AFP UK

Firefighters battled heat and suffocating smoke for a seventh consecutive day Monday on the Greek island of Evia, swept by the most destructive of the wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and forced thousands to flee.

Greece and neighbouring Turkey have been battling devastating blazes for nearly two weeks as the region suffers its worst heatwave in decades. 

The wildfires continue as an alarming UN climate report warned that the planet is warming faster than previously estimated. 

Two people have been confirmed dead in Greece and eight in Turkey, while dozens have been hospitalised.

While most of the fires that have blazed elsewhere in Greece for nearly two weeks have stabilised or receded, the ones on rugged and forested Evia — Greece’s second largest island after Crete — were the most worrying, creating apocalyptic scenes.

– Saving villages –

Authorities were on Monday putting the priority on saving the villages of Kamatriades and Galatsades because “if the fire passes through there, it will end up in a thick forest that will be difficult to extinguish,” firefighters told the Greek news agency ANA.

As the sweeping wall of fire laid siege to one village after another on the north of the island, firefighters toiled until dawn to quench flames at Monokarya in order to protect the town of Istiaia, all without the help of water-dousing aircraft, ANA reported.

Thick and suffocating smoke on Monday also enveloped the coastal region of Pefki, where hundreds of villagers had been evacuated by sea, while others regrouped, an AFP reporting team said.

Around 300 people evacuated from surrounding villages spent the night in a ferry moored near the long beach. Looming in the haze offshore, a military ship awaited further evacuees.

The ferry “was the only place where people could get a little peace and security,” a military official, Panagiotis Charalambos, told AFP.

Like many nearby communities, Pefki “had no electricity or water,” he said.

“Here, the people lived from the forest, from the crops, olives and tourism. There’s nothing of that left now,” said Louisa, a penioner in Pefki.

Finance Minister Christos Staikouras said up to 6,000 euros per household would be allocated to residents whose homes were damaged, as well as 4,500 euros for the injured.

In the town of Aidipsos, collections of basic necessities were organised for villagers who had lost everything in the fire.

“Have you seen the state offer us water? Snacks for the children? No one! They are just letting shopkeepers and individuals give water to people,” Pefki resident Giorgos told AFP.

–  Climate change reality –

While rain brought some respite from the blazes in Turkey over the weekend, Greece continued to suffer from an intense heatwave that Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said should show even doubters the hard reality of climate change.

Monday’s report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement would likely be breached around 2030 — a decade earlier than it projected just three years ago.

Meanwhile the EU said it was mobilising “one of Europe’s biggest ever common firefighting operations” to assist Greece and other countries.

The response was needed “as multiple fires affect several countries simultaneously,” EU crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarcic said.

Giorgos Kelaitzidis, Evia’s deputy governor, echoed many when he blasted the “insufficient forces” to fight the fires while “the situation is critical” on the island.

He said at least 35,000 hectares of land and hundreds of homes have been burned.

From July 29 to August 7, 56,655 hectares (140,000 acres) were burnt in Greece, according to the European Forest Fire Information System. 

The average area burnt over the same period between 2008 and 2020 was 1,700 hectares.

Some 650 firefighters have so far been deployed on Evia, according to Greek authorities.

But the air support faced “serious difficulties” because of turbulence, thick smoke and limited visibility, Greece’s Civil Protection deputy minister Nikos Hardalias said.

The situation looked better elsewhere, with officials saying that fires in the southwestern Peloponnese region and in a suburb north of Athens had abated. A fire on Crete was brought under control.

But Hardalias warned the risk of fires resurging was heightened.

After the UN issued its starkest report yet on the consequences of global warming, pressure is on China — the world’s biggest polluter — to deliver on its own climate goals.

President Xi Jinping has vowed his country will reach peak emissions before 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060. 

But so far, there is no action plan for achieving these goals.

Progress on a climate change law to rein in polluting sectors such as steel, iron and cement has stalled due to industry pressure, while new coal plants are proliferating.

Here’s a rundown of what China says it is doing to combat climate change.

– Curbing coal? –

Xi has vowed to “phase down” coal use from 2026.

Despite the big promise, China is building coal plants in more than 60 sites across the country, while idling plants have reopened.

Last year, the country added 38.4 gigawatts of coal-power capacity — more than three times the amount built elsewhere in the world, according to data from Global Energy Monitor (GEM), a US-based organisation which catalogues fossil fuel projects worldwide.

“This new coal binge is undermining both short- and long-term climate goals,” said Christine Shearer, GEM’s coal programme director.

China’s top economic planner told provinces last week to slow down efforts to curb emissions and make sure they do not hurt economic growth. 

Shuttered coal mines have reopened as demand for electricity surges.

“These mixed signals have confused both investors and local governments,” Martin Wang, an analyst at Guotai Junan Securities, said.

“No one is sure when to pull out their money from coal.”

The return to coal appears to run against the incentives offered by the launch of the world’s biggest carbon trading market last month to prod China’s power companies to curb emissions.

The price for a ton of carbon has hovered around the 50 yuan ($7.7) mark, too low to prompt a switch to cleaner fuels.

– Investing in renewables –

For China to meet its emissions targets, 90 percent of power should come from nuclear and renewables by 2050, according to researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Currently it is just 15 percent.

China has more than a third of the world’s installed wind and solar capacity and electricity generated using renewables is now cheaper than that made with coal. 

“But utility companies are still reluctant to increase the amount of green electricity they purchase because of intense pressure from the coal lobby,” said Han Chen, China energy policy researcher at the National Resources Defense Council, a US-based climate advocacy group.

“That is why renewables only contribute to 15 percent of China’s energy mix despite all the investments flowing into the industry.”

Beijing has pledged to invest in smart grids and energy storage over the next five years, to allow wind and solar energy generated in remote western regions to power factories on the east coast.

Investment in nuclear plants has also gone up. Over the next 15 years, Beijing wants to install at least 200 gigawatts of nuclear capacity. That is more than the installed capacity in the US and France -– the world’s two biggest users of nuclear power.

– Electric vehicles –

A quarter of China’s greenhouse gas emissions come from transport and the government has poured in billions to promote cleaner alternatives.

One in 20 cars sold in China today is an electric or hybrid vehicle and most big cities have thousands of public charging stations. 

Public buses in most cities run on electricity, while electrified roads for smart vehicles are being rolled out.

But Beijing started withdrawing support for electric car manufacturers in 2020 after several high-profile subsidy fraud cases rattled the industry.

– Reforestation –

Beijing has planted more than 40 billion trees over the past three decades, creating large carbon sinks that can absorb greenhouse gases. More than 22 percent of the county is now covered by forests, up from just 12 percent in 1978.

But experts say these planted forests are monocultures that can be easily destroyed by pests and droughts.

Overall, critics warn China has a long way to go to reach its own targets.

“China is in a cycle of carbon-intensive growth… reversing progress made in the early 2010s,” Li Shuo, Climate policy adviser at Greenpeace China, said.

“The key is to cut the country’s addiction to fossil fuel. Doing so is still being perceived by some as suicidal.”

Nepal’s indigenous peoples have been subjected to human rights violations including torture and unlawful killings under the country’s conservation policies, Amnesty International and a local activist group said Monday.

Nearly a quarter of the Himalayan nation’s land has been declared protected, while the government’s conservation efforts — particularly for tigers and rhinos — are hailed as a success internationally.

But the policies have seen indigenous peoples “forcibly evicted” from their ancestral lands, said the report, released by Amnesty and the Community Self-Reliance Centre on the International Day of Indigenous Peoples.

“That success has come at a high price for the country’s indigenous peoples, who had lived in and depended on these protected areas for generations,” Amnesty’s Deputy South Asia Director Dinushika Dissanayake said in a statement.

Dissanayake said that since the 1970s, Nepal’s governments have used an approach to conservation that “severely limited (indigenous peoples’) ability to access traditional foods, medicinal plants and other resources”.

“Heavy-handed enforcement of these policies has subsequently resulted in numerous cases of torture or other ill-treatment and unlawful killings.”

A spokesman for Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation said the agency had yet to read the report, but added that the government sought to “minimise” conflict between the laws and indigenous rights.

The report — which includes interviews with community members, activists and officials — cited the case of Raj Kumar Chepang, who died after allegedly being beaten by army officers in Chitwan National Park in July last year.

The 26-year-old, a member of the indigenous Chepang group who lived in Chitwan’s forests for generations, was collecting snails with six others when they were allegedly confronted and beaten, the report said.

“While returning home, Raj Kumar was not able to walk properly,” one of the six people, Santosh Chepang, told the report’s authors.

“His condition grew worse, and that led to his death.”

The rights groups said laws should be amended to restrict detentions and the use of force by the army in protected areas.

“Nepal’s authorities must recognise indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral lands and allow them to return,” added CSRC executive director Jagat Basnet.

Indigenous communities should be included in conservation initiatives, with alternative housing and land provided to those who lose their homes due to the establishment of national parks, the report added.

We ignored the warnings, and now it’s too late: global heating has arrived with a vengeance and will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bombshell — landing 90 days before a key climate summit desperate to keep 1.5C in play — says the threshold will be breached around 2050, no matter how aggressively humanity draws down carbon pollution.

Years in the making, the sobering report approved by 195 nations shines a harsh spotlight on governments dithering in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential threat.

Nature itself has underscored their negligence.

With only 1.1C of warming so far, an unbroken cascade of deadly, unprecedented weather disasters bulked up by climate change has swept the world this summer, from asphalt-melting heatwaves in Canada, to rainstorms turning city streets in China and Germany into rivers, to untameable wildfires sweeping Greece and California. 

“This report is a reality check,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who co-led hundreds of scientists in reviewing a mountain of published climate science.

“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed.”

Indeed, all but a tiny fraction of warming so far is “unequivocally caused by human activities,” the IPCC concluded for the first time in its three-decade history.

The world must brace itself for worse — potentially much worse — to come, the report made clear.

– Invisible threshold –

Even if the 1.5C target humanity is now poised to overshoot is miraculously achieved, it would still generate heatwaves, rainfall, drought and other extreme weather “unprecedented in the observational record”, it concluded.

At slightly higher levels of global heating, what is today once-a-century coastal flooding will happen every year by 2100, fuelled by storms gorged with extra moisture and rising seas.

“This report should send a shiver down the spine of everyone who reads it,” said Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, who was not among the authors. 

Another looming danger is “tipping points”, invisible thresholds — triggered by rising temperatures — for irreversible changes in Earth’s climate system.  

Disintegrating ice sheets holding enough water to raise seas a dozen metres; the melting of permafrost laden with double the carbon in the atmosphere; the transition of the Amazon from tropical forest to savannah — these potential catastrophes “cannot be ruled out,” the report cautions.

“An important reason for taking urgent action on emissions is to decrease the chances that one or more of these world-changing events will be triggered over the 21st century,” said Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Exeter.

Our natural allies in the fight against climate change, meanwhile, are suffering battle fatigue.

Since about 1960, forests, soil and oceans have steadily absorbed 56 percent of all the CO2 humanity has chucked into the atmosphere — even as those emissions have increased by half.

– Sliver of hope –

But these carbon sinks are becoming saturated, according to the IPCC, and the percentage of human-induced carbon they soak up is likely to decline as the century unfolds. 

“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. 

“Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”

The report offers a sliver of hope for keeping the 1.5C goal alive.

The IPCC projected the increase in global surface temperature for five emissions scenarios — ranging from wildly optimistic to outright reckless — and identifies best estimates for 20-year periods with mid-points of 2030, 2050 and 2090. 

By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold will be breached across the board — by a 10th of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme. 

But under the most optimistic storyline, Earth’s surface will have cooled a notch to 1.4C by century’s end. 

The other long-term trajectories, however, do not look promising.

Temperature increases by 2090 range from a hugely challenging 1.8C to a catastrophic 4.4C.

The report’s authors were at pains to emphasise that the 1.5C goal is not all-or-nothing.

– ‘Every bit of warming matters’ –

“It is important politically, but it is not a cliff edge where everything will suddenly become very catastrophic,” said lead author Amanda Maycock, director of the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Leeds.

Ed Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading and a lead author, said that “every bit of warming matters.” 

“The consequences get worse and worse as we get warmer and warmer. Every tonne of CO2 matters.”

Part 2 of the IPCC assessment — on impacts — is slated for publication in February. Part 3, to be released in March, focuses on ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. 

The focus now will shift to the political arena, where a non-stop series of ministerial and summit meetings, including a critical G20 in October, will lead up to the COP26 UN climate conference in Glasgow, hosted by Britain.

“I hope today’s IPCC report will be a wake-up call for the world to take action now,” said British leader Boris Johnson.

Countries do not see eye-to-eye on many basic issues, beginning with the 1.5C goal.

China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia are lukewarm on it, US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry told the New Yorker last week. Rich countries, meanwhile, have badly missed a deadline to provide funding for developing nations to green their economies and adapt to climate change already in the pipeline.  

“The new IPCC report is not a drill but the final warning that the bubble of empty promises is about to burst,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka. 

“It’s suicidal, and economically irrational to keep procrastinating.”

A bombshell climate science report “must sound a death knell” for coal, oil and gas, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday, warning that fossil fuels were destroying the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement would likely be breached around 2030 — a decade earlier than it itself projected just three years ago.

Guterres called the IPCC’s assessment — the most detailed review of climate science ever conducted — “code red for humanity”.

“This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet,” he said in a statement.

“Countries should also end all new fossil fuel exploration and production, and shift fossil fuel subsidies into renewable energy.”

In its first major scientific assessment since 2014, the IPCC said that Earth’s average surface temperature is projected to hit 1.5 or 1.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels at around 2030, no matter what trajectory greenhouse gas emissions take in the meantime.

By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold will have been breached across the board, by a tenth of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme.

– ‘The alarm bells are deafening’ –

In his most frontal assault yet on the fossil fuel industry that powers the global economy, Guterres said “immediate action” was needed to decarbonise the energy sector.

“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk,” said Guterres.

The Portuguese diplomat said keeping the 1.5C temperature goal in play meant that no new coal plants could be built and that all energy derived from burning coal must come from renewable sources by 2040.

Atmospheric levels of planet-warming CO2 are currently at their highest in at least the last two million years, with methane and nitrous oxide levels at their highest since 800,000 years ago.

Despite a record drop in carbon pollution last year driven by pandemic restrictions, the IPCC found “no detectable decrease” in the rate of greenhouse gas accumulation.

Guterres called on world leaders to ensure the COP26 climate summit in November leads to ramped up emissions cuts and finance to countries already dealing with the fallout from global heating. 

“If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe,” he said. 

“But, as today’s report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”

Firefighters tried Monday to prevent fires from reaching key communities and a thick forest that could fuel an inferno that one official said has destroyed hundreds of homes in seven days on the Greek island of Evia.

If most of nearly two weeks of fires had stabilised or receded in other parts of Greece, the ones on rugged and forested Evia were the most worrying and created apocalyptic scenes.

Firefighters were putting the priority on saving the villages of Kamatriades and Galatsades on Monday because “if the fire passes through there, it will end up in a thick forest that will be difficult to extinguish,” firefighters told the Greek news agency ANA.

After the fire laid siege to one village after another on the north of the island, firefighters also toiled until dawn to quench flames at Monokarya in order to protect the town of Istiaia, all without the help of water-dousing aircraft, ANA reported.

Thick and suffocating smoke on Monday also enveloped the coastal region of Pefki, where hundreds of villagers had been evacuated by sea, while others regrouped, an AFP reporting team said.

– Climate change reality –

Greece and neighbouring Turkey have been battling the devastating fires for nearly two weeks as the region suffers its worst heatwave in decades. Two people have been confirmed dead in Greece and eight in Turkey, while dozens have been hospitalised.

While rain brought some respite from the blazes in Turkey over the weekend, Greece continued to suffer from an intense heatwave that Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said should show even doubters the hard reality of climate change.

On Sunday Civil protection deputy minister Nikos Hardalias warned of “another difficult night” ahead, saying that strong winds were pushing a fire front towards beach villages on Evia, northeast of Athens.

Among 650 firefighters deployed on the island, Greece’s second biggest after Crete, were 250 from Serbia and Romania, supported by 11 planes and helicopters dousing flames with water during the day, according to the Greek firefighting services.

But the air support faced “serious difficulties” because of turbulence, thick smoke and limited visibility, Hardalias said.

Giorgos Kelaitzidis, Evia’s deputy governor, echoed many when he blasted the “insufficient forces” to fight the fires while “the situation is critical” on the island.

He said at least 35,000 hectares of land and hundreds of homes have been burned.

– ‘In the hands of God’ – 

Hundreds of people have already fled the island and another 349 were taken to safety early on Sunday, the coast guard said. 

In Pefki village, young people carried older people over the sand on to a ferry.

Elsewhere, villagers joined in the battle against the flames, helping firefighters.

“We are in the hands of God,” 26-year-old Evia resident Yannis Selimis told AFP. “The state is absent. If people leave, the villages will burn for sure.”

The situation looked better elsewhere, with officials saying that fires in the southwestern Peloponnese region and in a suburb north of Athens had abated. A fire on Crete was brought under control.

But Hardalias warned the risk of fires resurging was heightened.

Some 300 firefighters remained mobilised on the Peleponnese and rescue teams on Monday still fought flames at the foot of Mount Parnes, 30 kilometres (17 miles) north of Athens. These included units from Israel as well as Cyprus and France.

From July 29 to August 7, 56,655 hectares (140,000 acres) were burnt in Greece, according to the European Forest Fire Information System. The average area burnt over the same period between 2008 and 2020 was 1,700 hectares.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s first major scientific assessment since 2014, released Monday, shows unequivocally that global warming is unfolding more quickly than feared and that humanity is almost entirely to blame.

Here is a rundown of some of its key findings from the IPCC Working Group 1 report on physical science:  

Goodbye 1.5C, hello overshoot

Earth’s average surface temperature is projected to hit 1.5 or 1.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030 in all five of the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios  — ranging from highly optimistic to reckless — considered by the report. That’s a full decade earlier than the IPCC predicted just three years ago.

By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold will have been breached across the board, by a tenth of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme. 

There is a silver lining: in the most ambitious if-we-do-everything-right scenario, global temperatures — after “overshooting” the 1.5C target — fall back to 1.4C by 2100. 

Natural climate allies weakening 

Since about 1960, forests, soil and oceans have absorbed 56 percent of all the CO2 humanity has chucked into the atmosphere — even as those emissions have increased by half. Without nature’s help, Earth would already be a much hotter and less hospitable place.

But these allies in our fight against global heating — known in this role as carbon sinks — are showing signs of becoming saturated, and the percentage of human-induced carbon they soak up is likely to decline as the century unfolds. 

Yes, climate change is to blame

The report highlights the stunning progress of a new field, attribution science, in quantifying the extent to which human-induced global heating increases the intensity and/or likelihood of a specific extreme weather event such as a heatwave, a hurricane or a wildfire.

Within weeks, for example, scientists established that the record-shattering heatwave that devastated British Columbia in June would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of climate change.

More generally, the 2021 IPCC report includes many more findings reached with “high confidence” than before. 

Sea rising higher, more quickly 

Global oceans have risen about 20 centimetres (eight inches) since 1900, and the rate of increase has nearly tripled in the last decade. Crumbling and melting ice sheets atop Antarctica and especially Greenland have replaced glacier melt as the main driver.

If global warming is capped at 2C, the ocean watermark will go up about half a metre over the 21st century. It will continue rising to nearly two metres by 2300 — twice the amount predicted by the IPCC in 2019. 

Because of uncertainty over ice sheets, scientists cannot rule out a total rise of two metres by 2100 in a worst-case emissions scenario.   

Dire warnings from the deep past

Major advances in palaeoclimatology — the science of natural climate in Earth’s past — have delivered sobering warnings. 

For example, the last time the planet’s atmosphere was as warm as today, about 125,000 years ago, global sea levels were likely 5-10 metres higher — a level that would put many major coastal cities under water. 

Three million years ago, when atmospheric CO2 concentrations matched today’s levels and temperatures were 2.5C to 4C higher, sea levels were up to 25 metres higher.

Methane in the spotlight 

The report includes more data than ever before on methane (CH4), the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2, and warns that failure to curb emissions could undermine Paris Agreement goals. 

Human-induced sources are roughly divided between leaks from natural gas production, coal mining and landfills on one side, and livestock and manure handling on the other.

CH4 lingers in the atmosphere only a fraction as long as CO2, but is far more efficient at trapping heat. CH4 levels are their highest in at least 800,000 years. 

A focus on regional differences

Although all parts of the planet — from the oceans to the land to the air we breathe — are warming, some areas are heating faster than others. In the Arctic, for example, the average temperature of the coldest days is projected to increase at about triple the rate of global warming across the planet as a whole. 

Sea levels are rising everywhere, but will likely increase up to 20 percent above the global average along many coastlines.

Tipping points = abrupt change

The IPCC warns against abrupt, “low likelihood, high impact” shifts in the climate system that, when irreversible, are called tipping points. Disintegrating ice sheets holding enough water to raise seas a dozen metres; the melting of permafrost laden with billions of tons of carbon; the transition of the Amazon from tropical forest to savannah — are all examples.   

“Abrupt responses and tipping points of the climate system… cannot be ruled out,” the report says.

Global ocean ‘conveyor belt’

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — a large system of ocean currents that regulates the global transfer of heat from the tropics into the northern hemisphere — is slowing down, a trend “very likely” to continue throughout the 21st century. 

Scientists have only “medium confidence” that the AMOC will not stall altogether, as it has in the past. If it did, European winters would become much harsher, monsoon seasons would likely be disrupted, and sea levels in the north Atlantic basin could rise substantially.

We ignored the warnings, and now it’s too late: global heating has arrived with a vengeance and will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bombshell — landing 90 days before a key climate summit desperate to keep 1.5C in play — says the threshold will be breached around 2050, no matter how aggressively humanity draws down carbon pollution.

Years in the making, the sobering report approved by 195 nations shines a harsh spotlight on governments dithering in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential threat.

Nature itself has underscored their negligence.

With only 1.1C of warming so far, an unbroken cascade of deadly, unprecedented weather disasters bulked up by climate change has swept the world this summer, from asphalt-melting heatwaves in Canada, to rainstorms turning China’s city streets into rivers, to untameable wildfires sweeping Greece and California. 

“This report is a reality check,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who co-led hundreds of scientists in reviewing a mountain of published climate science.

“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed.”

Indeed, all but a tiny fraction of warming so far is “unequivocally caused by human activities,” the IPCC concluded for the first time in its three-decade history.

The world must brace itself for worse — potentially much worse — to come, the report made clear.

– Invisible threshold –

Even if the 1.5C target humanity is now poised to overshoot is miraculously achieved, it would still generate heatwaves, rainfall, drought and other extreme weather “unprecedented in the observational record”, it concluded.

At slightly higher levels of global heating, what is today once-a-century coastal flooding will happen every year by 2100, fuelled by storms gorged with extra moisture and rising seas.

“This report should send a shiver down the spine of everyone who reads it,” said Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, who was not among the authors. 

“In the unblinking delivery style of the IPCC, it sets out where we are now and where we are headed and climate change: in a hole, and still digging.”

Another looming danger is “tipping points”, invisible thresholds — triggered by rising temperatures — for irreversible changes in Earth’s climate system.  

Disintegrating ice sheets holding enough water to raise seas a dozen metres; the melting of permafrost laden with double the carbon in the atmosphere; the transition of the Amazon from tropical forest to savannah — these potential catastrophes “cannot be ruled out,” the report cautions.

Our natural allies in the fight against climate change, meanwhile, are suffering battle fatigue.

Since about 1960, forests, soil and oceans have steadily absorbed 56 percent of all the CO2 humanity has chucked into the atmosphere — even as those emissions have increased by half.

– Sliver of hope –

But these carbon sinks are becoming saturated, according to the IPCC, and the percentage of human-induced carbon they soak up is likely to decline as the century unfolds. 

The IPCC “report is a code red for humanity,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. 

“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”

The report does offer a sliver of hope for keeping the 1.5C goal alive.

The IPPC projected the increase in global surface temperature for five emissions scenarios — ranging from wildly optimistic to outright reckless — and identifies best estimates for 20-year periods with mid-points of 2030, 2050 and 2090. 

By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold will be breached across the board — by a 10th of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme. 

But under the most optimistic storyline, Earth’s surface will have cooled a notch to 1.4C by century’s end. 

The other long-term trajectories, however, do not look promising.

Temperature increases by 2090 range from a hugely challenging 1.8C to a catastrophic 4.4C.

The report’s authors were at pains to emphasise that the 1.5C goal is not all-or-nothing.

– ‘Every bit of warming matters’ –

“It is important politically, but it is not a cliff edge where everything will suddenly become very catastrophic,” said lead author Amanda Maycock, director of the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Leeds.

Ed Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading and a lead author, said that “every bit of warming matters.” 

“The consequences get worse and worse as we get warmer and warmer. Every tonne of CO2 matters.”

Part 2 of the IPCC assessment — on impacts — shows how climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, according to a draft seen by AFP. It is slated for publication in February. Part 3, to be released in March, focuses on ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. 

The focus now will shift to the political arena, where a non-stop series of ministerial and summit meetings, including a critical G20 in October, will lead up to the COP26 UN climate conference in Glasgow, hosted by Britain.

Countries do not see eye-to-eye on many basic issues, beginning with the 1.5C goal.

China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia are lukewarm on it, US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry told the New Yorker last week. Rich countries, meanwhile, have badly missed a deadline to provide funding for developing nations to green their economies and adapt to climate change already in the pipeline.  

“The new IPCC report is not a drill but the final warning that the bubble of empty promises is about to burst,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka. 

“It’s suicidal, and economically irrational to keep procrastinating.”

The monstrous Dixie Fire in northern California has grown to become the second-largest wildfire in state history, authorities said Sunday, with three people reported missing and thousands fleeing the advancing flames.

As of Sunday, the fire had destroyed 489,287 acres (198,007 hectares), authorities said, up from the previous day’s 447,723 acres. It now covers an area larger than Los Angeles.

The Dixie blaze is the largest active wildfire in the United States, but only one of 11 major wildfires in California.

Over the weekend, it surpassed the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire to make it the second-worst fire in state history.

“It was like driving out of a war zone that you see in a movie,” Tami Kugler told AFP, sitting beside her tent at an evacuation station after fleeing the historic town of Greenville before it burned down.

“My neighborhood is gone — I mean gone, gone. Everybody I care and love about that’s in that neighborhood, their homes are gone,” she said, adding: “I didn’t have insurance.”

On Saturday, Governor Gavin Newsom visited the charred remains of Greenville, expressing his “deep gratitude” to the teams fighting the flames.

He said authorities had to devote more resources to managing forests and preventing fires.

But he added that “the dries are getting a lot drier, it is hotter than it has ever been… we need to acknowledge just straight up these are climate-induced wildfires.”

Climate change amplifies droughts, creating ideal conditions for wildfires to spread out of control and inflict unprecedented material and environmental damage.

The Dixie blaze, which on Saturday left three firefighters injured, remained 21 percent contained Sunday, unchanged from the day before, the CalFire website reported.

Crews estimate the fire, which began July 13, will not be fully extinguished for two weeks.

– Higher temperatures forecast –

Weak winds and higher humidity have provided some succor to firefighters, but they are bracing for higher temperatures expected to exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) in the coming days.

Heavy smoke was making driving hazardous for fire crews in some areas, and steep trails also made access difficult.

The state’s eight largest wildfires have all come since December 2017. The still-blackened scars of previous fires have aided Dixie Fire crews at times, reducing available fuel.

Thousands of residents have fled the area, many forced to find temporary housing — even living in tents, and often unsure whether their homes have survived.

At an evacuation site under smoky skies in Susanville, exhausted families sat in folding chairs beside tents and vehicles packed with belongings grabbed from their abandoned homes.

The Plumas County sheriff’s office said it was still searching for three people listed as missing, after two others were found over the weekend.

The Dixie Fire has already destroyed about 400 structures — gutting Greenville — and CalFire said workers and equipment were being deployed to save homes in the small town of Crescent Mills, three miles (five kilometers) southeast of Greenville.

More than 5,000 personnel are now battling the Dixie blaze.

Despite repeated evacuation orders from the authorities, some residents have refused to flee, preferring to try to fight the fire on their own rather than leave their property.

By late July, the number of acres burned in California was up more than 250 percent from 2020 — itself the worst year of wildfires in the state’s modern history.

A long-term drought that scientists say is driven by climate change has left much of the western United States and Canada parched — and vulnerable to explosive and highly destructive fires.

A preliminary investigation has suggested the Dixie Fire was started when a tree fell on a power cable owned by regional utility Pacific Gas & Company (PG&E), a private operator that was earlier blamed for the Camp Fire in 2018, which killed 86 people.

As heart-stopping images of fires and floods dominate news cycles worldwide, the UN’s climate science panel will unveil on Monday its much-anticipated projections for temperature and sea-level rises less than three months before a crucial climate summit in Scotland.

After two weeks of virtual negotiations, 195 nations approved the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) comprehensive assessment of past and future warming on Friday in the form of a “summary for policymakers”.

The text — vetted and approved line by line, word by word — is likely to paint a grim picture of accelerating climate change and dire threats on the horizon.

On the heels of deadly floods in India, China and northern Europe as well as asphalt-melting heatwaves in North America and southern Europe, the IPCC’s report is the first so-called assessment report since 2014. 

Both the world and the science have changed a lot since then.

With increasingly sophisticated technology allowing scientists to measure climate change and predict its future path, the report will project global temperature changes until the end of the century under different emissions scenarios.

Based almost entirely on published research, it could forecast — even under optimistic scenarios — a temporary “overshoot” of the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement, and revise upwards its estimates for long-term sea-level rise.

It is also expected to reflect huge progress in so-called attribution science, which allows experts to link individual extreme weather events directly to man-made climate change.

While the underlying IPCC report is purely scientific, the summary for policymakers is negotiated by national representatives, and therefore subject to competing priorities. 

Belgian climate physicist and former IPCC co-chair Jean-Pascal Ypersele, who was party to the negotiations, said the talks were guided by the underlying science.

“I can testify that the authors of the #ClimateReport had the last word on every sentence in the SPM, which really was a Summary FOR (and not BY) policymakers,” he said on Twitter.

The report comes less than three months before the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, which are seen as vital for humanity’s chance of limiting the worst impacts of global warming.

“This is going to be the starkest warning yet that human behaviour is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why COP26 has to be the moment we get this right,” COP26 President Alok Sharma said over the weekend.

“We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years -– this is the moment,” he told a British newspaper. 

French climatologist Corinne Le Quere congratulated the delegates on Friday for finalising “the text of what I think will be one of the most important scientific reports ever published”.

There will be two further parts to the IPCC’s latest round of climate assessments, known as AR6.

A working group report on climate impacts, a draft of which was exclusively obtained by AFP, is set for release in February 2022.

Another report focusing on solutions for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change will be out the following month.