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Climate change: The warning is dire!

MPS has often published pieces, from various sources, about the issues we are already face, and likely to encounter, as a result of climate change.

Today comes news of an authoritative report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which paints a dire situation facing us all if we don't do something to arrest climate change

"The negative effects of climate change are already beginning to be felt in every part of the world and yet countries are ill-prepared for the potentially immense impacts on food security, water supplies and human health, a major report has concluded.

In the most comprehensive study yet into the effects of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that global warming could undermine economic growth and increase poverty.

The IPCC found that the negative impacts of climate change have already extended beyond any potential benefits of rising temperatures and that they will worsen if global-average temperatures continue to rise by the expected lower limit of 2C by 2100 – and will become potentially catastrophic if temperatures rise higher than 4C.

In a blunt and often pessimistic assessment of climate-change impacts – the fifth assessment since 1990 – the IPCC scientists give a stark warning about what the world should expect if global temperatures continue to rise as predicted without mitigation or adaptation.

“In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans,” says the report Climate Change 2014 Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, formally released early this morning by the IPCC after a final editorial meeting in Yokohama, Japan.

“Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger,” the report states."

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