September 25, 2019 — The planet is in hot water — literally — and that will have dire consequences for humanity, warns a new United Nations report on the state of the world’s oceans and ice.
Over the next century, climate change will make the oceans warmer and more acidic. Melting ice sheets will drive up sea levels at an accelerating pace. Marine heat waves will become 20 to 50 times more frequent, harming sensitive ecosystems. And the total biomass of animals in the sea could drop by as much as 15%, according to the sobering assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The oceans and ice are in trouble, so we’re all in trouble,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton and a lead author of the report.
But while some damage is inevitable at this point, the report makes clear that society’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades will determine how bad things ultimately get.