To Limit The Increase In Temperature, We Need To Increase Our Attempts Manifold: UN

An ice crevasse is seen on the Baishui Glacier No. 1, the world's fastest melting glacier due to its proximity to the Equator, on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the southern province of Yunnan in China. VOA

The United Nations says all countries must triple efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit an average global temperature increase to two degrees Celsius by 2030.

The ninth annual U.N. Environmental Program Emissions Gap report released Tuesday says emissions in 2030 could be up to 15 billion tons higher than needed to prevent a more than two degree hike.

The report said emissions in 2030 would need to be 55 percent lower than they were in 2017 to limit the average increase to a safer 1.5 degrees.

Traffic moves as smoke emits from the chimney of a factory on the outskirts of Gauhati, India. VOA

The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for limiting a temperature rise to between 1.5 and two degrees.

The report said emissions reached a record high of 53.5 tons in 2017 after three years of decreases.

The report also said the world’s 20 largest economies, the Group of Twenty, are not on track to meet their goals in 2030.

The analysis follows a special report last month by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It concluded that two degrees of warming, once believed to be a safe threshold, would trigger more deadly extreme weather events. The report said limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees would require countries to make rapid and unprecedented changes.

The Eiffel tower is illuminated in green with the words “Paris Agreement is Done,” to celebrate the Paris U.N. Climate Change agreement in Paris. VOA

“If the IPCC report represented a global fire alarm, this report is the arson investigation,” said UNEP deputy executive director Joyce Msuya. “The science is clear; for all the ambitious climate action we have seen, government’s need to move faster and with greater urgency. We are feeding this fire while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”

Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration issued The National Climate Assessment, which predicts climate change could cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually through the end of the century.

A woman displays a placard during a demonstration in New York on June 1, 2017, to protest U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the 195-nation Paris climate accord deal. VOA

The proportion of Americans found to be “alarmed” by climate change has doubled in just five years, the pollsters behind a nationwide survey revealed on Tuesday.

Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the poll conducted last December by Yale and George Mason universities were in the alarmed category — an all-time high — and twice the percentage of those surveyed in 2013.

More than 1,100 adults across the United States were asked about their beliefs, attitudes and behaviors toward climate change.

The answers were then used to classify respondents into six groups, from dismissive, or least worried about climate change, to alarmed, for those most worried.

FILE – People cool off at the Unisphere in Queens, New York, July 2, 2018. VOA

Those deemed dismissive of global warming represented 9 percent of respondents, a drop of five points compared to 2013.

‘Green New Deal’

The findings come amid a growing polarization of the political debate over the issue of global warming in the United States.

The decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris climate deal has fired up his base, while opponents have championed a “Green New Deal” that seeks to eliminate the nation’s heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions within a decade.

The 2015 Paris accord, agreed by nearly 200 nations, seeks to wean the global economy off fossil fuels in the second half of this century, limiting the rise in average temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

The increased visibility of global warming such debates generate could explain Americans’ rising concern, said Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor emeritus at Hunter College in New York City.

The climate in New York City in 60 years could feel like Arkansas now. Pixabay

“The more information you get there more interested that you are,” he said.

Academic research has further shown that growing exposure to bouts of extreme weather may also change minds, he added. “And it results in higher concern.”

Climate change influences economy

Climate change will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, hitting everything from health to infrastructure, according to a 2018 government report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II.

Meanwhile, three of the five costliest hurricanes in the United States — Harvey, Maria and Irma — occurred in 2017, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Commerce Department. (VOA)