Climate change: No time to lose

Gaudenz Flury, a prominent Swiss meteorologist and presenter of the nation’s daily weather forecast, painted a bleak picture of climate change and resilience in his keynote presentation at the recent SIRM Forum in Bern.

“The global temperature has gone up by 1.1% since 1850, a higher and faster increase than at any time in the past 100,000 years,” he noted.

Using Switzerland (where the temperature has risen by 2% since 1850) to demonstrate the consequences of this warming, he said the country has seen more intense and frequent rainfall, a greater number and severity of heatwaves, less snowfall, receding glaciers and longer vegetation periods.

Looking to the future, the prospects are worse still. Referring to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modelling and forecasts, Flury stated: “We are not on track [to mitigate climate change] at all.”

He pointed out that, excluding the effect of carbon emissions and allowing purely for natural factors, the temperature should have cooled slightly since 1850 instead of showing an unprecedented rise.

Further, given that the harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions have been known for well over 20 years, Flury was critical of the inadequate response to date. Emissions have actually increased since the turn of the century, he pointed out.

Assuming a Representative Concentration Pathway of 8.5, which experts believe may happen, the temperature would increase by 4.3°C this century, which would be unbearable for civilisation, said Flury.

By way of example, he remarked that in such a scenario, a one-in-50-year extreme heat event would occur between 27 and 41 times.

Even a milder scenario, such as a 2.5°C temperature rise, has catastrophic consequences. That would cause rising sea levels, affecting more than one billion people, and place more than two billion people at risk of contracting dengue fever.

In the current situation, the 2.5°C pathway appears the most likely, going by the latest data.

Flury said the need for action could not be clearer. There is a real risk of overshooting the 1.5°C increase set out in the Paris Agreement. Now is the time to make sure that does not happen. That must be the priority as the planet’s future is at stake.

Flury concluded by recommending that individuals play their part by stressing the urgency of climate change mitigation in a professional capacity and reducing their personal carbon footprint as much as possible.

“Remember, we’re hurtling into a brick wall at full throttle,” he said in closing.

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