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Planning Your Future? Don’t Plan Too Far Ahead, The World Has 12 Years Left

by Aoife Sheridan | October 10, 2018

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on Monday, Oct. 8th on the impact of climate change and the consensus was not good. The world may only have 12 years left to act on climate change before a global catastrophe breaks out.

Drought, flooding, extreme heat, increased poverty. No, this isn’t the blurb for a new disaster movie, it’s the reality that the world is facing right now. The reality of the world today is that climate change is now happening at such an alarmingly fast rate that we may only have 12 years left before hundreds of millions of people are in peril of losing everything. 

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Three years ago, nations met in the Paris agreement and issued a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases with the goal of limiting the rise in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial revolution levels. However, scientists and climate change researchers were quick to vocalize their doubts about the cap and how effective and practical it would be. their goal felt so unattainable that they proposed a second cap, aiming to stall the rise in temperature at 2 degrees Celsius, (3.6 Fahrenheit). Scientists at the time considered it to be the threshold for the most severe effects of climate change.

Evidence in the new report, which saw a team of 91 scientists from over 40 countries analyzing over 6,000 scientific studies, shows that the future is much bleaker than once thought. If there was a global increase in temperature of just 2 degrees Celsius, it would spell widespread disaster and the world may only have 12 years left. Furthermore, if we managed to shave off that extra 0.5 of a degree, the world would still be on the way to flooded coastlines, intense droughts and heat, and the loss of many industries. 

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This seemingly small bump in temperature would be enough to alter the weather worldwide drastically, causing havoc on natural ecosystems and agriculture, and would cost an estimated $54 trillion in damages to try and combat. 

However, there is one country in the world who is publicly opposed to the Paris Agreement, the United States. President Trump has previously mocked the Paris Agreement and is actively trying to withdraw from it. He has also vowed to increase the burning of coal by the country. This move would spell certain disaster as the US is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind China. 

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The findings of this new report are terrifying, to say the least, and if we do not act quickly to try and reverse some of the effects of climate change we could very well all be staring in the reality of a disaster movie. 12 years. The world only has 12 years left to try and fix the irreparable damage we have created. 

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