New: You can now listen to articles.PARIS: Climate change poses an"existential threat" to life on Earth, prominent scientists warned on Tuesday , in an assessment on this year's avalanche of heat records and weather extremes that they said are hitting more ferociously than expected.
"We must shift our perspective on the climate emergency from being just an isolated environmental issue to a systemic, existential threat," the authors said. Many climate-related records were broken by"enormous margins" in 2023, the report said, particularly temperatures in the oceans, which have absorbed almost all the excess heat caused by human carbon pollution.
People across the planet have faced heatwaves and droughts this year, while severe flooding has struck in the US, China and India and beyond. These could include the meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, thawing of large areas of permafrost and widespread coral reef die back. The report said three to six billion people could be"confined beyond the liveable region" by century's end.