Yesterday the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its latest report and compared our current situation to defusing a time bomb. The IPCC is urging everyone to implement on a massive scale all the solutions we already have in every single sector of our economies and societies : electricity, food and agriculture, land use, buildings, transport and mobility as well as waste. We have seen it time and again, it’s not a technological problem, it’s an economical and sociological one.
We have our work cut out for us and what we will collectively do in the next five years will define the climate for the next 50 if not 500 years. This should be front news and urge us all to change our lives radically. Our lives are already upended by climate change catastrophes… And this could be just the start if we were too keep on doing business as usual.
When I started covering climate change on this blog in 2007, climate change was a distant threat. But as global surface temperature is reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020 this is not any more the case. Kids born this decade will face a radically different lifetime than folks born in the 20th century :
As climate scientist say, every tonne of greenhouse gases counts. Every tenth of a degree of warming counts. We have all the tools at our disposal to rapidly slash emissions but our elected leaders and business communities prefer to line their pockets now. Our common future be damned.
Writing this with the current unrest in many countries, the war in Ukraine, the increasingly brutal and frequent climate catastrophes and extreme events, it’s hard not to see an era coming to an end. Some positive technological tipping points – renewables for electricity generation, electric vehicles and bikes for mobility… – are within grasp but won’t be enough on their own to prevent the worst from occuring. We need to heed the call for ending the bullshit as usual…
Read out more in :
- The New York Times : Earth to Hit Critical Warming Threshold by Early 2030s, Climate Panel Says
- The Guardian : Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late
- Wired : Warnings About Humanity’s Future Don’t Get More Dire Than This
- The BBC : UN climate report: Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster