“The next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”
The actions that policymakers take in the next couple of years will have “profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies” for the next 10,000 years and beyond, warns a new report that examines the long-term consequences of the so called “fossil fuel era.”
The agreement hashed out at the COP21 Paris climate talks “leaves a lot of leeway” for countries to postpone making critical cuts to their emission outputs—”more than the climate system allows,” said report co-author Patrik Pfister from the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern.