Two days after a climate summit failed to deliver game-changing pledges to slash carbon emissions, the United Nations warned Wednesday that global warming is devastating oceans and Earth’s frozen spaces in ways that directly threaten a large slice of humanity. Crumbling ice sheets, rising seas, melting glaciers, ocean dead zones, toxic algae blooms — a raft of impacts on sea and ice are decimating fish stocks, destroying renewable sources of fresh water, and incubating superstorms that will ravage some megacities every year, according to a landmark assessment approved by the 195-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Some of these impacts are irreversible. The report, a digest of 7,000 peer-reviewed studies, is a sobering reminder that record greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels, are driving the planet towards a hothouse climate our species could find intolerate.

Humanity must rescue oceans to rescue itself, UN warns. (2019, September 26). The Manila Times, p. A8.