The message remains mostly the same... and just keeps getting increasingly dire as time moves along...
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"... our nightmare is here, it is the world we live in."
"... evidence of the impact of climate change on the oceans is everywhere now. The collapsing fisheries, the changes in the Arctic and the hardship communities live there are having to face, the frequency and intensity of storms, everything imagined 30 to 40 years ago when the environmental movement was born, we're dealing with those now … the toxins in our bodies, food web, and in the marine mammals, it's all there."
"... carbon emissions have already risen "far above even the bleak scenarios."
In March 1958, high-precision monitoring began, and atmospheric CO2 was 315 parts per million (ppm).
Today, atmospheric CO2 is approaching 390 ppm.
... "360 is now known to be the level at which coral reefs cease to be viable in the long run."
Oceans absorb 26% (2.3 billion metric tonnes) of the carbon human activities release into the atmosphere annually.
The oceans are already more acidic than they have been at any time in the last 800,000 years. At current rates, by 2050 it will be more corrosive than they have been in the past 20 million years.
CO2 levels above 350 ppm "threaten the ecological life-support systems" of the planet and "challenge the viability of contemporary human societies."
20 million years ago was the last time we had carbon levels this high. At that time, sea levels rose over 30 metres and temperatures were as much as 18 degrees C higher than they are today.
... global carbon emissions, rather than slowing down in order to stem climate change, are continuing to increase... fumes that belch from chimneys, exhausts and jet engines, that should have bent in a rapid curve towards the ground, were heading for the ceiling instead".
... it is "improbable" that we would be able to stop short of 650 ppm, even if rich countries adopted "draconian emissions reductions within a decade".
That number, should it come to pass, would mean that global average temperatures would increase five times as much as previous models predicted.
Even if CO2 emissions were completely stopped immediately, ongoing impacts from climate change would take centuries to stop... ..."changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped".
"... we're in it right now...so it's not about, here's how much time we have. The clock in many ways has already run out. We're still growing our use of fossil fuels, we're not even in a mode of trimming them down, same with our use of plastic and the plastic pollution generated from it. There's more conversation about this than ever, but it's not translating into societal change or evolution."
"If we stay our present course, using fossil fuels to feed a growing appetite for energy-intensive lifestyles, we will soon be leaving the climate of The Holocene, the world of prior human history... (many say we have already entered The Anthropocene - 'the recent age of man').
The eventual response to doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 would be a nearly ice-free planet... preceded by a period of chaotic change with continually changing shorelines."
Our future is coming at us full force very quickly .. it does not appear as if we are going to have the collective will to somewhat adapt in such short time.
And once the reality of the situation begins to increasingly enter into the consciousness of the general population.. our world as it exists at the present moment will become forever changed.
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