A report just published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns, with unusual candour, that unless global warming is drastically reduced by 2030, our climate will undergo a wide array of catastrophic disruptions. Jim Skea, co-chair of the working group on mitigation, said: “We have presented governments with pretty hard choices. We have pointed out the enormous benefits of keeping to 1.5C [above Earth’s temperature before the Industrial Revolution], and also the unprecedented shift in energy systems and transport that would be needed to achieve that.” He then added: “We show it can be done within laws of physics and chemistry …. the final tick box is political will. We cannot answer that. Only our audience can – and that is the governments that receive it.”
The 1.5C target – already dangerously close to what humans can cope with – is the lower end of the pledges that were secured in the Paris talks. What is new is the scientists’ concern at what even that amount of change will entail. Half a degree doesn’t sound like much, but it would save us from 10 centimetres of global sea level rise, protect 20 percent of the planet from extreme heatwaves, afford icebergs in the Arctic sea a tenfold greater chance of lasting through the summer, and it would preserve nearly a quarter of the world’s coral reefs – nearly all of which would disappear at a rise of 2C.
Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the working group on impacts described the IPCC report as “a line in the sand” and “the largest clarion bell from the science community.” She expressed the hope that the report would “mobilize people and dent the mood of complacency.”
This complacency includes the Trump administration’s abandonment of the Paris Agreement and its dismantling of environmental protections. But it should also include our lack of concern about what is already in plain view. To give just one striking instance: in July 2017, an iceberg that weighed a trillion metric tons – the equivalent of more than 460 million Olympic sized swimming pools – detached itself from the Antarctic peninsula. Worse yet, most scientists interpreted the separation of the iceberg, Larsen C, as a prelude to further collapses in the ice sheets.
Faced with such grim facts, a tendency to despair is understandable. But there are reasons to hope that – as with CFC depletion of the ozone layer – we may yet, collectively, rise to the challenge. Consider, for example, the fact that Texas now produces more energy from wind than coal, that Costa Rica generates all but 2 percent of its energy from renewable sources, that Scotland has closed all of its coal-fired power plants and that many parts of the US, despite Trump’s climate change denialism, have introduced aggressive targets for reducing carbon, or eliminating it altogether, within the next 25 years. What the IPCC report underscores is that all of these responses need to be supported and, wherever possible, amplified.
Since our coastal plain cannot withstand catastrophic sea-level rise, Guyanese must hope that all of our politicians have heeded the IPCC warning. For even with its scientific hedging – assertions are made with “medium” or “high” confidence – the report’s key findings are stark enough for a layman to understand. One warns that “Populations at disproportionately higher risk of adverse consequences of global warming of 1.5°C and beyond include disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods (high confidence).” That sentence alone should make all of us realize that complacency towards climate change is no longer a sensible option.
