The United Nations (UN) released its latest report on climate change, warning that the “climate time bomb is ticking”, prompting renewed calls for countries, including the US, to take more aggressive action to curb carbon emissions.
The report, released Monday by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), concludes that continued global use of fossil fuels has caused the world to warm 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. level, close to the emergency threshold of 1.5 degrees. pushed the world closer to a point of no return. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report represented the stark warning to humanity yet.
“The climate time bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a manual to defuse the climate time bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity,” he said. “As can be seen, the 1.5 degree limit is achievable. But it will be a giant leap forward in climate action.”
Following the report, news outlets highlighted the findings, adding comments from additional climate experts and environmentalists who said the report should be a final warning and that “there is no longer room for compromise.” And White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday called the report a “sobering report on the state of our climate.”
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United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks during an interview in New York City. (AP/Robert Bumsted)
However, the IPCC’s report is only the latest in a long line of catastrophic UN warnings and calls for action stretching back decades. The international body first drew attention to emissions-induced climate change at its first Earth Summit in Sweden in 1972 and focused on the issue in the late 1980s when it began issuing its first major global warming warnings.
“The ticking time bomb — I mean, they really don’t have extreme rhetoric anymore,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “What will the rhetoric be like next time or will it just be the same? I think it could just be the same. We could have another stark, stark warning.”
“Since they never report being wrong, it doesn’t really matter. They just move on to the next one,” he continued. “This is an elitist-driven fear. It’s very important to the green energy industry, to the Greens and to the Democrats, but it’s not really important to anyone else. I think people are getting a little bored with it.”
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In 1989, Noel Brown, the former director of the UN environment program, told The Associated Press that entire nations would be wiped off the face of the earth by 2000 if global warming trends are not reversed. He added that if warming is not reduced, humanity can expect “more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.”
A paperboard factory in Canton, North Carolina, in 2014. (Asheville Citizen-Times)
A year later, the IPCC published its first assessment report, which stated with certainty that human activity, namely the burning of fossil fuels for energy, “will amplify the greenhouse effect, resulting, on average, in additional warming of the Earth’s surface”. The report also predicted that increases in emissions could cause “irreversible change in climate that could be detectable” by 2000.
The IPCC continued to publish reports in the 1990s and 2000s with sharp warnings and bold predictions.
“Emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols from human activities continue to alter the atmosphere in ways that are expected to affect climate,” said the agency’s third assessment report, published in 2001. “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is due to human activities.”
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In 2007, the IPCC released its fourth assessment report, which gave the world eight more years to reverse warming and emissions trends to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Seven years later, the Fifth Assessment Report stated that the increased emissions “increase the likelihood of serious, ubiquitous and irreversible consequences for humans and
ecosystems.”
The United Nations Headquarters can be seen in New York City. (AP Photo/Osamu Honda)
“Time is running out. The more we delay, the more we will pay. Climate change is accelerating and human activities are the main cause, as documented in a series of authoritative scientific reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote at the time.
“Climate change poses a major risk to the economic stability and security of nations.”
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Then, in 2019, UN General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garcia said that “11 years is all it takes to avert catastrophe,” giving Earth until 2030. At the same event, Guterres said, “we have no excuse not to act.”
And last year, in a report on sustainable development, the UN warned that to avoid irreversible damage, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025, fall by 43% by 2030 and reach zero by 2050.
However, despite years of warnings, the world continues to see an increase in carbon emissions and fossil fuel production. In 2022, energy-related carbon emissions reached a record high and global oil consumption is expected to reach a record high of 101.7 million barrels per day in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency.
Thomas Catenacci is a political writer for Fox News Digital.
