The latest IPPC report should come as no surprise. The warning bells have been ringing for decades but ignored. As Prof Will Steffen stated after the report was released, “unless the world slashed climate emissions by 50% by 2030 it faced an impossible future”. That is a starting point but we need to do even better. That was outlined in our last forum and applies to every activity of human existence including the way we travel and transport goods and services.
There has been much talk about how long we have to meet targets necessary to stabilise global temperatures at a level which can support human life. For many years 1.5 degrees above pre industrialised levels (1850-1900 baseline) was considered essential to avoid dangerous climate change. This figure has been adopted by the G7 group of nations. This figure has been extended, almost as an act of desperation to 2 degrees. Both are arbitrary best guesses1 by scientists however and the limit may well be less. The planet has already “warmed” 1.1 degrees and this has been sufficient to trigger heat waves and firestorms and torrential rain and flooding events on an unprecedented scale in terms of frequency and intensity. It is possible this increase may be sufficient to trigger some of the tipping points that will help put us on a hot house trajectory. But perhaps the greatest worry is the damage to the biosphere and its capacity to moderate climate change by absorbing CO2 etc.
Scientists are telling us it will be almost impossible now to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees and that to do so would require carbon capture technology, but this is a technology that is unproven – at least on the scale necessary, so any suggestion that we have until 2040 or 2050 to meet zero emissions based on this assumption is at best unhelpful and diminishes the degree of urgency, providing governments with a false sense of security.
TfM’s position is to aim for zero by 2030 with interim targets and work backwards from this “endpoint” with strategies and plans to achieve them. That was the position we adopted last year and the IPCC report does nothing to change it.
1 There are at least three reasons for this. Firstly climate modelling is very complex and is being constantly being improved. Secondly there are discontinuities or tipping points which are difficult to predict in terms of timing and impact. Thirdly there are factors which had not been previously identified and are not included in the model.