Pierce writes: "In the future, when historians are doing their work, many of them in underwater archives, they are going to be mystified by the role played by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
Locals evacuate the area with their animals as a wildfire rages in the suburb of Thrakomakedones, north of Athens, Greece, August 7, 2021. (photo: Giorgos Moutafis/Reuters)
10 August 21
This is the sixth time since 1988 that the IPCC has rung the alarm—but this one is different.
n the future, when historians are doing their work, many of them in underwater archives, they are going to be mystified by the role played by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Golly, they will say through their respiration devices, why didn’t anyone listen to these people? On Monday, the IPCC issued yet another report on the climate crisis, and the only way it could have been more direct about the imminent threat to human habitation is if you tied the report around a brick and threw it through a window at Exxon HQ. From the Guardian:
Within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather. Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade can prevent such climate breakdown, with every fraction of a degree of further heating likely to compound the accelerating effects, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science.
This is the sixth time since 1988 that the IPCC has rung the alarm, and this time it’s hitting a gong the size of Wyoming with the hammer of doom.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned: “[This report] is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.” He called for an end to new coal plants and to new fossil fuel exploration and development, and for governments, investors and businesses to pour all their efforts into a low-carbon future. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet,” he said.
Joe Manchin just caught a chill and doesn’t know why.
After a ship sinks, there always comes a point where the Coast Guard announces that its efforts have changed from “rescue” to “recovery.” I have a feeling from this report that we are at that kind of moment right now. So much of the damage appears irreversible that it’s time to make plans on how we’re going to live in a radically transformed biosphere.
Even if the world manages to limit warming to 1.5C, some long-term impacts of warming already in train are likely to be inevitable and irreversible. These include sea level rises, the melting of Arctic ice, and the warming and acidification of the oceans. Drastic reductions in emissions can stave off worse climate change, according to IPCC scientists, but will not return the world to the more moderate weather patterns of the past. Ed Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, and a lead author for the IPCC, said: “We are already experiencing climate change, including more frequent and extreme weather events, and for many of these impacts there is no going back.”
All of this was avoidable, of course, if we didn’t fundamentally believe that the climate crisis was essentially a political debate. The parallels to the pandemic are frighteningly exact: the scientific community is gradually acclimating itself (and us) to the fact that COVID is not going to be eradicated, but that, rather, it will be one of those diseases that is a part of being alive in this world, or whatever’s left of it. Welcome to Happy Fun Monday.
