Is the climate still time full of hope?

The number of red digital clocks on buses connected to the Union Square building in New York has dropped to zero over the past five years. The group that installed it, Climate Clock, described the rest of the time as “the most important number in the world.” It represents a narrowing opportunity for humans to limit global warming to a long-term average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The earth is already hot enough that climate disasters are spreading and intensifying. In the past week, The deadly heat wave Record rupture, and Mountain flooding More than a hundred people were killed in Texas. But this will get worse. The Intergovernmental Climate Change (IPCC) Committee of the United Nations Top Climate Scientists warns that every degree added makes predictions more dystopian: large groups escalate, sea levels rise, and sea levels rise more dramatically. Therefore, in the Paris Agreement, almost every country on Earth agreed to work towards the 1.5-degree goal. The climate clock calls it “no return”.

Unfortunately, this is also where we are going. Last year, the hottest record of all time was about 1.55 degrees higher than the world before the Industrial Revolution. Lower long-term average – maybe 1.36 degreesdepending on one’s measures, but they are rising rapidly. (Scientists usually measure temperatures on the Earth’s surface and average over a decade – so by the time they confirm that the line has crossed, it may lag behind us.) Global emissions have not even begun to drop from historical highs, and President Trump is spending months to reduce environmentalist jacks, such as the behavior of reducing inflation and the Environmental Protection Agency. “The current policy means we will have 3°C warming by the end of the century,” Piers Forster, a physicist who co-authored several landmark IPCC reports, told me in an email. “What we should do is acknowledge that our inaction or inadequate actions can cause death and destruction,” The Lancet Countdown is a research program for health and climate change. “This is the cross we have to carry,” she added, the moment we cross the line should be a grim occasion to renew our global ambitions. “It’s not giving us more space, time or space to swing,” she told me. “It’s about keeping the temperature as low as possible.”

We can’t bear knowledge above 1.5 degrees, and despite this, we’re still working on doing this, which sparks debate on whether the doorpost should move. “Dialing from 1.5 is a huge mistake,” Johan Rockström, co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact, told me. Beyond this point, the risks of climate turning points are escalating – the collapse of the ice sheet, the destruction of the ocean currents, the sudden permanent freeze melting. He prefers the metaphor of landing zones: the more we are, the more we land, the more we land, the harder it will be to remove carbon from the atmosphere in the future. “If we readjust every few years, we will lose any sense of urgency every few years,” said Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, former vice president of IPCC. (He has a tie that says “I ♡ 1.5°C” – although on the day we met, at the Environmental Scientist Awards Ceremony Border Planet Award He pointed out that the awards ceremony was too hot for him. Why target deadly warming levels?

A question of countdown without a point of return, they don’t tell you much about what will happen in the future. “I think we need to be honest with the places we are most likely to go,” climate scientist Daniel Swain told me in an email during extreme weather at the California Water Institute. “Unfortunately, the best scene from a decade ago might have been by the table.” He not only urged for emissions reductions, but also adapted to a hotter, more dangerous planet. The climate crisis is described as a time bomb for the ticking tickworm, but it gives the wrong impression that the bomb has not yet disappeared. In fact, we are not trying to blow up the explosion, but we are trying to curb the explosion. Swin still believes that the second number in the Paris Agreement is “well below 2°C” and can still be achieved through combat. The good news is that we know how to get there: by phasing out coal, oil and gas that creates crisis; by protecting the ecosystems we rely on; by electrifying buildings and vehicles; and, As Bill McKibben wrote On Wednesday, by expanding green energy (such as solar).

Marine biologist and climate advocate Ayana Elizabeth Johnson does not consider an optimist. Even so, she is the author of a bookWhat if we do it right? : The scene of climate futures. When I asked her about the 1.5-degree goal, she told me: “Some people feel that if you go above it, it’s all over and you can give up.” “But the narrow mistake she continues to move forward could be the lives of hundreds of millions of people. exist Two degrees, they may just be extinct. “What I can really think of is like not quitting smoking! Why are we giving up on life on Earth so easy in the future?” Johnson said. “Where is our tenacity? Where is our perseverance? We can do difficult things.” ♦