A professor from the University of Windsor is sounding the alarm after a frightening report released from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The report issued last week says hundreds of millions of lives are at stake if the world warms more than 1.5-degrees Celsius — which could happen as soon as 2040 if current trends continue.
Maria Cioppa is with the university's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and says governments around the world must take rapid action to avoid disastrous levels of global warming.
She says five or 10 year projections are happening now.
"If we look at what's going on now and what people are doing now, what countries are doing now, the problem is that the projections that we're now getting, as opposed to five or 10 years ago, are saying that's not enough anymore. If we want to keep damage to levels that we can handle we need to do more."
Cioppa says new science suggests we're closer to a catastrophe than we think.
"A lot of the newer research suggests that the climate may be even more fragile than we knew. So if something happens and that tips a balance then things will just spiral even more than was originally projected."
She says our new normal is not OK.
"The problem is not that climate is changing, the problem is we're used to it in a certain way. We think of it as being it's always been this way and it's not. Climate does change naturally, but the type of changes that are happening are ones that are not natural."
The U.N. report states when the planet reaches the crucial threshold of 1.5-degrees above pre-industrial levels, the risk of extreme drought, wildfires and floods grows exponentially.
— with files from AM800's Patty Handysides