Is There Still Time to Be Hopeful About the Climate?
In the past five years, a red digital clock the size of a bus, attached to a building in the Place Union de New York, has counted zero. The climate clock, the group that installed it, describes the time that remains – about four years – as “the most important number in the world”. It represents the opportunity to reduce humanity to limit global warming to a long -term average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees fahrenheit). The earth is already hot enough for climatic disasters to propagate and intensify; Last week, dead heat waves broke records and sudden floods killed more than a hundred people in Texas. But it will get worse. The Committee of UN CLIMATENISTS, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), warns that each tenth of additional degree makes forecasts more dystopian: the megastorms degenerate, the sea level increases more strongly. And so, in the Paris Agreement, almost all the nations of the earth agreed to work towards the target of 1.5 degrees. The climate clock described it as “no return point”.
Unfortunately, this is also where we are going. Last year, the warmest ever recorded, was about 1.55 degrees warmer than the world before the industrial revolution. The long-term averages are lower, perhaps 1.36 degrees, depending on how we measure, but they increase quickly. (Scientists generally measure temperatures on the surface of the earth and average it on average for a decade – so when they confirm that the line has been crossed, it can be behind us.) Global emissions have not even started to decline heights of all time, and President Trump takes months from the clock by the pillars of jacquier of environmentalism, such as the law on inflation and the environment. “Current policies mean that we would have 3 ° C of warming by the end of the century,” said Piers Forster, a physicist who co-wrote several GIEC Landmark reports, in an email. “What we must do is recognize that our inaction – or insufficient action – has generated death and destruction”, Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a research initiative focused on health and climate change, said. “It’s a cross that we will have to wear.” As the line is crossed, she added, should serve as a dark opportunity to renew the global ambitions. “It is not to give us more space, or time or room for maneuver,” she told me. “It is a question of keeping the temperatures as low as possible.”
The knowledge that we cannot afford to crash beyond 1.5 degrees and that we are on the right track to do it nevertheless, has triggered a debate on the question of whether the goal of goal should move. “It would be a huge error to deviate from 1.5,” said Johan Rockström, co -director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Beyond that moment, he said, there is an increasing risk of climate change points-the collapse of glacial caps, the disruption of ocean currents, the sudden thaw of permafrost. He preferred the metaphor for an landing zone: the more we are exceeding, the more difficult the landing is, and the more difficult to eliminate carbon from the atmosphere in the future. “If we readjust the target every few years, any feeling of urgency would be lost,” said Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele, former vice-president of the IPCC. (He has a tie which says “I ♡ 1.5 ° C” – Even if the day of our meeting, during a ceremony for the awards ceremony for the environmental scientists called the Planet frontier award ceremony, it was too hot for him to wear it.) Even if it is difficult to make the highways safer, he stressed, no leader could never fix a target of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Why target the fatal levels of warming?
A problem with the countdown, and with points of no return, is that they do not tell you much about what happens later. “I think we have to be honest at the place where we are most likely,” said Daniel Swain, a climatologist who studies extreme weather conditions at the California Institute for Water Resources. “The best scenarios of cases ten years ago are unfortunately outside the table.” He urged not only the emission cuts, but also the adaptation to a warmer and more dangerous planet. The climate crisis has been described as a time bomb, but it gives the false impression that the bomb has not yet triggered; In truth, we do not work so much to defuse the explosives that we try to contain the explosion. However, Swain argued that a second number in the Paris Agreement – “well below 2 ° C” – could still be accessible, with a fight. The good news is that we know how to get there: by eliminating the coal, oil and gas that caused the crisis; By protecting ecosystems, we depend; by buildings and electrifying vehicles; And, as Bill McKibben wrote on Wednesday, expanding green energy sources such as Solar.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and climate defender, does not identify as optimistic. Even so, she is the author of a book entitled “What if we do it well?: Visions of Climate Futures”. When I asked her questions about the goal at 1.5 degrees, she said to me: “Some people have the impression, if you exceed it, it’s over, and you can just give up.” But the difference between a narrow failure and a large one, she continued, could be hundreds of millions of lives. This could mean whether the places you like continue to exist or not. Well below two degrees, coral reefs have trouble surviving; has Two degrees, they can simply disappear. “All I can really find is, like, don’t be an abandonment!” Why do we abandon the future of life on earth so easily? ” Said Johnson. “Where is our tenacity?” Where is our courage? We can do difficult things. ” ♦
