Climate Crisis to Climate Catastrophe

The latest UN climate summit opens today (Monday) in Poland for two weeks.  Since there is always a shinier object to catch media attention, it will require some effort to find reports on what's going on.  I'll try, and during those weeks also post on some related matters.

But there are already two differences this year, right at the start.  The first is the sense of urgency.  And related to that, more attention to the neglected half of the climate crisis.

The reasons for the sense of urgency are all in recent reports, including the US government's much-ignored assessment released on the Feast of Rabid Consumption, otherwise known as Black Friday weekend.  That case was made in the Guardian article Sunday entitled Portrait of a Planet on the Verge of Climate Catastrophe:

"But this year’s [UN summit] will be a grimmer affair – by far. As recent reports have made clear, the world may no longer be hovering at the edge of destruction but has probably staggered beyond a crucial point of no return. Climate catastrophe is now looking inevitable. We have simply left it too late to hold rising global temperatures to under 1.5C and so prevent a future of drowned coasts, ruined coral reefs, spreading deserts and melted glaciers."

After describing the latest reports and current situation, as well as the likely effects, the article concludes:

"It will be bad for humans, but catastrophic for Earth’s other inhabitants... Scientists warned more than 30 years ago that such a future lay ahead, but nothing was done to stave it off. Only dramatic measures are now left to those seeking to save our burning planet..."

infographic by the smallman.com  Click to enlarge

Though it's been several years that we've known that the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue to warp climate for the next decade or so, and nobody knows yet if we've crossed the ultimate point of no return to runaway climate cataclysm, the latest (and usually conservative) UN report demonstrates that the world is almost certainly going to cross the 1.5C line, which is widely believed to be the limit before major climate catastrophes are in the cards.  And  major means more than we're seeing now.

The international goal of keeping global temps below the 2.0C line is also in danger.  The US report imagines rise of 3C, the consequences of which are unimaginable.

In terms of global response, there is a mixed bag of good and bad news.  To the good,  clean energy (which doesn't spew greenhouse gases, as well as other toxics) is growing and getting cheaper than most would have predicted, while fossil fuels, still vastly larger energy suppliers, are on the wane.  In the US, while carbon tax proposals didn't fare well in the 2018 elections, several other states are considering them.

But the situation is so dire now that incremental good is not going to offset the continuing bad news about glaciers melting, the oceans heating, sea level rising and so on.  So another Guardian article includes this quote:

“We are clearly the last generation that can change the course of climate change, but we are also the first generation with its consequences,” said Kristalina Georgieva, the CEO of the World Bank."

And that's the other change, the other difference.  Unless the world quickly cuts greenhouse gases emissions to nearly none, the future will continue to get worse and worse, until it will never get better, for thousands of years at least.  Changing course has been the priority, and is now more urgent than ever.

But there's the second half of that statement--we are the first generation that has to deal with climate induced disasters, which so far include wild fires, drought, flooding, intense storms, killer heat, lost crops, climate refugees and warfare, and probably more.  The world is waking up to the need to anticipate and respond to predictable and likely threats and changes, such as sea level rise.

In bureaucracy-speak, those two sets of tasks are called adaptation and mitigation.  Frankly I can never remember which is which, because the words don't make sense.  I call them addressing the causes, and the effects of the climate crisis.

So this year the World Bank takes the lead in making the inevitable swing towards dealing with the effects, that everyone can see. The Guardian: "The bank announced on Monday that its record $100bn (£78bn) of climate funding from 2021-2025 would for the first time be split equally between projects to cut emissions and those protecting people from the floods, storms and droughts that global warming is making worse. In recent years, just 5% of global funding has gone on protection..."

Why so little towards protection previously?  Besides taking awhile to recognize the scope of the problem, there was likely also a reluctance to divide attention from the need to cut back emissions, the need to deal with the causes.  Some feared that a phenomenon that already seemed too complex would lose even more people with this additional set of tasks.  It's hard enough to get people to concentrate on one huge goal; two might be too much.

There's the additional fear--and it might be coming--that efforts to address effects will become so central that efforts to address causes will slow or stop.  This could happen particularly if those who refuse to recognize the climate crisis suddenly switched strategy and say something like, "well, we don't know why the climate is going crazy so we can't do anything about that.  But we do see what it's doing, and we must deal with that."

This suggests that an already narrow window for effective change in limiting global heating is even narrower, not only because we probably have little time to limit future catastrophe, but because we will be too busy dealing with the effects in the here and now, and we will need all the attention and resources we can muster to do so.

But the need to keep addressing the causes won't end.  Now is the time to insist on both, which is another reason I employ this vocabulary: cause and effect are automatically linked forever.  They aren't two different things; they are logically and actually bound together in an easily understandable way.  Though it took a long time, we eventually dealt with both causes and effects of automobile accidents and lung cancer, to name two prominent problems of recent decades.  It just makes sense.

It will be interesting therefore to see if current advocates of climate crisis action stop resisting the discussion of dealing with effects, and take control of both aspects of addressing the climate crisis, without losing efforts to address either one.  This has slowly been happening.  These meetings in Poland may suggest whether a common strategy can be achieved.