Vox - David Roberts
Limiting global warming to 1.5˚C is almost certainly not going to happen. Admitting that, need not end hope.
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| Activists in Berlin stood with signs calling for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at a rally that criticized Germany’s insufficient climate policy on May 29, 2019. Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Image |
In the 2015
Paris climate agreement,
the countries participating in the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to a common target: to
hold the rise in global average temperature
“well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue
efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees
Celsius.” The lower end of that range, 1.5˚C, has become a cause célèbre
among climate activists.
Can that target still be met? Take a look at this animation from Carbon Brief:
No
graphic I’ve ever seen better captures humanity’s climate situation. If
we had peaked and begun steadily reducing emissions 20 years ago, the
necessary pace of reductions would have been around 3 percent a year,
which is ... well, “realistic” is too strong — it still would have
required rapid, coordinated action of a kind never seen before in human
history — but it was at least possible to envision.
We didn’t, though. We knew about climate change, there were scientists yelling themselves blue in the face, but we didn’t
turn
the wheel. Global emissions have only risen since then. Humanity has
put more CO2 in the atmosphere since 1988, when climate scientist James
Hansen first testified to Congress about the danger of climate change,
than it did in all of history prior.
Now, to hit 1.5˚C, emissions would need to fall off a
cliff, falling by 15 percent a year every year, starting in 2020, until
they hit net zero.
That’s probably not going to happen. Temperature is almost certainly going to rise more than 1.5˚C.
A lot of climate activists are extremely averse to saying
so. In fact, many of them will be angry with me for saying so, because
they believe that admitting to this looming probability carries with it
all sorts of dire consequences and implications. Lots of people in the
climate world — not just activists and politicians, but scientists,
journalists, and everyday concerned citizens — have talked themselves
into a kind of forced public-facing optimism, despite the fears that dog
their private thoughts. They believe that without that public optimism,
the fragile effort to battle climate change will collapse completely.
I don’t think that’s true, but I can’t claim to know it’s
not true. Nobody really knows what might work to get the public worked
up about climate change the way the problem deserves. Maybe advocates
really do need to maintain a happy-warrior spirit; maybe a bunch of dour
doomsaying really will turn off the public.
But it is not the job of those of us in the business of
observation and analysis to make the public feel or do things. That’s
what activists do. We owe the public our best judgment of the situation,
even if it might make them sad, and from where I’m sitting, it looks
like the 1.5˚C goal is utterly forlorn. It looks like we have already
locked in levels of climate change that scientists predict will be
devastating. I don’t like it, I don’t “accept” it, but I see it, and I
reject the notion that I should be silent about it for PR purposes.
In this post, I’ll quickly review how 1.5˚C came to be
the new activist target and some reasons to believe it might already be
out of reach. Then I’ll ponder what it means to admit that, what follows
from it, and what it means for the fight ahead.
How 1.5˚C became the “last chance”
The new target adopted in Paris reflected a growing
conviction among scientists and activists that 2˚C, the target that had
served as a kind of default for years, was in no way “safe.” Climate
change at that level would in fact be extremely dangerous. Thus the
addition of “efforts” to hit 1.5˚C.
But it wasn’t
until last year that the world really got a clear sense of how much
worse 2˚C (3.6˚F) would be than 1.5˚C (2.7˚F), after the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a
special report on the subject. Its findings were
grim.
Even 1.5˚C is likely to entail “high multiple interrelated climate
risks” for “some vulnerable regions, including small islands and Least
Developed Countries.”
All of those impacts become much worse at 2˚C. (The World Resources Institute has a
handy chart; see also
this graphic from Carbon Brief.)
Severe heat events will become 2.6 times worse, plant and vertebrate
species loss 2 times worse, insect species loss 3 times worse, and
decline in marine fisheries 2 times worse. Rather than 70 to 90 percent
of coral reefs dying, 99 percent will die. Many vulnerable and low-lying
areas will become uninhabitable and refugee flows will radically
increase. And so on. At 2˚C, climate change will be devastating for
large swathes of the globe.
In short, there is no “safe” level of global warming.
Climate change is not something bad that might happen, it’s something
bad that’s happening. Global average temperatures have risen about 1.3˚C
from pre-industrial levels and California and
Australia are already burning.
Still, each additional increment of heat, each fraction
of a degree, will make things worse. Specifically, 2˚C will be much
worse than 1.5˚C. And 2.5˚C will be much worse than 2˚C. And so on as it
gets hotter.
The aforementioned IPCC report is the source of the much
quoted notion that “we only have 11 years” to avoid catastrophic climate
change (which I suppose now is “only 10 years”). That slogan is derived
from the report’s conclusion that, to have any chance of limiting
temperature rise to 1.5˚C, global emissions must fall at least 50
percent by 2030.
That goal, a 10-year mobilization to cut global emissions
in half, has become the rallying cry of the global climate movement and
the organizing principle of the Green New Deal.
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| Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and others at a rally. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images |
Being honest about 1.5˚C
Climate hawks, along with numerous recent scientific and
economic reports (including the IPCC’s), emphasize that limiting global
warming to 1.5˚C is still possible — physically and economically
possible, with technology and resources we now possess.
And it’s true. As the IPCC
showed,
with sufficient torturing of climate-economic models, it is still
possible to construct a pathway whereby emissions decline at the needed
rate. Such scenarios generally involve everything going just right:
every policy is passed in every sector, every technology pans out, we
take no wrong turns and encounter no culs de sac, and
climate sensitivity
(the amount temperature changes in response to greenhouse gases) turns
out to be on the lower end of scientific estimates. If we roll straight
sixes for long enough, we can still win this.
he slogan
meant to summarize this state of affairs has been around, with
variations, for decades: “We have all the tools we need, all we lack is
the political will.”
But political will (
whatever that is)
is not some final item on the grocery list to be checked off once
everything else is in the cart. It is everything. None of the rest of
it, none of the available policies and technologies, mean anything
without it. It can’t be avoided, short-circuited, or wished away.
After all, it is possible to end global poverty in a
decade, or even less. We have the technology to do so; it’s called
money. The people who have more could give enough to those with less so
that everyone had a decent life. Similarly, it’s possible to end global
homelessness, habitat destruction, hunger, and war. The resources exist.
All we lack is the political will.
But we haven’t ended those things. There are lots and
lots of ways to reduce suffering that are possible, and have been
possible for a long time, and we still don’t do them. We don’t even do a
fraction of what we could to reduce immediate, visible suffering, much
less the suffering of future generations and far-off populations. It
turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to generate and effectively
deploy the political power needed to secure beneficial policies (and
hold them in place over time).
It’s not that progress hasn’t been made against a lot of
large-scale problems. Global poverty and hunger have been declining. In
the US, politics have radically shifted on issues like LGBTQ marriage
and drug policy in recent years. Things can change quickly.
But global hunger is starting to
edge up again,
in no small part thanks to climate change. And climate change is
different from those other large scale problems, for two reasons.
First, it’s not that progress is swinging around too
slow, it’s that there’s very little progress at all. For all the frenzy
around renewable energy in recent years, the best we’ve been able to do
is slightly slow the rise in global emissions. We’re still traveling
headlong in the wrong direction, with centuries of momentum at our
backs.
Secondly and consequently, the level of action and
coordination necessary to limit global warming to 1.5˚C utterly dwarfs
anything that has ever happened on any other large-scale problem that
humanity has ever faced. The only analogy that has ever come close to
capturing what’s necessary is “wartime mobilization,” but it requires
imagining the kind of mobilization that the US achieved for less than a
decade during WWII happening in every large economy at once, and
sustaining itself for the remainder of the century.
Emissions
have never fallen at 15 percent annually anywhere, much less
everywhere. And what earthly reason do we have to believe that emissions
will start plunging this year? Look around! The democratic world is in
the grips of a populist authoritarian backlash that shows no sign of
resolving itself any time soon. Oil and gas infrastructure is being
built at a furious pace; hundreds of
new coal power plants
are in the works. No country has implemented anything close to the
policies necessary to establish an emissions trajectory toward 1.5˚C;
many, including the US and Brazil, are hurtling in the other direction.
Just focusing on the US,
there’s a more than 50/50 chance that President Donald Trump will be
reelected in 2020, in which case we are all, and I can’t stress this
enough, doomed. Even if Dems take the presidency and both houses of
Congress, serious federal action will have to contend with the
filibuster, then the midterm backlash, then the next election, and more
broadly, the increasingly conservative federal courts and Supreme Court,
the electoral college, the flood of money in politics, and the
overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate.
The US, like many other countries, is balanced on a
knife’s edge of partisanship, its growing demographics frustrated by
structural barriers, its direction uncertain, and its policies and
institutions increasingly unstable. Does a sudden and thorough
about-face in social, economic, and political practice feel like
something that’s in the offing this year? It doesn’t feel like that to
me.
The difficulty of envisioning such a thing has led climate hawks like Al Gore to
place their hopes
on unpredictable social “tipping points,” invisible thresholds that,
once breached, will allegedly yield radical change. (Back in 2012, Gore
told me, “we’re not at the tipping point, but we’re much closer than we have been.”)
For as long as I can remember, people have been pointing
out signs that such a tipping point is in the offing — counting the
number of street protests, or the number of times TV news anchors saying
the word “climate,” or the number of city officials endorsing 2030
goals — but global emissions just continue rising.
As I’ve
written before,
such tipping points are certainly possible. By their nature, they
cannot be ruled out. Insofar as we have any hopes for rapid action,
they rest there.
But hoping for a radical, unprecedented break in human
history is very different from having a reasonable expectation that such
a thing will take place. Lightning striking the same spot 100 times is
possible. A roomful of monkeys with typewriters producing a Shakespeare
play is possible. Human beings shifting the course of their global
civilization on a dime is
possible. But it probably won’t happen.
We’ve waited too long. Practically speaking, we are
heading past 1.5˚C as we speak and probably past 2˚C as well. This is
not a “fact” in the same way climate science deals in facts — collective
human behavior is not nearly so easy to predict as biophysical cycles —
but nothing we know about human history, sociology, or politics
suggests that vast, screeching changes in collective direction are
likely.
Coping with the tragic story of climate change
What bothers me about the forced optimism that has become
de rigueur in climate circles is that it excludes the tragic dimension
of climate change and thus robs it of some of the gravity it deserves.
That’s
the thing: The story of climate change is already a tragedy. It’s sad.
Really sad. People are suffering, species are dying off, entire
ecosystems are being lost, and it’s inevitably going to get worse. We
are in the midst of making the earth a simpler, cruder, less hospitable
place, not only for ourselves but for all the kaleidoscopic varieties of
life that
evolved here in a relatively stable climate. The most complex and most idiosyncratic forms of life are
most at risk; the mosquitoes and jellyfish
will prosper.
That is simply the background condition of our existence as a species now, even if we rally to avoid the worst outcomes.
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| Yeah, it’s a bummer. |
Tragedy
isn’t the only story, of course, and it’s not necessarily the one that
needs to be foregrounded. There’s can-do innovation and technology,
there’s equity and green jobs, there’s national security, there’s
reduced air and water pollution — there are lots of positive stories to
tell about the fight against climate change.
But it would be shallow, and less than fully human, to
deny the unfolding tragedy that provides the context for all our
decisions now.
I know from conversations over the years that many people
see that tragedy, and feel it, but given the perpetually heightened
partisan tensions around climate change, they are leery to give it
voice. They worry that it will lend fuel to the forces of denial and
delay, that they are
morally obliged to provide cheer.
I just don’t think that’s healthy. To really grapple with
climate change, we have to understand it, and more than that, take it
on board emotionally. That can be an uncomfortable, even
brutal process,
because the truth is that we have screwed around, and are screwing
around, and with each passing day we lock in more irreversible changes
and more suffering. The consequences are difficult to reckon with and
the moral responsibility is terrible to bear, but we will never work
through all those emotions and reactions if we can’t talk about it, if
we’re only allowed chipper talk about what’s still possible in climate
models.
Hope in the face of tragedy
Saying that we are likely to miss the 1.5˚C target is an unpopular move in the climate community. It solicits accus
ations of “defeatism” and being — a term I have heard too many times to count — “unhelpful.
Such
accusations are premised on the notion that a cold assessment of our
chances will destroy motivation, that it will leave audiences
overwhelmed, hopeless, and disengaged.
But the idea that hope lives or dies on the chances of
hitting 1.5˚C is poisonous in the long-term. Framing the choice as “a
miracle or extinction” just sets everyone up for massive disappointment,
since neither is likely to unfold any time soon.
As climate scientist Kate Marvel
put it,
“Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.”
Every bit makes it worse. No matter how far down the slope we go,
there’s never reason to give up fighting. We can always hope to arrest
our slide.
Exceeding 1.5˚C, which is likely to happen in our
lifetimes, doesn’t mean anyone should feel apathetic or paralyzed. What
sense would that make? There’s no magic switch that flips at 1.5˚C, or
1.7, or 2.3, or 2.8, or 3.4. These are all, in the end, arbitrary
thresholds. Exceeding one does not in any way reduce the moral and
political imperative to stay beneath the next. If anything, the need to
mobilize against climate change only becomes greater with every new
increment of heat, because the potential stakes grow larger.
Given the scale of the challenge and the compressed time
to act, there is effectively no practical danger of anyone, at any
level, doing too much or acting too quickly. The moral imperative for
the remainder of the lives of everyone now living is to decarbonize as
fast as possible; that is true no matter the temperature.
No one ever gets to stop or give up, no matter how bad it gets. (If you need a kick in the pants on this subject, read
this essay by Mary Heglar.)
Preparing for the world to come
As a final, practical point, speaking frankly about the
extreme unlikelihood of stopping at 1.5˚C (and the increasing
unlikelihood of stopping at 2˚C) could affect how we approach climate
policy.
To be clear, it shouldn’t have any effect at all on our
mitigation policies. In that domain, “as fast as possible” is the only
rule that matters.
But it should mean getting serious about adaptation,
i.e., preparing communities for, and helping them through, the changes
that are now inevitable. As the old cliché in climate policy goes, we
should be planning for 4˚C and aiming for 2˚C instead of what we’re
doing, which is basically the reverse, drifting toward 4˚C while telling
ourselves stories about a 2˚C (and now, 1.5˚C) world.
Here in the US, we need to think about how to help
Californians dealing with wildfires, Midwestern farmers
dealing with floods, and coastal homeowners dealing with a
looming insurance crisis.
All those problems are going to get worse. We need to
grapple with that squarely, because the real threat is that these
escalating impacts overwhelm our ability, not just to mitigate GHGs, but
to even care or react to disasters when they happen elsewhere. Right
now, much of
Australia is on fire
— half a billion animals have likely died since September — and it is
barely breaking the news cycle in the US. As author David Wallace-Wells
wrote in a
recent piece, the world already seems to be heading toward a “system of disinterest defined instead by ever smaller circles of empathy.”
That shrinking of empathy is arguably the greatest danger
facing the human species, the biggest barrier to the collective action
necessary to save ourselves. I can’t help but think that the first step
in defending and expanding that empathy is reckoning squarely with how
much damage we’ve already done and are likely to do, working through the
guilt and grief, and resolving to minimize the suffering to come.
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