Chance to slow, adapt to climate change dwindling
Skydivers call it “ground rush,” the seemingly exponential increase in perceived speed as a skydiver in free-fall nears the ground before releasing her parachute. At higher altitudes, conversely, a skydiver’s distance from the ground can give the illusion of floating above it all, making it difficult to sense one’s descent.
Humanity may be still somewhere between those two perceptions when it comes to climate change, but the latest report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last week, brings renewed urgency to its past warnings that time is running short for a safe landing.
“Climate change impacts in North America have been occurring faster and will become more severe much sooner than we had previously thought,” Sherilee Harper, one of the report’s lead authors, said during a news briefing last week.
The report’s latest update warns that climate change’s effects are gathering speed and could soon overwhelm the ability of humanity and nature’s own resilience to adapt to those changes, unless the production of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming — carbon dioxide and methane, among others — are reduced in the next two to three decades to avoid more than a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in warming.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-chance-to-slow-adapt-to-climate-change-dwindling/