Over the next few years
As always, the word is that we can do it if we really get serious and hurry up, and the obvious problem is that we’re not going to.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, warns that unless countries drastically accelerate efforts over the next few years to slash their emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, will likely be out of reach by the end of this decade.
That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably.
And what goes along with worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse? Mass migrations, and resistance to mass migrations, and wars and genocides. In a world that’s already broken. It will be horrible. It will be Mariupol everywhere and Treblinka everywhere.
But the task is daunting: Holding warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius would require nations to collectively reduce their planet-warming emissions roughly 43 percent by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s, the report found.
Yeah. Do we look as if we’re doing that? Do we look as if we’re going to be doing that starting today?
By contrast, current policies by governments are only expected to reduce global emissions by a few percentage points this decade. Last year, fossil fuel emissions worldwide rebounded to near-record highs after a brief dip as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Governments probably can’t do anything about it without being overthrown and replaced by governments that will undo any doing.
The report, which was approved by 195 governments and lays out strategies that countries could pursue to halt global warming, comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket, diverting political attention from climate change. In the United States and Europe, leaders are focused on shoring up domestic fossil fuel supplies to avoid painful price spikes and energy shortages, even if that means increasing emissions in the short term.
But of course there is no “short term.” There’s no short term in the sense that “we can keep on with the fossil fuels for just this one short term and then we’ll immediately slash them by 43 percent and the planet will be saved.” How long would that short term be exactly? How would we know? What would be different such that an immediate switch to using roughly half of what we’ve been using would be quick and painless? Don’t make us laugh. It’s not possible. Animals don’t evolve to take the long view, not even as long as the next eight years. When heating costs double from one month to the next it’s game over.
But even if that goal becomes unattainable, scientists said, it will still be worthwhile for countries to slash emissions as quickly as possible to prevent as much warming as they can. Every additional rise in global temperatures increases the perils that people face around the world, such as water scarcity, malnutrition and life-threatening heat waves, the U.N. panel has found.
And what goes with them: mass migrations, wars, genocides. I think the panels and journalists should include that part, even though it’s not as trackable as water scarcity and the rest.
For a foretaste of what is possibly to come, please see “Bronze Age Collapse,” when, in a mere fifty years, the great cities of the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Levant disappeared, and literacy was lost for centuries (called the Greek Dark Age). Probable factor: prolonged drought, famine, and trade collapse.
But electric cars and more recycling will save us yet, right? Natural systems running on their own (or changing drastically, or not running at all) will still result in governments being overthrown, and all the deadly consequences you’ve noted. But nobody in power will dare even mention the truth. If people think that’s a buzzkill, just wait till they see what business as usual brings us.
Left-ish parties that one might think would be somewhat more aware of this issue are busy denying reality in the gender wars. There’s a similar failure and fear of speaking plain facts. In both cases the parties in question have completely underestimated the costs (political and otherwise) of failing to engage with what the facts on the ground (and in the air and water) truly are. Yes there will be genocide, but all the suicidal ideating trans activists will be disappointed to find out that trans folk aren’t being singled out for special treatment, and that we’re all in the same inclusive, all-gender, pan-species, biosphere-wide, burning, sinking boat.
And why don’t we care? Is there any good explanation for that? Maybe trying to figure out that — the psychology of it — could be the first step to trying to do something about it?
As I mentioned – animals don’t evolve to take the long view.
GW
It has been suggested that the human brain is especially fine-tuned to react to sudden dangers as well as threats from an identifiable external agent. Gradual change for the worse or threats without an identifiable enemy don’t trigger the same instinctual fear reaction even if you know on an intellectual level that the danger is orders of magnitude greater than, say, the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack.
Possible silver lining to the dark cloud.
Any increase in the cost of petroleum is an incentive to substitute other energy sources wherever possible.
Jim, that works if the change is sudden and rapid enough; if it is slower and more gradual, we find ways to adapt. When I was a teen in the 1970s, just starting to learn to drive, the gas crisis hit and everyone assumed gas would be super high by now. In fact, the gas prices have been lower based on current dollar values.
I threw someone off balance lately when he was complaining about gas prices and I said I was glad. I explained. He said “what about the poor?” (Funny how people only think about the poor when it will help them, isn’t it?) I also explained how cheap gas is bad for the poor, trapping them in a car culture, when affordable mass transit would allow them to achieve a better life by not having to spend so much on buying and maintaining a car. This seemed impossible for him to understand. There were only two people in the room at that time who understood – me and my husband.
I’m of two minds about it. Higher fuel prices is incentive to use mass transit in places that have mass transit. For everyone else, it’s pain that can only be resolved by years of work by Other People, with funding secured from more Other People. Even buying a more efficient vehicle is tricky. This work should have been done during flush times, but nobody wanted to do it at those times. The wrong people are being hurt. But of course remedies are about reducing fuel prices, not about doing that as a stopgap and helping people reduce their dependence on cars.
iknklast;
Yes. The most important actions have to be collective.
Eg: restart the closed nuclear reactors in Japan & Germany. Thus cutting worldwide demand for natural gas & making nitrogen fertilizer cheaper.
Change zoning rules so people can put in basement suites in suburban houses near transit stops. So less need for cars.
I’m sure there are lots more.