Pep Canadell
Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project and Senior Research Fellow at the CSIRO Climate Science Centre in Canberra, Australia
Planetary indicator after planetary indicator is falling with new records and with impacts decades earlier than predicted just a few years ago. This time, the Arctic's distant ice-free Septembers are a decade ahead of worst-case global warming scenarios. But even more alarming is that, for the first time, ice-free Septembers are predicted to pass even in scenarios with greenhouse gas emission reductions that are consistent with the Paris Agreement to stabilise global warming at no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
It is further evidence of how fast global warming is progressing and of the accelerating impacts on the planet that will affect global societies and economies.