The United Nations is pushing forward on its efforts to highlight the need to take climate change seriously and to move toward solutions for the global crisis. In a report expected to be released April 12, the U.N.'s panel on climate change is expected to detail the sources of carbon emissions across the planet as well as propose means for reducing greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.
The panel, in a report from the Associate Press after they obtained a copy of the report, is expected to also demand action be taken in the next few years or the world could face a calamity at levels not before witnessed.
There are worries, however, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not going far enough to assist national governments on how to reduce their emissions, which is leading to future concerns that coming to an international consensus on how to move forward could be hard to come by.
The international community is hopeful that a new climate agreement aimed at being adopted next year can come to fruition if more time is spent on fully understanding the causes of climate change and the efforts than can reverse, or halt, the continued deterioration of the planet.
The new IPCC report does push the envelope farther than it has in previous studies. In the leaked report to AP, "the IPCC shows with graphs and tables which countries are responsible for the greatest share of emissions, using a range of different accounting methods."
This could be a political move to push the United States and China on board international climate agreements, which they have rebuked in years past.
USA Today reports that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the United States has been by far the largest producer of carbon emissions on the planet. The statistics show that over the past 150 plus years, the US has accounted for nearly 30 percent of the world's carbon emissions, making it the leading cause of climate change.
"Overall, per-capita emissions in the highly industrialized countries ... remain, on average, about five times higher than those of the lowest income countries," the draft report says.
For now, despite the lack of political will in the US government to push alternatives to the fossil fuel market, the IPCC continues the UN's calls for change, saying that without a serious concerted effort to reduce emissions, the planet faces devastating consequences.
