Climate change: is the Earth at a crossroads?

Humanity is at a “climate crossroads”, said Damian Carrington in The Guardian. “What we do in the next few years will determine our fate for millennia.”

That’s the message of the landmark report published this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was compiled by the world’s leading climate experts and takes stock of the latest research. The window of opportunity to sustain “a liveable and sustainable future”, the report claims, is “rapidly closing”.

Global temperatures are already 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, and they’re likely to reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s regardless of what we do now. The real question is whether we stabilise the global temperature rise around that threshold or just blast right through it.

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The former option will require greenhouse gas emissions to peak “at the latest before 2025” and steeply reduce thereafter.

‘Irreversible adverse impacts’

If we exceed 1.5°C of warming, “we won’t like it”, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The IPCC predicts with “high confidence” that it would lead to “irreversible adverse impacts” on vulnerable ecosystems.

Were we to hit 2°C of warming, the effects of increased wildfires, drying of peatlands and permafrost thawing would make it very hard to turn back the temperature rise. It would be “like trying to climb a greased pole”.

One consolation is that the IPCC believes green reforms have made the “most dystopian scenarios”, involving 4°C or more of warming, much less likely than once feared.

On the other hand, it believes its projections for when adverse impacts would kick in were too conservative. We’re already suffering some of the extreme weather events it thought would occur when we hit 1.5°C of warming.

‘All that’s missing is the political will’

The good news, said Jack Kessler in the Evening Standard, is that we can still rescue the situation. Renewable technologies are available and rapid progress is possible. “Only 66 years separated the Wright brothers’ first flight and Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon.” All that’s missing is the political will.

Call me cynical, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker, but I can’t see this report spurring urgent action when so many previous ones have failed to.

According to a recent study, China approved 106 gigawatts’ worth of new coal-fired power plants in 2022, the equivalent of two large plants a week. The Biden administration has just approved a huge new oil drilling venture in Alaska.

“Can actions like this be squared with halving emissions by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050? The simple answer is no.”