Two times as quickly as they did thirty years ago, sea levels are increasing. About 19 million people in East Africa are suffering from severe food insecurity as a result of ongoing drought. In Pakistan, floods caused by unprecedented rains claimed 1,700 lives.
The UN climate agency notes that despite this, global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising.
The World Meteorological Organization issued a somber preliminary study saying that the "tell-tale indicators and repercussions of climate change are getting more catastrophic" as world leaders gathered in Egypt on Sunday to begin the UN's COP27 climate negotiations. The past eight years have been the hottest ever seen, despite a rare La Nia weather phenomena that held the rise in global temperature in check for three years. Heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and storms are becoming "more regular and severe extreme weather occurrences around the planet." The report analyzes ongoing ocean acidification as well as the melting of glaciers.
The WMO's Petteri Taalas told the Associated Press that "the melting [of ice] game we have lost, and also the sea level pace." "So yet, there are no encouraging signs."
Governments will be assessing their progress on lowering greenhouse gas emissions and switching to renewable energy sources as they assemble this week for the annual climate conference, as they have done for the previous 26 years. The world's largest polluters admitted that their progress in decreasing greenhouse gas emissions had been too slow during the summit last year.
However, a Washington Post study found that practically none of them really followed through on a commitment to "revisit and reinforce" their aims. According to the WMO provisional study, current concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are all at record highs. The rise of methane, which traps heat 25 times more effectively than carbon, is accelerating.
Al-Jazeera claims that African states are putting pressure on wealthy countries at this year's conference to increase financial aid for low-income nations who are being struck hardest by climate change but are not at fault for the disasters they are experiencing. In order to prevent widespread misery, displaced people, and violence on a worldwide scale, wealthier countries must donate ten times more to developing countries than they do now to aid in their adaptation to climate change, according to a UN report published last week.
According to Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, "the concept that you can construct a wall around your state and somehow protect yourself, so that you can adapt while everyone else will drown, burn, or perish in droughts, is simply absurd."
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