Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, according to the leaked draft of the IPCC report. The report was set to be published in March 2022.
Coal and Gas Power Plants must close by the next decade. Moreover, people would have to adapt and change their lifestyle altogether to avoid a significant climate meltdown, wrote Fiona Harvey and Giles Tremlett in a report in The Guardian.
On June 23, AFP released a leaked draft of the world’s leading authority on climate science which was supposed to be a summary for the politicians of Group II of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
It suggested issues like Unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, species extinction, more diseases, and cities battling to survive their existence with the rise in ocean level and ice melting.
However, scientists asserted that it was not the final draft to be released in March 2022 and was only for peer review.
The document, called the sixth assessment report, is divided into three parts: the physical science of climate change; the impacts and ways of reducing human influence on the climate.
The first part of the report came out on August 9. Within two months, another part of the report leaked from the premier institute of research.
A small group of scientists decided to leak the draft via the Spanish branch of Scientist Rebellion, an offshoot of the Extinction Rebellion movement.
Journalists Juan Bordera and Fernando Prieto published it for the first time in the online Spanish magazine CTXT.
This series of unwanted flow of information to the public is a sign that people within the organization are seriously concerned about the climate situation and want to deliver the correct data before it is censured at the political level.
Bordera told the newspaper The Guardian that some scientists were worried about their conclusions getting manipulated before its publication in 2022.
Governments have the authority to make changes in the “summary for policymakers”, wrote Harvey and Tremlett.
The report highlights the urgent need to change lifestyles to a more sustainable way, particularly in rich countries and among all the wealthy people worldwide.
Restricting the use of over-heating or over-cooling homes, walking and cycling, cutting air travel, and using energy-consuming appliances less would be significant steps to control the climate menace, wrote The Guardian.
It would also be crucial to shift to change the eating patterns in many affluent parts of the world. “A shift to diets with a higher share of plant-based protein in regions with excess consumption of calories and animal-source food can lead to substantial reductions in emissions, while also providing health benefits … Plant-based diets can reduce emissions by up to 50% compared to the average emission-intensive western diet,” the report says.
Cutting the global emissions and reducing the temperature below 1.5C of pre-industrial levels by the countries around the world would be very significant.
“Weaker near-term action would place limiting warming to these levels out of reach, as it would entail assumptions about subsequent accelerated policy development and technology development and deployment, inconsistent with evidence and projections in the assessed literature,” the report warns.
CTXT, the online Spanish Platform that published the data for the first time, also said there is a need to discuss some aspects of the global economic sphere.
It asserted that the global economy needs to change from only depending on GDP, and the report has not highlighted its significance much.
“The essential radical change in an economic system whose perverse operation of accumulation and reproduction of capital in perpetuity has brought us to the current critical point is not clearly mentioned,” CTXT wrote.
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