Climate change affects health directly, causing more sickness and death. In more indirect ways, it affects nutrition, reduces working hours, and increases climate–induced stress.
With just one more week to go for the global conference on climate in Dubai—CoP-28 (Conference of Parties 28)—where all Heads of States will discuss global climate change, the news emerging from the United Nations is disturbing.
Earth has sped up to 2.5–2.9 degrees Celsius of global/anthropogenic warming since pre-industrial times and is set to blow well past the agreed-upon international climate threshold, a UN report has indicated.
To have a thin possibility of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, limited by the 2018 Paris Climate Agreement, countries will have to slash their emissions by 42% by the end of this decade, said the United Nations Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap report issued early this week. The report added that carbon emissions from burning coal, oil and gas rose by 1.2% in 2023.
The unfolding apocalypse
This year, Planet Earth got a taste of what is in store, setting the agenda for the Dubai meet. But, where the Dubai meet will take the world, or, more pertinently, humanity is anybody’s guess, if one critically examines how things unfold.
Significantly, the climate meeting has been scheduled to occur in oil-rich Dubai. The CoP President, Sultan Al Jaber, heads one of the world’s largest oil companies, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The president will likely be less inclined to push the world away from fossil fuels.
By the end of September 2023, the daily global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, the limit set earlier, above mid-19th century levels, on 86 days. That increased to 127 days because nearly all of the first two weeks of November and all of October reached or exceeded the 1.5-degree Celsius limit, according to the European climate service, Copernicus.