Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumElizabeth Kolbert: Every Decade Is Consequential; The 2020s Will Be Permanently Consequential
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What will the twenty-twenties bring? In geophysical terms, this question is almost too easy to answer. Temperatures will continue to rise. Its virtually guaranteed that the coming decade will be warmer than the twenty-tens, which were warmer than the two-thousands, which were warmer than the nineteen-nineties, whichyou guessed itwere warmer than the nineteen-eighties.
And with still higher temperatures will come still greater damage. Droughts will grow more punishing. (Australias horrific wildfires are, in large part, the result of what Australians are calling a big dry, which is now in its third year and has forced many towns to truck in water.) Warmer air holds more moisture, so the flip side of drought is deluge. (Last week, as Australia was roasting, flooding in Indonesia killed at least forty people.) Meanwhile, the planets ice sheets will continue to melt, leading to ever-higher sea levels, as will the Arctic ice cap. Its possible that by 2030 the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free at the end of the summer.
Which brings us to the question of what it means to wake up. If in the past year (or the past decade) the world began to understand how dangerous climate change is, it certainly didnt act like it. In the past ten years, more CO2 was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of J.F.K.
In 2015, in Paris, world leaders, including President Barack Obama, committed to holding the average global temperature increase to well below 2°C. They never committed to how they were going to do this, however, and last month, in Madrid, the creaky machinery of climate diplomacy came very close to breaking down altogether. The Trump Administration, which has filed to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, and the Morrison government, which wanted to use an accounting trick to fulfill its Paris commitments, were explicitly blamed for the stalemate. Many commentators noted the irony of the situation. A headline in the Guardian put it this way: AUSTRALIA TOOK A MATCH TO UN CLIMATE TALKS WHILE BACK HOME THE COUNTRY BURNED.
Every decade is consequential in its own way, but the twenty-twenties will be consequential in a more or less permanent way. Global CO2 emissions are now so highin 2019, they hit a new record of forty-three billion metric tonsthat ten more years of the same will be nothing short of cataclysmic. Unless emissions are reduced, and radically, a rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will be pretty much unavoidable by 2030. This will make the demise of the worlds coral reefs, the inundation of most low-lying island nations, incessant heat waves and fires and misery for millionsperhaps billionsof people equally unavoidable.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/what-will-another-decade-of-climate-crisis-bring
gordianot
(15,248 posts)It may be the decade Politics and Climate link up. Other than some awareness it is not a good start.