They promised to try
For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU’s climate service. World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts. This first year-long breach doesn’t break that landmark Paris agreement, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.
Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists say.
But urgent action is not happening and is not going to happen.
El Niño is part of the picture, but the picture remains grim anyway.
An end to El Niño conditions is expected in a few months, which could allow global temperatures to temporarily stabilise, and then fall slightly, probably back below the 1.5C threshold. But while human activities keep adding to the levels of warming gases in the atmosphere, temperatures will ultimately continue rising in the decades ahead.
And we know human activities keep adding to the levels of warming gases in the atmosphere because we are helpless to stop them. Democratic governments can’t and authoritarian governments don’t give a shit.
Yeah. Not to be a nervous Norman, but I think that it’s too far gone to hope for a good outcome, much lest the best. Humanity seems to be intent on dooming itself. We are already seeing catastrophic weather events getting worse year by year; I’m 57 years old and I fully expect to see major disasters in my lifetime, which are a result of human-created climate change. Meanwhile, our idiot GOP congressmen throw snowballs and say “look, snow!”
A lot of educated and otherwise responsible people I know seem to have given up. They know enough to recognise that the countries and industries that could take really meaningful action are not, and are not going to. the general sentiment seems to be, “well why should we (NZ)/I ruin my life when it will make no difference?” I disagree, we have to try, even if our individual or country effort is largely a rounding error. I don’t have kids, but I seem to care more about their kids futures than they do.
Yup, and they don’t care about catastrophic changes that happen elsewhere. And, when it stops snowing in their home State, they’ll say “look, no more nasty snow – this is great!” it’s the problem having a broken political system that can’t be fixed by democratic means.
Not that I’ll live to see it, but I’m betting on 3-4 C increase by the end of the century. Assuming we don’t trigger some catastrophic tipping point that hasn’t been accounted for yet.
Well, look on the bright side, I always say. Civilisation arguably only arose because of the retreat of the glaciers produced by Ice Age No. 4 in the Pleistocene series. (All those Babylonians, Egyptians etc had no idea as to how to make snowshoes, grow crops under ice, and other skills necessary for surviving polar conditions.) It might just be that our adding of all that CO2 to the atmosphere is accidentally right. Without it, the planet would be in line to move into Pleistocene Glaciation No. 5. In No.4, readers will no doubt recall, there were glaciers about a kilometre thick down to Central Park in NYC.
But then again, capitalists (like er, say, me) incline to short-term thinking. (In the long run, as JM Keynes noted, we will all be dead.) As all the fossil carbon could be (shock, horror!) nationalised by do-gooder governments sooner than we may think, best it be all extracted ASAP and converted into $$$$ in our own private bank accounts. We could even finish up owning a chain of tropical resorts in balmy Greenland, Iceland, down Patagonia way, or even in Antarctica. (Barbecued penguin could be a gourmet’s delight.) It’s just a matter of thinking outside of the square.
But then again, after all the fossil carbon is gone, we will have nothing from which to make our ubiquitous plastics, road tar, or the synthetic rubber for tyres for our electric cars. Our descendants could well find themselves driving animal-powered carts with wooden wheels (no fossil-carbon left for the-making of iron and steel) on cobbled roads. And donkeys are damned stubborn, I believe. The curses of those cart occupants upon our profligate generation will likely be audible on Venus. On second thought, make that Mars. Venus has a thick atmosphere almost 100% made up of CO2, and a temperature at its surface sufficient to melt lead; again all down to the said CO2.
Oh Omar, you brought up one of my “favorite” subjects, wasting fossil fuels that we’ll need to transition to the next phase by burning them… Even without climate change it’s monumentally stupid…