The 2010s amounted to "a decade lost" for slowing climate change, as nations around the world failed to substantially rein-in the heat-trapping emissions generated by power plants, factories, cars and trucks, and other sources that burn fossil fuels, a United Nations report said Tuesday.
The Earth's average temperature is now on track to soar by close to 4 degrees Celsius – or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit – by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial levels. Scientists have broadly concluded that the planet needs to keep warming to within 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Rapid rates of warming, meanwhile, are already essentially locked-in: Even ambitious new efforts to slash carbon emissions, as represented in nations' commitments under the 2015 Paris climate accord, will still produce 2.9 to 3.4 degrees of warming.
The report, from the UN's World Meteorological Organization, renewed calls for yet more urgent action to drastically reduce emissions around the world.
"There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. "We need to translate the commitments into action and increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of mankind."
Despite rapid growth in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, sharp declines in coal-fired power generation in developed nations, and recent high-profile investments in electric vehicles and EV charging infrastructure, global emissions are next expected to peak by the end of the next decade.
"The effects of climate policies have been too small to offset the impact of key drivers of emissions such as economic growth and population growth," the report said, characterizing the finding as a "rather bleak fact."
Already, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is comparable to 3-5 million years ago, when temperatures were roughly 2-3 degrees warmer and sea levels were 30-60 feet higher, the WMO said.
"In this critical period, the world must deliver concrete, stepped-up action on emissions," Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme said in a statement. "We face a stark choice: set in motion the radical transformations we need now, or face the consequences of a planet radically altered by climate change."
A public petition for the British government not to go through with Brexit gained so many signatures that the Parliament website crashed on Thursday.
There's a phenomenon on the internet called the "Streisand Effect," whereby a person's attempt to suppress information ends up widely publicizing that very same information. It was named after a situation an incident when Barbra Streisand tried to keep images of her Malibu mansion off the web and inadvertently drew massive amounts of attention to it. And it's why Devin Nunes' mom was trending on Twitter Tuesday morning.
The Democratic National Committee stands by its decision not to allow Fox News to host a Democratic primary debate in the 2020 presidential election, a party official told Cheddar on Thursday. "Our role at the DNC is to make sure we have a fair process and we do not believe Fox News can have a fair debate,” the DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa said.
In a presidential field that's growing more crowded by the day, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is looking to stand out by making foreign policy central to her campaign while her fellow Democratic candidates tussle over progressive moonshots like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All. At a campaign event in Concord, N.H., during the Presidents Day weekend, Cheddar's J.D. Durkin spoke with Gabbard, who said her agenda is based on her belief that the U.S. is "addicted" to regime-change wars.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019.
While New York City is mired in finger-pointing over the loss of Amazon's HQ2, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey urges the company to reconsider the bid that Newark made.
According to House Ways and Means Committee Member Judy Chu, the GOP "made false claims" about the tax bill that passed in December of 2017 and is taking effect this tax season. "They said things like the American public would get on the average a $4,000 per person increase. Well, that is certainly not the case," Chu, a California Democrat, told Cheddar.
Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Strategies and former campaign manager of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, knows exactly why Amazon's HQ2 plans in New York City fell apart. "It's not that we didn't get it because of some geopolitical economic trend or something out of our control. We didn't get it because our own politicians and Amazon themselves were too incompetent and too arrogant and too tone deaf to get it right," Tusk told Cheddar.
Amazon's blog post announcing it will pull the plug on its New York City headquarters is nothing but a bluff to bring politicians back to the negotiating table, said D.A. Davidson Analyst Tom Forte. "Absolutely Amazon's bluffing," Forte told Cheddar Friday.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
