Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown told climate skeptics to “wake up” Monday after a panel of United Nations-assembled scientists released a climate change report damning current efforts to reduce emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is sanctioned by the U.N. to study the effects of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s atmosphere. Its current goal is to find a path to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Based on models analyzed by the IPCC, the Earth has little chance of avoiding high temperatures without radical, unprecedented changes.
“This IPCC report makes unmistakably clear that the world must radically change. It must decarbonize and establish a totally renewable basis for all economic activity,” Brown said in a statement. “The big powers – the United States, China, India and the European Union – must show the way.” (RELATED: It’s The Final Chance We Have To Stop Global Warming … Until The Next Chance)
“We can do it but only if the deniers, the skeptics and the comfortable wake up to what the scientists are telling us,” Brown added.
The report outlines several overall strategies, all radical in their scope if not in their specific policy prescriptions, for achieving less than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. One policy suggested is a carbon tax equivalent to $49 a gallon by 2030. By 2100, the gas tax would raise to $240 a gallon.
The 1.5 degree Celsius ceiling figure is pulled from the Paris Climate Accord, an international agreement to cut emissions signed by many countries in 2015. The U.S. joined the agreement in 2016, but President Donald Trump reversed former-President Barack Obama’s course and announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the agreement last year.
The agreement has largely failed in its objective to keep global warming under 1,5 degrees Celsius as countries have repeatedly cheated the pledges made in the non-binding accord. The U.S. is one of the few countries that has managed to cut emissions since the Paris agreement was signed.
Climate alarmists like Brown use the report to call for massive changes to how societies and governments approach the issue of climate change, and they claim it supports a narrative of doom that environmentalists have been pushing decades. The IPCC report undercuts at least one facet of that narrative, however.
“The IPCC once again reports that there is little basis for claiming that drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes have increased, much less increased due to” greenhouse gases, University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr. tweeted.
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