The current extreme temperatures and wildfires are just two of the signs that we're headed into climate chaos.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report this week, and the findings are dire. It’s being called a “Code Red for humanity.”
“Even though we've had all these warnings, tens of thousands of scientific studies published telling us that we're headed into climate chaos,” Jeff Berardelli, CBS News meteorologist & climate specialist says, “And seeing it around us now, the world has not taken enough action.
“In fact, if anything, actually, we're seeing the trajectory of both emissions and also temperatures increase the same rate they've been increasing for the past couple of decades. So right now, we are failing.”
Jeff says you may only need to look out your window to see the effects of climate change.
“We're seeing more extremes than I've ever seen in my career, this summer, from the fires in California, the Pacific Northwest heatwave. Two towns have been wiped off the map by wildfires already this summer. And we're just at the beginning of fire season," he points out.
“The Pacific Northwest heatwave was the kind of heatwave we didn't even think was possible, yet it happened. So the impossible is becoming not only possible but probable, as we can see.”
Jeff notes that there is more extreme weather in more places in a shorter period of time than he’s ever seen in his career. And it's happening all over the world.
Basically, this latest IPCC report notes that we have our work cut out for us.
"We really need to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming," Jeff explains. “We have time to stop our temperatures from warming before they reach two degrees. Once we get to that two-degree area, we start to see these extremes kind of metastasize."
"The extremes accelerate and compound extremes. And that's what we're very concerned about.”
There’s overwhelming consensus in the scientific community on how to meet that climate goal.
“There's only one thing that we can do,” Jeff says, “and that's reduce our burning of fossil fuels and reduce the emissions that go out to the atmosphere. I mean, that's the bottom line.”
“At some point, maybe in a couple to a few decades, we'll have the technology to suck that carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. It's called carbon capture, but it's not even close to being ready for prime time. It's not ready for scale. It's going to take many years to get it ready. So in the meantime, we're going to get close to that two degrees Celsius mark unless we just stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
And as Jeff reveals, If the world doesn’t do that, the consequences could be catastrophic.
“The bottom line is we absolutely have to transition away from fossil fuels because otherwise we're headed towards climate calamity.”
