Climate – reaching the tipping point
On the eve of the COP27, widely known as the world climate summit, world leaders and the international community face the stark reality of being already deep into the climate crisis. The rising global warming has reached its tipping point. The question that the world leaders face now is simple and straight: can the summit be a turning point to undo the climatic damage humanity has been doing to the planet?
A new UNO study, presented on an opening day (6th of Nov), of the COP27 summit, shows that extreme weather conditions and ice melting are attaining new highs, as the greenhouse gases acquire disastrous emissions rates. The report presents World Meteorological Agency data on rising global temperature, according to which the previous eight years, from 2016 to onward, were the hottest ever in recorded human history.
“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts,” asserted the WMO secretary-general, Prof Petteri Taalas, with the warning “We have such high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5C of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach.”
In simple terms, according to Prof Petteri, for many glaciers, the time to undo the hazardous impacts of rising temperature is passed, which means humanity must brace for the consequences arising out from a long-term sea level rise.
Pakistan’s prime minister Shahbaz Sharif has also presented the case of Pakistan at the global summit. Faced with an unprecedented scenario of supercharged climatic events – devastating heatwaves, rainfalls, and floods, this year, Pakistan stands as an arresting example to show the world that the stakes are high, so much so to leave the summit without the resolve to implement the climatic commitments on finance, resilience, and adaptation.
At this COP27 summit, world leaders must put climatic commitments into effect. If not now then when it will be? As the world is about to reach the climate tipping point, there will, therefore, hardly be a turning point.
