The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.
The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago, at the insistence of more vulnerable nations, to forestall severe weather impacts and potential runaway warming that could lead to exceeding irreversible planetary tipping points. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. “Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the U.N.’s arbiters of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points—thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.
“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature,” says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton, of the University of Exeter. If he and other scientists are right, then hopes currently being expressed of a temperature reset by reducing emissions after overshoot may be fanciful. Before we know it, there may be no way back.
At least humanity will kill itself off before it can infect another planet.
It is so fucking sad how pathetic humanity is.
Given we have for awhile setup models for the future with several cases and we have been hugging the worst case line the whole time. And that is with some effort put forth which is massively backsliding all over the place. I mean whats the point of can or can’t turn it back when we are not even really willing to try. We do know we have to pull out all the stops to reduce future pain and the more we do the less harch it will be. That should be enough to gode us.
We’ve tried doing fuckall and it isn’t working, what more do you want!?!?
And a very special “fuck you” to all those out there who are actually replanting forests and coral reefs and who are protecting the rights of animals of all kinds and sizes. Another special “fuck you” to the politicians who are fighting, year in year out, to make better policies to make this world better despite the politics and lets not forget the entrepeneurs who’ve chosen to go for the greener options which has made the greener options more profitable and more competitive in recent years.
A special fuck you to all of them, from all of us, here at home.
This is what decades of chasing ‘eXpOnenTial gRowTh’ has led to. Those who have made themselves incredibly wealthy through the purchase of climate change skeptic politicians and using complicit media outlets to cover up the effects of unconstrained fossil fuel usage now fully control the reins of power. Until the ultra rich and their puppets are held accountable and punished accordingly by the people, we are all going to burn to death by the end of the century.