 No room for climate delay, UN chief tells online summit Majuro (AFP) Marshall Islands (AFP) Nov 22, 2018 - The world is not moving fast enough to curb global warming and needs immediate action to address the issue, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told an online climate change conference Thursday. Guterres issued the call to arms ahead of next month's COP24 climate talks in the southern Polish city of Katowice, which will attempt to revive a global climate deal reached in Paris in 2015. Addressing the Virtual Climate Summit, Guterres urged world leaders to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. He praised the online summit, which has been organised by the Marshall Islands using online technology to remain carbon neutral, as an example of the innovative thinking needed to combat climate change. "We need more such creativity to transform our economy and limit global warming to as close to 1.5C as possible," he said. "Climate change is moving faster than we are and we cannot afford any more delays. The world counts on all nations to ensure that next month's climate conference in Poland is a success." Former US vice president Al Gore said the way humanity was treating the planet was "unimaginable". "We're still pouring 110 million tonnes of global warming pollution into the atmosphere around our planet like it's an open sewer," the Nobel laureate said. "All of the extra energy trapped by man-made global warming pollution... is now equal to the amount of heat energy that would be released from 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding on Earth every single day." UN General Assembly president Maria Fernanda Espinosa had her own bleak statistics, telling the online gathering that carbon dioxide levels were now the highest in 800,000 years. She also pointed out that 17 of the 18 hottest years on record had occurred since 2001 and that the cost of climate-related disasters in 2017 topped $500 billion. Yet Espinosa said it was not too late to act. "When numbers such as these cause us to panic, there are other reasons to be encouraged," she said. "My message today is not one of dismay but one of hope -- that we can come together as a global community and work as one to protect and heal our planet and preserve it for future generations." The online summit consists of a rolling, 24-hour livestream that will hear addresses from world leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau of Canada before organisers issue a declaration early Friday.
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The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the main driver of climate change, have hit a new record high, the UN said Thursday, warning that the time to act was running out.
Ahead of the COP 24 climate summit in Poland next month, top United Nations officials are again trying to raise the pressure on governments to meet the pledge of limiting warming to the less than two degrees Celsius, enshrined in the 2015 Paris accord.
"Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth," the head of the World Meteorological Organization Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
"The window of opportunity for action is almost closed."
In an open letter to all states ahead of COP24, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet warned of cataclysmic consequences if the world does not reverse course.
"Entire nations, ecosystems, peoples and ways of life could simply cease to exist," she said, citing evidence that nations are not on track to meet the commitments made in Paris.
US President Donald Trump, who pulled his government out of the Paris agreement, again on Thursday appeared to cast doubt on climate science.
"Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?" he said in a tweet.
Asked to respond to Trump, deputy WMO chief Elena Manaenkova told reporters that the science underpinning global warming was "unequivocal," without challenging the US leader directly.
- 5 million years -
The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the UN weather agency's annual flagship report, tracks the content of dangerous gases in the atmosphere since 1750.
This year's report, which covers data for 2017, puts the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere at 405.5 parts per million (ppm).
That is up from 403.3 ppm in 2016 and 400.1 ppm in 2015.
"The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3�C warmer," Taalas said.
Researchers have made reliable estimates of C02 concentrations rates going back 800,000 years using air bubbles preserved in ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
But by studying fossilised material the WMO also has rough CO2 estimates going back up to five million years.
In addition to CO2, the UN agency also highlighted rising levels of methane, nitrous oxide and another powerful ozone depleting gas known as CFC-11.
- 'No magic wand' -
Emissions are the main factor that determines the amount of greenhouse gas levels, but concentration rates are a measure of what remains after a series of complex interactions between atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere and the oceans.
Roughly 25 percent of all emissions are currently absorbed by the oceans and biosphere -- a term that accounts for all ecosystems on Earth. The lithosphere is the solid, outer part of the Earth, while the cyrosphere covers that part of the world covered by frozen water.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that in order to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, net CO2 emissions must be at net zero, meaning the amount being pumped into the atmosphere must equal the amount being removed, either though natural absorbtion or technological innovation.
WMO's deputy chief, Elena Manaenkova, noted that CO2 remains in the atmosphere and oceans for hundreds of years.
"There is currently no magic wand to remove all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere," she said.
"Every fraction of a degree of global warming matters, and so does every part per million of greenhouse gases," she said.
According to the UN, 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001, while the cost of climate-related disasters in 2017 topped $500 billion (439 billion euros).
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