When teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, nominated for the Peace Nobel this year, scolded titans of industry in Davos and heads of state at the United Nations, she told them to look at the science.

Excellent advice, but not for the faint of heart. If economics is the "dismal science", research on global warming has become the science of our dismal future.

Four blockbuster reports from the United Nations over the last year have made it inescapably clear that the window of opportunity for avoiding serious consequences from our meddling with Earth's climate system has slammed shut.

The impacts, in other words, are already upon us, and will get worse -- perhaps far, far worse -- before they get better.

With one degree Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels, the world has already seen a crescendo of tropical storms swollen with more moisture, and made more deadly by rising seas.

A larger expanse of ocean warm enough to incubate these cyclones has spawned devastation in regions -- Mozambique was hit twice this year -- rarely affected in the past.

Erratic monsoons in south Asia shedding too much or too little rainfall at the wrong time; deadly heat waves over the last 18 months in East Asia, Europe and North America; warming at the poles twice the global average wreaking havoc on infrastructure and fuelling wildfires -- all are a foretaste of things to come, scientists warn.

On current trends, our greenhouse gas emissions will heat the planet's surface another three or four degrees by 2100.

Even if all nations -- gathering Monday in Madrid for another round of UN climate talks -- honour their carbon-cutting pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement, we'll add at least two degrees.

- Sixth mass extinction -

The first of the 1,000-page "special reports", delivered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October last year, reset the threshold for a climate-safe world from 2C to 1.5C.

Across a wide range of impacts, an extra-half degree of warming was found to make a huge difference, even the difference between life and death: 70 percent of the tropical corals upon which half-a-billion people and a quarter of marine species depend are projected to disappear in a 1.5C world. Half the corals in the Great Barrier Reef are already gone.

In a 2C world, however, they will all but disappear.

The report concluded humanity must fundamentally change the way we produce, distribute and consume almost everything, starting with energy.

Next, in May, was a UN report revealing that a million species -- one in eight -- faces extinction.

Five times in the last half-billion years abrupt natural calamities have tipped the planet into a "mass extinction event" with at least two-thirds of all life forms unable to adapt.

Today, it is human activity that has triggered a mass dieoff, with species vanishing at 10-to-100 times the normal "background rate" or more.

In August, the IPCC released an assessment of how we use and abuse land: deforestation, unsustainable agriculture, destruction of ecosystems.

The global food system -- responsible for a quarter of carbon pollution -- must be overhauled from top to bottom, both to ensure that 10 billion people can eat their fill in 2050, and to tame global warming, the UN body warned.

The final tome in the quartet looked at oceans and Earth's frozen spaces, known as the cryosphere.

- Hothouse Earth -

The world's two ice sheets -- atop Greenland and Antarctica -- have shed more than 430 billion tonnes of mass every year since 2005, and are now the main drivers of rising seas, on track to surge a metre higher by 2100, the report concluded.

Some studies project a two-metre (6.5 feet) increase by century's end, but all experts agree that sea level rise will accelerate after that and continue for centuries, redrawing the world's coastlines.

Some 300 million people will find themselves in flood zones by 2050, according to even more recent findings.

Most alarming of all, scientists agree, is the threat of runaway global warming -- a scenario in which manmade carbon pollution triggers the release of greenhouse gases from natural sources, such as permafrost in Siberia and methane formations in shallow Arctic seas.

Several times in Earth's distant past its climate system has tipped into a new stable state -- a "hothouse Earth" -- that was 10C, 12C even 14C hotter than today.

None of this, of course, means that humanity should collectively throw up its hands up in despair.

"We are going to have to adapt to some changes that may now be unavoidable," Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter told AFP.

"But the fact that we start to see some unexpected shifts in the system should give us an extra impetus to meet the Paris goal of limiting the warming as close to 1.5C as we can."

As climate crisis deepens, UN talks shift into low gear
Paris (AFP) Nov 27, 2019 - The disastrous impacts of global warming have never been so visible, nor the worldwide public outcry so audible, but most of the nearly 200 nations gathering in Madrid next week to tackle the problem are taking their sweet time -- the one thing the world doesn't have.

A recent onslaught of deadly heat waves, unprecedented wildfires, once-in-a-century flooding, and aberrant cyclones made more destructive by rising seas has jolted at least some of humanity into a state of panic.

With only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, 18 of the 19 warmest years on record have occurred this century, with 2019 shaping up to be among the hottest.

Scientists, meanwhile, continue to send up bright red warning flares about the climate devastation lurking just over the horizon, notably in four blockbuster UN reports during the last year.

A fifth, delivered by the UN on Tuesday, shows that national pledges to cut greenhouse gases are barely a 15 percent down-payment on the effort needed to cap global warming at 1.5 C.

To stay under that safety threshold, CO2 emissions -- still rising each year to record levels -- would need instead to fall 7.6 percent annually for a decade starting now, a virtual impossibility.

The danger of pushing the planet's climate system into a self-propelling trajectory towards an unliveable "hothouse Earth" is real.

And yet the 12-day UN climate conference, the 25th in as many years, will largely focus on finalising the "rulebook" for the 2015 Paris climate treaty, which becomes operational in 2021.

A slew of thorny issues have been laid to rest over the last three years, but two remain unresolved.

- Levy on air travel -

The first is the architecture of carbon markets and how to handle carbon "credits" accumulated under the Kyoto Protocol, which will be overtaken once the Paris deal kicks in.

The debate pits China, India and especially Brazil against rich nations opposed to the carry-over of old credits and concerned about the environmental impact of double-counting.

"If carbon markets are not designed appropriately, they could result in an increase in global emissions," Lambert Schneider, an expert at the Oeko-Institut in Berlin, told AFP.

The other, a potential deal-breaker, is so-called "loss and damage".

Under the bedrock UN climate treaty, adopted in 1992, rich nations agreed to shoulder more responsibility for curbing global warming, and to help developing countries prepare for unavoidable future impacts -- the twin pillars of "mitigation" and "adaptation".

But there was no provision for helping countries already reeling in a climate-addled world, such as Mozambique -- recently hit by devastating cyclones -- and small island states literally disappearing under the waves.

A new mechanism was established in 2012, but with damage estimates running to $150 billion a year by 2025, there is no agreement on where the money might come from or even if it should be paid.

"How do we address people who are being displaced by climate change?" asked Belize's Carlos Fuller, lead negotiator for the Association of Small Island States.

One idea on the table, he said, is a levy on international air travel.

- 'Sleepwalking towards climate catastrophe' -

Under the Paris architecture, countries do not have to revisit their carbon-cutting vows until next year, and even then they are under no obligation to make them stronger.

Nearly 70 countries in a "climate ambition alliance" have taken that step, but they only account for eight percent of global emissions.

"We don't expect to hear dramatic announcements in Madrid by any of the big countries -- not China, India or Japan, and certainly not the US or Brazil," Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told AFP.

"We are sleepwalking towards climate catastrophe and need to wake up."

That the 25,000-strong conference is even starting on Monday is something of a miracle.

Originally set to take place in Santiago, "COP 25" was cancelled after a million people protesting low wages and inequality took over the streets of the Chilean capital last month. Spain stepped in to host the event, though Chile will still preside.

Sixteen-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg -- half-way to Chile after sailing the Atlantic and embarking on a US road trip -- had to do a U-turn and hitch another ride across the ocean on her way to Madrid.

Thunberg sparked a student "strike for climate" movement of her own, which saw millions of young people, angry and anxious about their future, pour into streets worldwide. Another "Fridays for Future" turnout is slated for this week.

"This COP is unlikely to satisfy their expectations," said Lola Vallejo, head of the climate programme at the International Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris.

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US, EU 'owe half the cost' of repairing climate damage
Paris (AFP) Nov 25, 2019
The United States and Europe bear more than half the cost of repairing the damage already wrought by climate change, a coalition of environmental groups said Monday. Based on their historic greenhouse gas emissions, the US and EU should be held jointly responsible for 54 percent of funding owed to developing nations already dealing with extreme flooding, droughts and megastorms rendered more frequent and intense by global warming, the groups said. A week ahead of a UN climate summit in Madrid ... read more