News headlines this week on a new U.N. climate report have included lines like the world has just a decade to control climate change and life or death warning for planetary survival. You'd think that might have dominated the news cycle but not in today's world. The U.N. report has issued a new target for the world to stop temperature rise. And a new challenge that the effort must be total and must begin now. Joining me is Seth Borenstein science writer for The Associated Press and Seth. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Now many of our listeners will be aware of the 2 degree goal. Now this panel of scientists is reporting that the goal should actually be one point to five degrees Celsius higher than post industrial levels. What's the significance of that change. So to put this all in context first we've already warmed one degree Celsius since pre-industrial so we are really talking about the difference between half a degree Celsius more of warming and 1 degree Celsius more of warming. So this is mostly a smaller nations poorer nations saying wait a minute. The difference between those two levels is life or death for us. So they asked this group of scientists to study to see what is really the difference between one half and 1 degrees Celsius and of course it's half a degree Celsius. But what does it mean in terms of Earth and people. And is it feasible to stop that. Since we're already you know very close and they found that indeed there's a world of difference between half a degree of warming and one degree more warming. The trouble is most scientists and even the report when you go deeply into say to it acknowledge that it's very unlikely highly unlikely that we'll be able to limit warming to just another half a degree. What do they say it would take to make this more ambitious goal. What it would take to meet this goal is immediate and dramatic changes in just about everything in her life mostly our energy systems but are our buildings our transportation and has to be global. So we're talking about a about a 50 percent cut in emissions by 2030 and emissions are still rising now. Forget about a 50 percent cut and that by 2050 we would essentially have. No annual missions that we would be not putting extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or we'd be only putting the amount that we that is sucked up by trees and oceans so that we wouldn't be adding to this this this is you. When I talk to scientists who are not part of this report they all said we're not even going to stop to degree this 2 degree goal. You know in other words we can't even limit warming to another degree forget about half a degree. One scientist I talked to said this is similar to an academic exercise wondering what if frogs had wings. It's not going to happen unless the world changes dramatically and we haven't seen signs of the world changing dramatically. So just to be clear then what you're saying is that it seems obvious from this report even though they they are urging these changes these rapid and far reaching changes that the global community has been able to limit emissions so far and it doesn't look like they're going to be able to. That's right. In the report. Deep in the report they went through 529 different scenarios of emissions would you care to guess how many of those found that they could limit. Warming to just another half a degree Celsius from now. I do know what it is it's 2 percent yeah it's 9 out of 529. Less than 2 percent. And even under those the margin of error is such that it may not still limited the report. At one point point blank sleeze point blank says there is no definitive way to ensure. Temperatures are limited to one point far. Most scientists are saying yes the goal is two degrees but that 2 degree goal is also unlikely. So we're looking at unlikely and further I'm like where you are now president Trump said yesterday that he'd gotten the report but wanted to look into who drafted it. Can you give us some background on the panel and the scientists who make up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the United Nations. Yes it is. This process has been going on for about 30 years now. And it has all scientists and other experts in the field by the way the IPCC won a Nobel Prize it was a Peace Prize a few years back but it did win a Nobel Prize. So these are all scientists and all they do is review literature scientific studies that have already been published in peer reviewed journals. So in other words they don't do any news research. They look they spend two or three years studying the literature and Sarah and saying here's what it is. And they studied 6000 pieces of peer reviewed scientific literature for this. So it's not their own studies it's looking at studies that have been out there that have all been. Vetted by other scientists and that's about 91 scientists from around the world including the U.S. many U.S. scientists are part of this. Many U.S. government scientists are part of this the. And then the summary which was 34 pages is voted on. And when they did right before they release it and it's this time was in Incheon South Korea and the 100 and some governments that go to this including the United States all have to agree that the way the wording word by word so it is has to be unanimous word by word the summary not the other chapters but the summers. This also this whole process. There are many many drafts and they go to out to other scientists for yet more review and they even go out to governments. So President Trump may not have seen it but the U.S. government has seen this commented on this repeatedly. These are legitimate scientists. And this has been vetted every which way but sideways including by governments. Now Seth you're covering this major hurricane Hurricane Michael heading toward the Florida panhandle and right now it's just shy of Category 5 strength. Are hurricanes like this one predicted as one of the results of increased global warming. Yes. What what the studies show is that we'll get stronger and wetter hurricanes may be less frequently but stronger and wetter ones I mean and maybe less the overall number of hurricanes but the number of whoppers will continue will will increase and get more frequent. So but there'll be fewer of the weaker hurricanes and for example with Michael and some of the reporting I was just doing. It's the water around the area where Michael has been is four to five degrees warmer than normal. And that water is hurricane fuel and this is like putting high testor ultra high test in an engine. And the other thing the studies have shown is that in a warmer world hurricanes will rapidly intensify more like Hurricane Michael has done. It went from a 90 mile an hour storm at 5:00 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday to 140 mile an hour storm. 24 hours later and this is a second time in its short lifespan less than 10 days that Michael has rapidly intensified. So that's what the type of thing we will see more often. Now scientists do something called attribution studies when they go back and do very painstaking analysis saying is there a climate change factor in this weather event and they do computer simulations with climate change and without and seeing how you know what happens in both and seeing the difference. They haven't done that with Michael yet but they're saying this fits what we would see. I've been speaking with Seth Borenstein he's science writer for The Associated Press. SETH Thank you. My pleasure.
Preventing an extra single degree of heat could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems on this fast-warming planet, an international panel of scientists reported Sunday. But they provide little hope the world will rise to the challenge.
The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its gloomy report at a meeting in Incheon, South Korea.
In the 728-page document, the U.N. organization detailed how Earth's weather, health and ecosystems would be in better shape if the world's leaders could somehow limit future human-caused warming to just 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (a half degree Celsius) from now, instead of the globally agreed-upon goal of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C). Among other things:
— Half as many people would suffer from lack of water.
— There would be fewer deaths and illnesses from heat, smog and infectious diseases.
— Seas would rise nearly 4 inches (0.1 meters) less.
— Half as many animals with back bones and plants would lose the majority of their habitats.
— There would be substantially fewer heat waves, downpours and droughts.
— The West Antarctic ice sheet might not kick into irreversible melting.
— And it just may be enough to save most of the world's coral reefs from dying.
"For some people this is a life-or-death situation without a doubt," said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, a lead author on the report.
Limiting warming to 0.9 degrees from now means the world can keep "a semblance" of the ecosystems we have. Adding another 0.9 degrees on top of that — the looser global goal — essentially means a different and more challenging Earth for people and species, said another of the report's lead authors, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia.
But meeting the more ambitious goal of slightly less warming would require immediate, draconian cuts in emissions of heat-trapping gases and dramatic changes in the energy field. While the U.N. panel says technically that's possible, it saw little chance of the needed adjustments happening.
In 2010, international negotiators adopted a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) since pre-industrial times. It's called the 2-degree goal. In 2015, when the nations of the world agreed to the historic Paris climate agreement, they set dual goals: 2 degrees C and a more demanding target of 1.5 degrees C from pre-industrial times. The 1.5 was at the urging of vulnerable countries that called 2 degrees a death sentence.
The world has already warmed 1 degree C since pre-industrial times, so the talk is really about the difference of another half-degree C or 0.9 degrees F from now.
"There is no definitive way to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 above pre-industrial levels," the U.N.-requested report said. More than 90 scientists wrote the report, which is based on more than 6,000 peer reviews.
"Global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate," the report states.
Deep in the report, scientists say less than 2 percent of 529 of their calculated possible future scenarios kept warming below the 1.5 goal without the temperature going above that and somehow coming back down in the future.
The pledges nations made in the Paris agreement in 2015 are "clearly insufficient to limit warming to 1.5 in any way," one of the study's lead authors, Joerj Roeglj of the Imperial College in London, said.
"I just don't see the possibility of doing the one and a half" and even 2 degrees looks unlikely, said Appalachian State University environmental scientist Gregg Marland, who isn't part of the U.N. panel but has tracked global emissions for decades for the U.S. Energy Department. He likened the report to an academic exercise wondering what would happen if a frog had wings.
Yet report authors said they remain optimistic.
Limiting warming to the lower goal is "not impossible but will require unprecedented changes," U.N. panel chief Hoesung Lee said in a news conference in which scientists repeatedly declined to spell out just how feasible that goal is. They said it is up to governments to decide whether those unprecedented changes are acted upon.
"We have a monumental task in front of us, but it is not impossible," Mahowald said earlier. "This is our chance to decide what the world is going to look like."
To limit warming to the lower temperature goal, the world needs "rapid and far-reaching" changes in energy systems, land use, city and industrial design, transportation and building use, the report said. Annual carbon dioxide pollution levels that are still rising now would have to drop by about half by 2030 and then be near zero by 2050. Emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, also will have to drop. Switching away rapidly from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas to do this could be more expensive than the less ambitious goal, but it would clean the air of other pollutants. And that would have the side benefit of avoiding more than 100 million premature deaths through this century, the report said.
"Climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming" the report said, adding that the world's poor are more likely to get hit hardest.
Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said extreme weather, especially heat waves, will be deadlier if the lower goal is passed.
Meeting the tougher-to-reach goal "could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heat waves, and about 65 million fewer people being exposed to exceptional heat waves," the report said. The deadly heat waves that hit India and Pakistan in 2015 will become practically yearly events if the world reaches the hotter of the two goals, the report said.
Coral and other ecosystems are also at risk. The report said warmer water coral reefs "will largely disappear."
The outcome will determine whether "my grandchildren would get to see beautiful coral reefs," Princeton's Oppenheimer said.
For scientists there is a bit of "wishful thinking" that the report will spur governments and people to act quickly and strongly, one of the panel's leaders, German biologist Hans-Otto Portner, said. "If action is not taken it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future."
