By Associated Press
Sept. 25, 2019
At a Glance
- The report was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- Sea levels could rise up to 3 feet by the end of the century.
- The international team of scientists projected for the first time that some island nations will probably become uninhabitable.
Earth is in dire straits due to climate change, and rising sea levels will cause "sweeping and severe" consequences for humans, an expert United Nations climate panel warned in a grim new report Wednesday.
The assessment was one of several findings in the oceans and ice report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued as world leaders met at the U.N.
The report noted that sea levels are rising at an ever-faster rate as ice and snow shrink. Oceans are also getting more acidic and losing oxygen.
The agency warned that if steps aren't taken to reduce emissions and slow global warming, seas will rise 3 feet by the end of the century, with many fewer fish, less snow and ice, stronger and wetter hurricanes and other, nastier weather systems.
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The oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat from carbon pollution in the air, as well as much of the carbon dioxide itself. Earth's snow and ice, called the cryosphere, are also being eroded.
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The report found:
-Seas are now rising at one-seventh of an inch a year, which is 2.5 times faster than the rate from 1900 to 1990.
-The world's oceans have already lost 1% to 3% of the oxygen in their upper levels since 1970 and will lose more as warming continues.
-From 2006 to 2015, the ice melting from Greenland, Antarctica and the world's mountain glaciers has accelerated. They are now losing 720 billion tons of ice a year.
-Arctic June snow cover has shrunk more than half since 1967, down nearly 1 million square miles.
-Arctic sea ice in September, the annual low point, is down almost 13% per decade since 1979. This year's low, reported Monday, tied for the second-lowest on record.
-Marine animals are likely to decrease 15%, and catches by fisheries in general are expected to decline 21% to 24%, by the end of century because of climate change.
"Climate change is already irreversible," French climate scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a report lead author, said at a news conference in Monaco, where the document was released. "Due to the heat uptake in the ocean, we can't go back."
But many of the worst-case projections in the report can still be avoided, depending on how the world handles the emissions of heat-trapping gases, the report's authors said.
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