Giving Compass' Take:

• This Nature post highlights three trends — rising emissions, declining air pollution and natural climate cycles — that will hasten climate change, and urges action on multiple fronts.

• From designing strategy adaptation to rethinking policy goals, the time for mobilizing resources is now.

• Here's more on understanding the consequences of climate change.

Three trends — rising emissions, declining air pollution and natural climate cycles — will combine over the next 20 years to make climate change faster and more furious than anticipated. In our view, there’s a good chance that we could breach the 1.5 °C level by 2030, not by 2040 as projected in the special report (see ‘Accelerated warming’). The climate-modeling community has not grappled enough with the rapid changes that policymakers care most about, preferring to focus on longer-term trends and equilibria.

Policymakers have less time to respond than they thought. Governments need to invest even more urgently in schemes that protect homes from floods and fires and help people to manage heat stress (especially older individuals and those living in poverty). Nations need to make their forests and farms more resilient to droughts, and prepare coasts for inundation. Rapid warming will create a greater need for emissions policies that yield the quickest changes in climate, such as controls on soot, methane and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) gases. There might even be a case for solar geoengineering — cooling the planet by, for instance, seeding reflective particles in the stratosphere to act as a sunshade.

Read the full article about preparing for accelerated global warming by David G. Victor, Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan at Nature Research.