessment report done by the ICPP with goals of providing an overview on the science of climate change, emphasizing new results since the publication of the Fifth Assessment.
The report includes findings such as approximately 3.5 billion people live in areas that are highly vulnerable to climate change and vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions.
Local environmental advocate Madhavi Venkatesan agrees with the concerns brought on by the UN report and says things must change.
“Climate change has always been in existence, what is different about the current period is that we have no evidence over the 800,000 years of ice scoring data that we have, that climate change has been peaking at this level over 400 parts per million,” said Venkatesan.
The report also highlights a number of climate change impacts that it claims could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC, or more.
“This is the unfortunate thing, we probably are one of the largest contributors to climate change activity, but in the United States we do not feel it just because of our geographic presence,” Madhavi said.
As populations, economies and standards of living grow, so does the cumulative level of greenhouse gas emissions.
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