Almost forgotten among the ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan and the continuing rise in COVID-19 numbers is a piece of bombshell news with an impact measurable in decades and centuries.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report earlier this month that cites human activity as a major cause of climate change. It doesn’t hem and haw, hedge its bets or use weasel words. The earth’s climate is changing for the worse, and we are to blame.
The report is both ideally and unfortunately timed.
“Ideally” because it comes in the middle of a summer that illustrates weather extremes. These include “heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones,” all of which will become more commonplace.
One of the most disturbing parts of the report states that the planet’s “surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered.” In other words, what humanity is experiencing right now in terms of temperature will continue – no matter what – through 2050.
Just as concerning is the observation that “past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia.” Our environmental sins will haunt our kids, our kids’ kids, and generations to come.
Really, you could point a finger at any part of the report and find something depressing. Comforting bedtime reading this is not.
The report is also perfectly timed because it comes months ahead of the 26th U.N.'s Climate Change Conference of the Parties, aka COP26, scheduled for Glasgow this fall. The paper is poised as the primary document at that conference, just as its predecessor was the anchor paper for the Paris climate accord in 2015.
Yet the report is unfortunately timed because, as noted above, it falls in the middle of a busy news cycle, where it has been muscled off front pages not only by the Middle East debacle and the immediacy of COVID, but also by the very weather extremes it warns us of.
Officials may be so distracted dealing with climate emergencies – putting out fires quite literally in some cases – that they will miss a quickly closing window of opportunity for prevention.
The report warns that the Earth’s governments – 195 of which signed off on these findings – must do everything in their power to limit the increase of global warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius, which will still be disruptive, and not the more devastating 2.0 degrees Celsius or above.
The report is also unfortunately timed because it comes as the United States, which stepped away from a leadership role in curbing climate change under the Trump administration, is more divided than ever — over vaccines, mask-use, election results, you name it. Climate change is just one more area of dissension.
Make no mistake, this report is definitive, deeply researched and sourced, with the authority of some of the world’s top minds behind it. Still, there will be those who will dismiss it out of hand, who will make the predictable jokes when next winter’s first cold day rolls around. (There’s a reason these phenomena haven’t been labeled “global warming” for years — because the weather patterns climate change begets are so varied.)
Some conservatives, meanwhile, have slowly moved the needle of their belief from “climate-change denial” to “climate-change acceptance, but too expensive to address.” And within this narrow shift comes a small glimmer of hope.
If environmentalists can convince the movers and shakers that climate change is too expensive NOT to address — in effect, that the environment, like the banking or real-estate industries, is too big to fail — they will be more apt to act. And if parts of our coastline become inhabitable, if clean water becomes a luxury, if the health costs of treating those who are most susceptible to polluted air continue to balloon — then the cost of “business as usual” will be too great.
We can and should shift more of our economy to renewable energy sources, train workers from traditional energy industries to thrive in these newer endeavors, incentivize homeowners to transition to solar power, invest in high-speed rail and other forms of mass transit to shift away from individual car ownership.
What we can’t afford to do is nothing. A friend I was talking to about the report reached a conclusion that is all too commonplace: “It sounds like we’re already screwed, so why bother?”
That response reminds me of a line from the musical “Hamilton,” where a legacy is defined as “planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
For future generations, we have to plant the seeds of climate-change reversal today, before there aren’t any gardens left.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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