Joe Issa Eyes COP24 Outcome In Poland Advocated In COP23 In Paris

As the world awaits with bated breath the outcome of the global conference on climate change currently under way in Katowice, Poland,  environment advocate Joe Issa, who supported the ‘1.5 to stay alive’ Caribbean campaign during the last conference in Paris in 2015, says he remains measurably optimistic.

“I am hopeful for a deeper commitment by those most responsible for CO2 emission into the atmosphere, to keep global warming to within 1.5 – 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial level, for the sake of small island states like Jamaica.

“However, if what’s trending is true and we lose the US and Russia, then the desired outcome would be less likely as it will take deep cuts in carbon emission to maintain global warming at the desired level by the end of the century and going forward.

“If so then, woe be unto us, especially if we live near the coast, as most of us do. It will take time but we will lose masses of land due to sea-level rise. This will impact our public sector and major infrastructure and the economic activity as we know it.

“And if that’s not enough, more furious hurricanes fuelled by global warming is already a reality, causing unprecedented damages. All this, because of the burning of fossil fuel, which emits the dangerous carbon dioxide gas or greenhouse gas that fuels global warming,” said Issa, adding, “Don’t believe me, believe the experts.”

Issa, who is Jamaica’s largest indigenous retailer of petroleum products referred to a recent revelation that the earth has failed its last annual physical and is heading in a dangerous direction, and that humans are falling far short in our efforts to combat the crisis.

The findings are said to have added to overwhelming evidence that CO2 concentrations, which fuel climate change, may never fall below the 400 parts per million threshold; so earth is “screwed”.

The revelations were contained in the 2017 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s “State of the Climate” report, which is said to be equivalent to Earth’s “annual physical”.

The report is co-authored by 524 authors from 65 countries, and confirms 2017 as either the second- or third-hottest year on record – the figures differ slightly based on which of two global data sets are used, according to an article first published on HuffPost.

It said the last four years have been the warmest four years on record.

According to NOAA, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and global sea levels reached record highs in 2017, and that’s without the influence of El Niño – a climatic event that creates warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and is said to be capable of changing weather around the world. The last El Niño, which spanned from 2015 to 2016, was said to be among the strongest El Niño events since 1950.

Climatologist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction and a lead author of the report, Deke Arndt, was quoted as saying at a press briefing that last year “was easily the warmest non-El Niño year on record”.

Arndt reportedly said that the last three years have effectively established “a new neighborhood in terms of global temperature.”

The report noted that the rate that humans are pumping GO2 into the atmosphere has quadrupled since 1960, and that last year, the average CO2 concentration reached 405 parts per million, the “highest in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years.”

According to the findings, in 2017, the global ocean surface temperature warmed to a near-record high, falling just short of the 2016 mark. The world’s oceans are approximately 3 inches higher than they were in 1993 and are rising at an average 1.2 inches per decade.

Greg Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, reportedly compared what’s happening to the world’s oceans to a freight train. “The facts are so startling that they make you wonder how much longer it’s going to be before earth becomes inhabitable, and whether we ought not to accelerate the search for other habitable planets.

“We’ve started to push them with greenhouse gases, and that freight train is now moving and actually it will continue to move,” he reportedly told reporters. “If we were to freeze greenhouse gases at the level they are today, the oceans would continue to warm and seas continue to rise for centuries to come.”