JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Sunday, March 16, 2025

Earth gets hotter, deadlier during decades of climate talks

by

1229 days ago
20211102
FILE - In this Aug. 17, 2021, file photo, embers light up hillsides as the Dixie Fire burns near Milford in Lassen County, Calif. World leaders have been trying to do something about climate change for 29 years but in that time Earth has gotten much hotter and more dangerous. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 17, 2021, file photo, embers light up hillsides as the Dixie Fire burns near Milford in Lassen County, Calif. World leaders have been trying to do something about climate change for 29 years but in that time Earth has gotten much hotter and more dangerous. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

By SETH BOREN­STEIN-As­so­ci­at­ed Press

World lead­ers have been meet­ing for 29 years to try to curb glob­al warm­ing, and in that time Earth has be­come a much hot­ter and dead­lier plan­et.

Tril­lions of tons of ice have dis­ap­peared over that pe­ri­od, the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els has spewed bil­lions of tons of heat-trap­ping gas­es in­to the air, and hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have died from heat and oth­er weath­er dis­as­ters stoked by cli­mate change, sta­tis­tics show.

When more than 100 world lead­ers de­scend­ed on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Sum­mit to dis­cuss glob­al warm­ing and oth­er en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues, there was “a huge feel­ing of well-be­ing, of be­ing able to do some­thing. There was hope re­al­ly,” said Oren Lyons, faith­keep­er of the Tur­tle Clan of the Ononda­ga Na­tion, one of the rep­re­sen­ta­tives for Na­tive Amer­i­cans at the sum­mit.

Now, the 91-year-old ac­tivist said, that hope has been smoth­ered: “The ice is melt­ing. ... Every­thing is bad. ... Thir­ty years of degra­da­tion.”

Da­ta an­a­lyzed by The As­so­ci­at­ed Press from gov­ern­ment fig­ures and sci­en­tif­ic re­ports shows “how much we did lose Earth,” said for­mer U.S. En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency chief William K. Reil­ly, who head­ed the Amer­i­can del­e­ga­tion three decades ago.

That Earth Sum­mit set up the process of in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate ne­go­ti­a­tions that cul­mi­nat­ed in the 2015 Paris ac­cord and re­sumes Sun­day in Glas­gow, Scot­land, where lead­ers will try to ramp up ef­forts to cut car­bon pol­lu­tion.

Back in 1992, it was clear cli­mate change was a prob­lem “with ma­jor im­pli­ca­tions for lives and liveli­hoods in the fu­ture,” U.N. Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al An­to­nio Guter­res told the AP this month. “That fu­ture is here and we are out of time.”

World lead­ers have ham­mered out two agree­ments to curb cli­mate change. In Ky­oto in 1997, a pro­to­col set car­bon pol­lu­tion cuts for de­vel­oped coun­tries but not poor­er na­tions. That did not go in­to ef­fect un­til 2005 be­cause of rat­i­fi­ca­tion re­quire­ments. In 2015, the Paris agree­ment made every na­tion set its own emis­sion goals.

In both cas­es, the Unit­ed States, a top-pol­lut­ing coun­try, helped ne­go­ti­ate the deals but lat­er pulled out of the process when a Re­pub­li­can pres­i­dent took of­fice. The U.S. has since re­joined the Paris agree­ment.

The year­ly glob­al tem­per­a­ture has in­creased al­most 1.1 de­grees Fahren­heit (0.6 de­grees Cel­sius) since 1992, based on mul­ti-year av­er­ag­ing, ac­cord­ing to the U.S. Na­tion­al Ocean­ic and At­mos­pher­ic Ad­min­is­tra­tion. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the pre­vi­ous 110. Since 1992, the world has bro­ken the an­nu­al glob­al high tem­per­a­ture record eight times.

In Alas­ka, the av­er­age tem­per­a­ture has in­creased 2.5 de­grees (1.4 de­grees Cel­sius) since 1992, ac­cord­ing to NOAA. The Arc­tic had been warm­ing twice as fast as the globe as a whole, but now has jumped to three times faster in some sea­sons, ac­cord­ing to the Arc­tic Mon­i­tor­ing and As­sess­ment Pro­gram.

That heat is melt­ing Earth’s ice. Since 1992, Earth has lost 36 tril­lion tons of ice (33 tril­lion met­ric tons), ac­cord­ing to cal­cu­la­tions by cli­mate sci­en­tist An­drew Shep­herd of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds. That in­cludes sea ice in the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic that melts now more in the sum­mer than it used to, the shrink­ing of gi­ant ice sheets in Green­land and Antarc­ti­ca, and melt­ing glac­i­ers.

And Michael Zemp, who runs the World Glac­i­er Mon­i­tor­ing Ser­vice, said Shep­herd’s num­bers may be a lit­tle low. He cal­cu­lates that since 1992, the glac­i­ers of the world have lost near­ly 9.5 tril­lion tons of ice (8.6 tril­lion met­ric tons), about a tril­lion tons more than Shep­herd’s fig­ures.

With more ice melt in the ocean and wa­ter ex­pand­ing as it warms, the world’s av­er­age sea lev­el has risen about 3.7 inch­es (95 mil­lime­ters) since 1992, ac­cord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to cov­er the Unit­ed States in wa­ter to a depth of 11 feet (3.5 me­ters), Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado sea lev­el re­searcher Steve Nerem cal­cu­lat­ed.

Wild­fires in the Unit­ed States have more than dou­bled in how much they have burned. From 1983 to 1992, wild­fires con­sumed an av­er­age of 2.7 mil­lion acres a year. From 2011 to 2020, the av­er­age was up to 7.5 mil­lion acres, ac­cord­ing to the Na­tion­al In­ter­a­gency Fire Cen­ter.

“The un­healthy choic­es that are killing our plan­et are killing our peo­ple as well,” said Dr. Maria Neira, di­rec­tor of the World Heath Or­ga­ni­za­tion’s en­vi­ron­ment, cli­mate change and health pro­gram.

The Unit­ed States has had 265 weath­er dis­as­ters that caused at least $1 bil­lion in dam­age — ad­just­ed to 2021 dol­lars — since 1992, in­clud­ing 18 so far this year. Those dis­as­ters have caused 11,991 deaths and cost $1.8 tril­lion. From 1980 to 1992, the U.S. av­er­aged three of those bil­lion-dol­lar weath­er dis­as­ters a year. Since 1993, the coun­try has av­er­aged nine a year.

World­wide there have been near­ly 8,000 cli­mate, wa­ter and weath­er dis­as­ters, killing 563,735, ac­cord­ing to the EM­DAT dis­as­ter data­bas e. Those fig­ures are prob­a­bly miss­ing a lot of dis­as­ters and deaths, said the De­barati Guha-Sapir, who over­sees the data­base for the Cen­tre for Re­search on the Epi­demi­ol­o­gy of Dis­as­ters at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain School of Pub­lic Health in Brus­sels.

Med­ical re­searchers ear­li­er this year looked at 732 cities world­wide and cal­cu­lat­ed how many deaths were from cli­mate change-caused ex­tra heat. They found that on av­er­age since 1991, there have been 9,702 heat deaths from glob­al warm­ing a year just in those stud­ied cities, which adds up to 281,000 cli­mate-caused heat deaths since 1992.

But that’s a small pro­por­tion of what re­al­ly is hap­pen­ing, said study au­thor Ana Vice­do-Cabr­era, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at the In­sti­tute of So­cial and Pre­ven­ta­tive Med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bern in Switzer­land. Us­ing those cities, re­searchers cal­cu­lat­ed that dur­ing the four hottest months of the year, the added heat from cli­mate change is re­spon­si­ble for 0.58% of the globe’s deaths.

That comes to about 100,000 heat deaths caused by cli­mate change a year for 29 years, she said.

WHO of­fi­cials said those fig­ures make sense and cal­cu­late the an­nu­al death toll from cli­mate change will rise to 250,000 a year in the 2030s.

Sci­en­tists say this is hap­pen­ing be­cause of heat-trap­ping gas­es. Car­bon diox­ide lev­els have in­creased 17% from 353 parts per mil­lion in Sep­tem­ber 1992 to 413 in Sep­tem­ber 2021, ac­cord­ing to NOAA. The agency’s an­nu­al green­house gas in­dex, which charts six gas­es and weights them ac­cord­ing to how much heat they trap, rose al­most 20% since 1992.

From 1993 to 2019, the world put more than 885 bil­lion tons (803 bil­lion met­ric tons) of car­bon diox­ide in the air from the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els and mak­ing of ce­ment, ac­cord­ing to the Glob­al Car­bon Project, a group of sci­en­tists who track emis­sions.

A pes­simistic Lyons, the Na­tive Amer­i­can ac­tivist, said, “I would say this meet­ing in Glas­gow is the last shot.”

 


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored