“Now or Never” shouted the Reuters new service headline—“Only severe emissions cuts will avoid climate extremes—U.N. Report.” More specifically, as the BBC site reported: “To avoid very dangerous warming, carbon emissions need to peak within three years, and fall rapidly after that. Even then, technology to pull CO2 from the air will still be needed to keep temperatures down.”
That was the shock: three years. Since the last big climate meeting at Glasgow the refrain has been, only ten years to get it right. Now, just three.
But in a followup, the BBC asserted “Key UN finding widely misinterpreted.” Environmental correspondent Matt McGrath suggested that the idea that the output of greenhouse gases has to peak in 2025 “implies that carbon could increase for another three years and the world could still avoid dangerous warming.” But scientists he interviewed said this is incorrect—that in fact emissions need to start falling immediately."
The background: The world is almost certainly going to continue experiencing increasing incidences of droughts, fires, more violent and unpredictable storms in any season, and heat waves of greater temperatures and lengths. The effects of climate disruption we’re trying to avoid are so severe that they change the nature of places on the planet. That's what this report is about.
In BuzzFeed, Zahra Hirji summed it up:
“The best possible future — the one with fewer climate disasters, extinctions, and human suffering — involves limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But for this to happen, a new report warns, greenhouse gas levels must start dropping by 2025.
“We are on a fast track to climate disaster,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday while announcing the new report by the United Nation’s preeminent climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“This is not fiction or exaggeration,” he added. “It is
what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a
pathway to global warming of more than double 1.5 degrees.”
Guterres' phrase, “fast track to disaster” appears over and over in similar news reports.
In the Washington Post, Sarah Kaplan and Brady Dennis wrote:
“The world is on track to blaze past a crucial climate target within eight years, some of the planet’s top researchers, economists and social scientists said in a sober assessment Monday.
Whether humanity can change course after decades of inaction is largely a question of collective resolve, according to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Governments, businesses and individuals must summon the willpower to transform economies, embrace new habits and leave behind the age of fossil fuels — or face the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change.
“The science has been ever more consistent and ever more clear,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in an interview.
What’s needed now is “political courage,” she added. “That is what it will take — the ability to look beyond current interests.”
The barriers to looking beyond current interests is suggested by the play received by this astounding news of an imminent slide to doomsday. The top news was dominated by Ukraine and the incident of an actor slapping a comedian on stage at the Oscars. The Washington Post story was pretty far down the digital front page. So was the New York Times story, which valiantly attempted to play up the positive: “Stopping Climate Change is doable but time is short.” Rolling Stone called this the “Silver Lining” in the report: that the tools to head off catastrophe mostly exist.
Rolling Stone explained: If there is a single message in the WG3 report, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, told me, it is this: “Things are bad, we can fix this, but the window is closing.”
But the story continued--
Unfortunately, that has been the message in more or less every version of this report for the last 20 years and nobody has paid much attention to it. But what’s different this time is that the urgency is palpable.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations who put the power and influence of fossil fuels above the welfare of the planet: “It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.”
Firmly on track to an unlivable world, Rolling Stone repeated.
After the initial stories came the next day fatalism. An article in the Atlantic groused that a rise of only 1.5. degrees always was an impossible target. Grist soon agreed, and others took up the refrain. They did so in the context of continuing to try to cut emissions—that every fraction of a degree rise that can be avoided may help. In fact, the "three years" in a sense is not new, and not definitive. It would just make it very difficult to stay below 1.5 degrees by 2030. But even 1.5 is a best estimate--no one really knows where the thresholds and tipping points are. Just that they are coming soon, if we haven't passed them already.
A columnist in the Los Angeles Times despaired. Why bother reading the report? Nobody does anything about it. The LA Times initial coverage seemed to reflect that thought—all they printed on their front page was a box at the bottom, with the quote “Earth is on track to be ‘unlivable’—then a single paragraph with a jump to an inside page. The more important environmental story on the front page was “Two Raptors Have Berkeley Enraptured.”
It’s satire that writes itself: “Earth on track to be unlivable—film at eleven.”
It took Mary MacNamara, the LA Times culture columnist and critic a few days later to ask in her story, “Why are we talking about anything but climate change?”
A week later, the LA Times printed letters from readers under a headline noting they got far more letters on this climate column than on the Slap. Many readers pointed out that her column was carried on the last page of the style section, while the Slap was on the front page—opposite to what it should be. Many also criticized the LA Times for not covering Los Angeles climate stories, like the protests of scientists arrested in downtown LA after the report was issued. A few days later a similar protest and result outside the White House fence forced newspapers to cover it.
That the modest coverage of the report and its findings so far hasn’t actually ended is perhaps the only surprise. There have been followup stories on elements of the reports and evaluations of proposals, such as nuclear power and the better known forms of geoengineering.
Yet the context of this latest report is dark and daunting. The response to these UN reports is the least of it. This one comes as the commitment in Washington to addressing the climate future seems to be waning, and maybe even reversing. The war in Ukraine could very well be both a preview of the future and the future’s endgame. The darkness gripping the politics of America is extreme, and yet, it keeps getting worse. Technology and politics are combining to not only ignore real information but to make real information scarce and close to inaccessible. After just about killing off other sources of information, the Internet is becoming a cesspool of unreliable words and images.
I keep recalling the final scenes from the 2022 movie Don’t Look Up—a self-consciously final ragtag family meal in which the coming end is self-consciously ignored. At the end of it the Leonardo DiCaprio character remarks, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” And then the walls implode. It is an elegy for our Earth.
Is there any hope here, on this Earth Day? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: hope is a condition of the present, not a forecast of the future or even of future possibilities. You don’t have hope—you enact it. It isn’t what you feel. It is what you do.
What exists right now are these reports—not the headlines, not the summaries, but the thousands of pages of what to do to confront both the causes and consequences of climate disruption. Countries, individual states and communities are using these documents to develop specific plans. Developing and implementing these plans will take work. Right now it is the most heroic and most important work there is. Confronting and addressing the causes and effects of climate disruption will be the work of generations and entire societies for as long as they may last. The hope is in doing that work, at every level.
