Experts warn: climate change is largely uncontrolled

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Climate change will “now occur largely unchecked, meaning that massive changes to our planet can no longer be avoided,” said a joint statement on Wednesday at the start of the renowned trade event. The German Weather Service (DWD), among others, participates in this.

“We must accept that the limit of 1.5 degrees will be exceeded,” said the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Jochem Marotzke. He was already involved as lead author in the preparation of a status report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The climate agreement has effectively failed

“This also means that only with enormous efforts will it be possible to keep warming below the 2 degree limit,” the expert said. “We are currently on track to a 3 degree world by the end of the century.” The 2015 Paris climate agreement has ‘effectively failed’.

DWD board member Tobias Fuchs warned of the consequences. “Any further global warming will lead to a rapid increase in weather-related natural hazards such as heat waves, extreme drought, heavy rainfall or storms and thus increase the risks for people and nature,” he explained in Hamburg. Humanity must therefore better prepare for the “catastrophic consequences” that such extreme weather events would entail.

At the conference, the DWD will also present a current report on extreme weather conditions in Germany. The number of warm days with a maximum temperature of at least 30 degrees has tripled since the 1950s, from an average of about three days per year to nine days. Higher temperatures in the summer months led to drier soils.

The pace of warming is increasing

According to the DWD, this happened against the background of increasing global warming. In Germany, the annual average temperature has already risen by 1.7 degrees since systematic measurements began in 1881, and since the 1960s every ten-year period has been warmer than the last. The pace of warming is also increasing. Between 1971 and 2022 it was already 0.38 degrees per decade.

The chairman of the German Meteorological Association, Frank Böttcher, called on politicians and society to honestly assess the situation and take decisive countermeasures. “Let’s put an end to the illusion that we have made an important contribution to climate protection over the past thirty years. Many have done a lot. “But we are still far from a decline in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

He pointed to other observations such as increasing extreme precipitation, shrinking ice areas and an “unprecedented rapid rise in global air and water temperatures.” Humanity is still unclear about the dimensions of the climate change it has initiated.

According to his own statements, the researcher saw a way out in a fundamental change in consumer decisions. Ultimately, politics must ensure that products and services are monitored or promoted based on their climate footprint and resource consumption, he explained. This must be done in a ‘socially acceptable’ manner. Böttcher is the organizer of the conference, where top researchers will meet until Friday.

(AFP)

Source: Blick