The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer
It tries to find hope against a backdrop of failure.
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| Men perform a ceremony on the drought-stricken bed of Poopo, a lake in Bolivia. David Mercado / Reuters |
People must be burnt out on major climate reports, and can you really
blame them? Every year, it seems, yet another group of scientists
compiles what we know about climate change. And every year, with few
exceptions, the broad outlines of that knowledge seem worrying. But
nothing ever really changes—and so our ongoing apocalypse becomes not
only all the more terrifying, but all the more tedious.
That burnout is understandable, but I urge you to pay attention to—yes—
a new report,
released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
the UN-convened coalition of climate scientists from around the world.
Where previous assessments have warned of our hideous overheated future,
this one does something different: It tries to sketch a better one.
The
report articulates what seems, from the vantage point of 2018, like a
best-case scenario for climate change. It describes what the world will
look like if it warms by only 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees
Celsius, by the end of this century. Meeting that target would require
humanity to abandon coal and other fossil fuels in the next decade or
two: an economic transition so abrupt that, in the IPCC’s words, it “has
no documented historic precedents.
”
This
lukewarm world would still suffer many of the consequences of climate
change. There would be more deadly heat waves, more heavy rainstorms,
and more intense and frequent droughts. Yet some of the phenomenon’s
most catastrophic symptoms—including dozens of feet of sea-level rise
and planet-wracking extinctions—might be averted.
The report, in
other words, lays out humanity’s last best hope for managing climate
change. But it does so against a backdrop of generational failure.
More
than a quarter-century ago, the countries of the world hammered out the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In language signed by
President George H. W. Bush and ratified by the Senate,
that document—which
later gave rise to both the IPCC’s reports and the Paris Agreement—laid
out the goal for all of the UN’s future work on climate change. “The
ultimate objective,” it said, was to cut greenhouse-gas emissions so as
to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate
system.”
“Climate
scientists have made it abundantly clear, over the past few years, that
we’ve already passed that goal. We’ve already dangerously interfered,”
says
Christopher Field,
the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who
has worked on previous UN reports, but was not involved in this one.
The
new report confirms his contention. It finds that the world has already
warmed by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius, since humans
began sending industrial pollution into the atmosphere. The costs of
this warmth can be seen around the world: This decade alone, sweltering
heat waves have killed thousands; engorged floods have ravaged cities
from Houston to North Carolina; and half of the coral in the Great
Barrier Reef
has died.
The
question is what happens next. “The international community is
struggling with how to address the climate challenge … [while] not being
able to meet the ultimate objective,” Field told me. “We’ve already
seen dangerous interference—now the question is, how do we deal as
effectively as we can with that?”
The
new 2.7-degree plan tries to lay out such a strategy. Written by 91
researchers from around the world, it summarizes the findings of more
than 6,000 different scientific studies. It argues that humanity must
begin rapidly switching away from fossil fuels if it hopes to avoid
ecological upheaval. But almost every step of its prescription sits at
odds with current policy.
Under its plan, the level of carbon
pollution released into the atmosphere every year must begin to fall
immediately. (Instead, it
hit a record high last year.) By 2030, the world would need to have cut its annual emissions by about half. (Even the Obama administration’s
now-cancelled climate policies only cut U.S. emissions by about a quarter by that year.) By 2050, the world must get 80 percent of its electricity from renewable or nuclear power. (Today,
only about 20 percent of electricity comes from those sources.)
Additionally, humanity would need to start removing more carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere than it emitted by 2050. But even in
that world, humanity would probably overshoot the 1.5-degree target for a few decades.
Nowhere
are its prescriptions more glaring than around coal. By 2050, it warns
that coal must generate no more than 7 percent of global electricity.
Today, coal generates about 40 percent of the world’s power.
But
more than 1,600 new coal plants are due to come online worldwide in the next few decades, most under contract from Chinese companies. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has tried
to create new subsidies for coal companies. It has
also moved to weaken or repeal pollution regulations limiting airborne neurotoxins, as well those reducing greenhouse-gas emissions—rules that attracted the ire of coal companies.
“Many will dismiss the [2.7-degree] target as unrealistic, if not laughable,” said
Kim Cobb,
a professor of climate science at Georgia Tech, in an email. “It is not
our job as scientists to give the world a ‘pass’ in the face of
damaging delays in tackling climate change.”
She added that its
authors “spent months of their lives outlining a path that is entirely
justified, from a cost perspective, and urgently needed.”
This
report is the first time that the IPCC has examined a 2.7-degree
warming “target.” For more than a decade, every nation on the planet has
pledged to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees
Celsius. This goal remains as notional as its newer and more ambitious
peer: Even if every country met its obligations as they stand today
under the Paris Agreement, the world would emit too much carbon dioxide
and shoot past the goal.
But that less ambitious target of 3.6
degrees Fahrenheit has started to look more and more dangerous. In
particular, increasing Earth’s temperature by that amount seems like it
might greatly increase the risk of destabilizing ice sheets in
Antarctica and Greenland.
“We know there’s a threshold
somewhere—probably in the vicinity of [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit]—where
we’re very likely committed to more than [30 feet of sea-level rise]
over centuries,” Field told me. It may be possible to preserve those
large stores of ice at 2.7 degrees, scientists have found.
Katharine
Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech, told me that the report as a
whole should be seen as a re-appraisal of where we’re heading as a
planet. “It’s like we had a medical issue. The physician had diagnosed
it. But now they’re worried it might be worse than we thought,” she
said. “So we go back and do a complete work over, every type of test we
can imagine.”
The new prognosis is stirring. A world that warms by
3.6 degrees—and not 2.7 degrees—will find that its problems metastasize
out of scale with that seemingly small difference. In the hotter world,
the number of people affected by water scarcity will double. Twice as
many corn crops will perish in the tropics. The size of global fisheries
will drop by 50 percent. And 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs will
perish.
Plants and animals will also have a much harder time. If the world
warms 3.6 degrees, the number of species projected to lose half their
habitat will
double as compared to the 2.7-degree world. These
effects are particularly acute for the Arctic. In the 2.7-degree world,
the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will entirely melt about once a century.
In the 3.6-degree world, the Arctic Ocean will go ice-free about once a
decade—a potentially cataclysmic moment for polar bears, seals, and
other high-latitude mammals.
“A
lot of the reason it’s been so challenging to turn the corner on
climate change is it will mean that some of the folks who are in
positions of power and privilege won’t maintain that privilege,” Field
said. “We have a huge number of special interests that benefit from
making the transition slower rather than faster.”
Even lacking
that clause, the new report might set the stage for the next stage of
the climate challenge. As every climate scientist will tell you, the
battle to prevent climate change entirely has already been lost. But the
battle to blunt its effects—to
manage it, as humanity manages
the threats of hunger, poverty, war, disease, and other afflictions, and
to choose a better, cooler future—has just begun.
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