There’s no cliff edge
A new report on climate change will say (no surprise ahead) that the trend is not good. Not good at all.
The planet is odds-on to hit 1.5C of global warming within 20 years, the world’s leading climate scientists will warn in a milestone report tomorrow.
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A 1.5C rise in average global temperatures on pre-industrial levels is widely considered to be the point beyond which climate change will become increasingly dangerous.
Eh? It’s already becoming increasingly dangerous – it’s been doing that for decades, or ever since we started burning coal and oil at steadily escalating rates.
The cabinet minister Alok Sharma, president of Cop26, said countries must work harder to reduce emissions and ensure the threshold is not breached. “This report will be a big wake-up call for countries to do even more,” he said.
Even more than what? Countries aren’t really doing anything, are they? Other than talking? Cars, planes, container ships, cruise ships – they’re all still out there doing their thing.
Professor Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at Reading University and a lead author of the report, declined to discuss the content of the paper, but said: “Every fraction of the degree matters. There’s no cliff edge where impacts suddenly go from being fine to being disastrous. It’s a gradual worsening of the impacts as global temperatures rise.”
What I’m saying. It’s not as if everything’s ok now, because we haven’t hit the 1.5 mark yet. Greece and California are in flames; everything’s not ok.
My virtual ears perk up when I notice people negating “everything is X” with “everything is not X”. Usually they really mean “not everything is X” or “some things are not X”. In this case, though, I think the sentiment, with which I agree, is literally “everything is not OK”, or “nothing is OK”. The situation is horrible.
I think that anyone in the Northwest who had been accustomed to needing a sweater in summer will be able to attest that things are not fine now. Two heat domes so far, and a drought in the Midwest are good “local” indicators that things are not fine.
As I have been saying for years, we spend a lot of time talking about talking about it. We spend very little time doing anything about it. Our town invests almost all its time in recycling and has put up a few wind turbines, and think they are greener than green. They ignore the monster trucks sitting in front of businesses idling for god knows how long, the intensity of the agricultural emissions, the extreme amount of beef eaten here. They have their heads in the sand bigly.
Around here – in oh so supposedly-enlightened Seattle – there are more and more people sitting in their idling cars for god knows how long. Most of the cars of course are SUVs, that get a few yards to the gallon.
Electricity isn’t *all* our energy use, but this tells us how to get that with minimal CO2 emission.
https://www.electricitymap.org/map
For each region where data is available, it shows the amount of CO2 emitted per kWh generated, color coded from green for very low through shades of brown to black for very high. Also if you can click on a region you get details of what sources were used to generate electricity over the last hour or day.
Spoiler alert: the regions that are consistently green use a mix of hydro, geothermal & nuclear for most of their electricity. The regions that try to use a lot of solar & wind, end up brown much of the time, because they have to burn gas when the sun isn’t shining & the wind isn’t blowing
Much of the reporting I’ve seen over here (mostly the BBC) is like an exercise in missing the point. For instance, it makes a big deal of the fact that the report is likely to contain worst-case scenarios which, says the BBC are likely to be “bad”.
Well no shit. But the issue here is that the best-case scenarios are light years past “bad” and the most likely scenarios are already in the “unthinkable” range. I get a strong impression of the BBC wanting to avoid being the bearer of bad news. The bad news that we’re all fucked. Are the remaining dregs of humanity supposed to break from toil on their frazzled cinder of an ex-planet and say, fondly, “well, at least the BBC didn’t make us feel as though we ought to care about the imminent environmental catastrophe on the day that report came out”?
On the news this morning, the BBC correspondent said that the report will be a wake-up call for the UK to… host hopefully slightly more successful climate talks than might otherwise be the case. That’s not a wake-up call. That’s a go-back-to-sleep call. The report isn’t even out yet and the BBC is already abdicating all responsibility on our behalf to a nebulous, unknown group doing things we don’t know about but will probably be able to sort everything out, not to worry, it’ll be fine. I mean, why are we even worried about this when a celebrity has probably died their hair green and is pretending to be oppressed?
I can’t tell you how angry I am about this, but I seem to do nothing else but complain to the BBC these days. Perhaps I’ll complain to someone else today, for a change.