Window closing for any meaningful climate action
It was an odd title for a comedy night but British stand-up Carl Donnelly turned out to have chosen an environmental theme with impeccable timing.
With temperature records tumbling daily in last week’s European heatwave, a crowd in an east London bar seemed uniquely primed to appreciate his darkly humorous riffs on the existential threat posed by climate change.
That foretaste of a radically hotter world underscored what is at stake in a decisive phase of talks to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement, a collective shot at avoiding climate breakdown.
With study-after-study showing climate impacts from extreme weather to polar melt and sea level rise outstripping initial forecasts, negotiators have a fast-closing window to try to turn the aspirations agreed in Paris into meaningful outcomes.
“There’s so much on the line in the next 18 months or so,” said Sue Reid, vice-president of climate and energy at Ceres, a US non-profit organisation.
“This is a crucial period of time both for public officials and the private sector to really reverse the curve on emissions,” Reid said.
In October, the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned emissions must start falling next year at the latest to stand a chance of achieving the deal’s goal of holding the global temperature rise to 1.5ºC.
With emissions on track to push temperatures more than 3ºC higher, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres is working to wrest bigger commitments from governments ahead of a summit in New York in September.
Telling world leaders that failing to cut emissions would be “suicidal”, the Portuguese diplomat wants to build momentum ahead of a fresh round of climate talks in Chile in December.
By the time Britain convenes a major follow-up summit next year, plans are supposed to be under way to almost halve global emissions over the next decade.
“In the next year-and-a-half we will witness an intensity of climate diplomacy not seen since the Paris Agreement was signed,” said Tessa Khan, an international climate change lawyer and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network.
As the diplomatic offensive intensifies, the latest scientific studies have offered negotiators scant comfort.
US climatologist Michael Mann believes emissions need to fall even more drastically than the IPCC assumes since the panel may be underestimating how far temperatures have already risen since pre-industrial times.
“Our work on this indicates that we might have as much as 40% less carbon left to burn than the IPCC implies if we are to avert the 1.5ºC warming limit,” said Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Mann has urged governments to treat the transition to renewable energy with the equivalent urgency that drove the US industrial mobilisation in World War II.
Given the uncertain prospects, some are starting to steel themselves for the unravelling of the world they once knew. “Revolution or collapse, the good life as we know it is no longer viable.”