With so many reports talking about the climate change devastation by the end of the century, I suspect that metric resonates as a distant issue that hardly requires a panicked approach. After all, we have so many more immediate problems – like Putin’s war, inflation, COVID surges and severe, antidemocratic polarization our own back yard – that our habitual practice of kicking the can down the road seems to fit our current battle with priorities… even when it comes to climate change.
Sure, a serious rise in prices at the pump may push the sale of more electric cars, but the sparse availability of rapid charging stations and the limited range of electric vehicles remain an infrastructural inconvenience that most of us find unacceptable. We’re even watching states electing to tax homeowners with solar panels, especially in fossil fuel resource states, and a rising right wing that has just pushed environmental realities off the table. Republican resistance (joined by Democratic Senators from Arizona and West Virginia) to infrastructural climate change solutions has pushed the United States years beyond what is truly needed to contain this scourge.
Except where climate change has crushed agriculture through rising desertification, where shorelines are battered by rising waters, small island nations literally disappearing, where fire has decimated towns and forests, floods and landslides have destroyed homes and livelihoods or superstorms that have killed and destroyed millions of acres… well, climate change is still a fun subject for post-apocalyptic films. I think we need to stop focusing on the distant future damage, as compelling as that might be, and understand that the laws of physics make climate change a horrible, unkickable can. Now! We have more than enough evidence of significant damage from rising global temperatures today and just around the corner to refocus our priorities.
The interweaving of politics and energy – like German dependence on Russian oil and gas, which funds Putin’s brutality – is a reminder that wars over resources, accompanied by massive migration of the poorest on earth, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. The United Nations tells us that if we have not reversed the accelerating emission of greenhouse gasses well before the end of this decade, we will have passed the tipping point where climate change will really begin to feed on itself… and accelerate. Think: melting tundra emitting massive amount of methane, 24 times heavier than mere carbon dioxide, creating an unstoppable vicious circle. And yeah, scientists are still using that “end of the century” metric instead of telling people, who do not expect to live that long, what they face now and in the immediate future. We need a radical change in course, a radical amping up of climate-related investment and a global commitment to save our planet.
That new UN report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stresses that without immediate major steps to reverse greenhouse gas emissions, humanity (and the poor plants and animals we drag with us who have no say in the matter) is dooming itself to untold misery, making increasing parts of the earth “unlivable.” Instead of the 2.7 degree (Fahrenheit) temperature rise experts had predicted for the 21st century, new projections have kicked those projections up to somewhere between 4.3 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, with “high confidence” without a radical change in global climate policies. We are beginning to choke ourselves to death.
Citing a litany of broken corporate and national promises, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres says that too many continue to build their world in reliance on fossil fuels. “It is a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world,” he said. “We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree limit [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] agreed in Paris… Some government and business leaders are saying one thing — but doing another… Simply put, they are lying,” Guterres added, “And the results will be catastrophic.”
Writing for the April 5th Associated Press, Frank Jordans and Seth Borenstein, point out some of the highlights (lowlights?) of the UN report: “[The] the figures show much of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere was released by rich countries that were the first to burn coal, oil and gas when the industrial revolution really got going in the 1850s… The U.N. panel said about 40% of emissions since then have come from Europe and North America. Just over 12% can be attributed to East Asia, which includes China. The country took over the position as world’s top emitter from the United States in the mid-2000s.” Industrial nations, which today are beginning to cap the use of fossil fuels, obviously did the bulk of the damage awhile ago. China and India have now joined the league of major polluters.
We are still way under target for containing this climate change beast. “To keep the 1.5-degree limit [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] agreed in Paris [at the climate change conference] within reach, we need to cut global emissions by 45% this decade,” said Guterres, the U.N. chief. “But current climate pledges would mean a 14% increase in emissions.” We have under a decade to explode the countermeasures to climate change. We can. But will we?
I’m Peter Dekom, and my life expectancy will shelter me from some of worst horrors of climate change… foisting those on my son and his family, and their families, etc.
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