The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is sounding the alarm about global warming, saying the world has to cut emissions by 50-70% by 2050 and to zero by the year 2100.

They also say that embracing efforts to slow global warming now is affordable.

Reuters:

Governments can keep climate change in check at manageable costs but will have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2100 to limit risks of irreversible damage, a U.N. report said on Sunday.

The 40-page synthesis, summing up 5,000 pages of work by 800 scientists already published since September 2013, said global warming was now causing more heat extremes, downpours, acidifying the oceans and pushing up sea levels.

"Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in the message. Leaders must act, time is not on our side," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in presenting the report in Copenhagen that is meant to guide global climate policy-making.

With fast action, climate change could be kept in check at manageable costs, he said, referring to a U.N. goal of limiting average temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. Temperatures are already up 0.85 C (1.4F).

The study by the Intergovernmenal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), approved by more than 120 governments, will be the main handbook for negotiators of a U.N. deal to combat global warming due at a summit in Paris in December 2015.

To get a good chance of staying below 2C, the report's scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050 from current levels and to "near zero or below in 2100".

Below zero would require extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - for instance by planting forests that soak up carbon as they grow or by burying emissions from power plants that burn wood or other biomass.

RENEWABLES, NUCLEAR

To cut emissions, the report points to options including energy efficiency, renewable energies from wind to solar power, nuclear energy or coal-fired power plants where carbon dioxide is stripped from the exhaust fumes and buried underground.

But carbon capture and storage (CCS) is expensive and little tested. Last month, Canada's Saskatchewan Power opened the world's first big CCS unit at a coal-fired power plant after a C$1.35 billion ($1.21 billion) retrofit.

"With CCS it's entirely possible that fossil fuels can be used on a large scale," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said. In most scenarios, the report says "fossil fuel power generation without CCS is phased out almost entirely by 2100".

Without extra efforts to cut emissions, "warming by the end of the 21st century will bring high risks of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally," the IPCC said.

Reason has left the building. It isn't just that there hasn't been any warming for 17 years. That's really a blink of an eye in the history of climate. The earth has been warming for 20,000 years - and thank God for that. Where I'm sitting now, 20,000 years ago a sheet of ice half a mile thick would have been above my head.

Smarter heads than I have fleshed out all the arguments against the IPCC conclusions, but basically, it comes down to this; those who are pushing this agenda are not interested in saving the planet but in the aggregation of power. The issue is control, not climate, and giving in to the schemes of the IPCC will result in the destruction of our economy and a loss of freedom.

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