AFTER the UN sounded “code red for humanity” with the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report earlier this month, research has emerged indicating more of the same and revealing further details of the shocking extent of damage caused to the delicate balance of nature. US-based scientists have published the findings of their research in the Nature Scientific Reports, declaring that if carbon emissions continued to be released into the atmosphere at the same rate, it would annihilate up to 95pc of the earth’s ocean surface by 2100. This means that over 70pc of the earth’s surface, which is covered with water, would undergo permanent damaging changes in less than 80 years. The surface climate of oceans would be destroyed with the absorption of a poisonous concentration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That would irreparably change the water acidity levels, surface water temperature and concentration of the mineral aragonite (used by many marine animals to form shells and bone). According to the article, the seas have already absorbed up to a third of the world’s carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution. However, the accelerated pace with which CO2 was still being released into the atmosphere would mean a death sentence for most of the species that live on the surface of oceans. A living example of these alarming findings is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where rising sea temperatures have bleached and destroyed more than half the wondrous corals since 1995. The Great Barrier Reef stretches over 2,300 kilometres and has been a World Heritage Site since 1981 due to its scientific importance.

The UN’s IPCC report also contained similar dire warnings, and urged immediate collective action to arrest the accelerated pace of global warming and keep catastrophic climate events at bay. The unprecedented and large-scale forest fires that recently wreaked havoc in a number of European and Mediterranean regions are an example of what calamities lie ahead. The world needs to wake up and change its ruinous ways.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2021