Three maps show unchecked climate change’s impact

By on 17 October, 2018

In the wake of the IPCC’s shocking findings in their latest report, three interactive maps model discrete impacts of unchecked climate change.

The Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change released its special report on global warming on October 8.

Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the report, responding to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.

“Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would
require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.

The consequences of 1.5ºC of warming are stark and almost incomprehensible, but considerably better than a world with a 2ºC temperature rise.

For example: global sea level rise would be 10 centimetres lower. Seventy to 90 percent of coral reefs worldwide would perish, versus over 99 percent. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require require global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030. ‘Net zero’, which means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air, would need to be achieved by 2050.

Media responses to this shocking warning have ranged across the political spectrum, along with indifference feigned or real from world leaders.

We’ve rounded up three mapping projects published coincidentally with the IPCC’s findings, that seek to put some of the effects of climate change into understandable terms.

Revelator have published an interactive map demonstrating the projected global change to precipitation globally by 2050 under scenario 8.5, which models unchecked climate change resulting in global temperature rise of around 5 or 6°C by 2100.

A still of the interactive average precipitation change map created by Revelator.

The Union of Concerned Scientists have taken a different tack, mapping high level sea level rise’s impact on coastal regions of the US in terms of homes lost to inundation.

New Security Beat have teased out some of the geopolitical implications of climate change in their map of state fragility and climate exposure, in which they use a range of indicators to rank states against each of these criteria, and highlight those at most risk of both.

New Security Beat’s Climate Exposure and State Fragility map.

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