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The British newspaper The Guardian asked 380 world climatologists with the question of how high a rise in global temperatures they expect this century. The answers do not seem optimistic. Experts expect an increase of at least 2.5°C over pre-industrial levels.
The estimate is thus a whole degree higher than the internationally set climate protection goals. The Paris Agreement of December 2015, for example, allows a maximum change of 1.5 degrees and orders its signatories to strive to stay below this limit. At the same time, according to the survey, only six percent of climatologists believe in this goal.
On the contrary, 80 percent of them speak of 2.5 degrees and almost half even expect a warming of at least three degrees. At the same time, scientists draw attention to social phenomena that are associated with warming.
The United Nations draws attention to some of them on its website. “Climate change: Intensifies the struggle for land and water, affects food production and increases hunger, forces people to migrate, increases poverty and inequality, and increases security risks for women and girls,” the organization lists the five most serious impacts of global warming.
Even many scientists surveyed by the British newspaper predict a “semi-dystopian” future with famines, conflicts and mass migration caused by heat waves, fires, floods and storms. At the same time, their intensity and frequency will far exceed those that have already struck in the past.
Last November, climatologist Aleš Farda from the Institute of Global Change Research of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic spoke about a similar change in global temperatures for Seznam Zprávy: “We are heading for a warming of between 2.5-3 °C.” This is bad news, and here we have to expect especially worse problems with drought and heat waves, at the same time associated with episodes of extremely heavy rainfall leading to the occurrence of floods.”
The conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presented last August by its Czech deputy climatologist Radim Tolasz, defined five main climatic extremes that, according to predictions, await the Czech Republic already in the middle of this century: an increase in average temperature, heat waves, river floods, fire weather and torrential rainfall.
“According to our models, the climate system has an inertia of about 20 to 30 years, which means that we are already prepared for the next 30,” Tolasz said at the time in an interview with Seznam Zprávy. And so he drew attention to the fact that it will be very difficult to influence climate change by the middle of the century, and the debate is conducted more with regard to the longer future and the outlook for the entire 21st century.
However, according to experts, the political will is lacking. In the quoted survey by The Guardian, three-quarters of the respondents cited this as a fundamental problem for climate change. Less than two thirds identified the influence of the interests of large corporations, especially from the fossil fuel industry, as the culprit.
“The world’s reaction so far is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools,” said a South African scientist who did not wish to be named. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with considerable suffering for the people of the Global South,” he added.
Many studies have recently shown that the southern hemisphere is much more susceptible to climate change. An article in the respected scientific journal Science shows that although the Southern Hemisphere only covers about a quarter of the Earth’s land area, it has lost as much as 95% of its water over the past two decades.
This and similar articles point to the main reason why it is necessary to keep global climate change below 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era. If it is overcome in the long term, the so-called “tipping points” of entire planetary systems may be exceeded and their subsequent collapse, which will have consequences not only in natural but also in social phenomena on the entire planet.
“Just as a branch can withstand a certain load before it breaks, some parts of the planetary system can also ‘break’ and change to a qualitatively different state during advancing climate changes,” explains the educational project Climate Facts.
“While only coral reefs are at risk from large planetary systems at a warming of up to 1.5°C, at warming above two degrees Celsius we are approaching the likely tipping points of many large planetary systems,” the project adds. Therefore, if the forecasts of the scientists interviewed in the survey above come true, the effects on life on planet Earth could be drastic.
