The United Nations publishes a climate report; I ask a question

Greetings from the start of fall in the northern hemisphere.  Here in northeastern Virginia temperatures are oscillating, giving us alternating glimpses of summer and autumn.  The cats are not entirely pleased, suspecting that humans have, once again, failed to arrange things to their perfect satisfaction.

It’s also been an overwhelming month for me.  Professionally, I finished my new book’s first draft (about 70,000 words) and am now revising it, seeing what first readers make of it.  My two fall seminars are under way, taking up more time since each is a hybrid/Hyflex class.  Clients are also engaging me – all for virtual events for the rest of 2021.  Personally, my family ran into three bad health scares, two of which turned out to be real, one treatable, and the other not.  Which is to say: my apologies for being quiet of late.

I’d like to return to the bloghouse with a note about climate change.  A note and a question, really.

It’s about that recent UN report. It has some good news about a group of nations promising to cut emissions over the next decade.  Yet even with that, there’s a very scary finding:

The available NDCs of all 191 Parties taken together imply a sizable increase in global GHG emissions in 2030 compared to 2010, of about 16%.

To translate from the diplomatic bureaucratic: GHG = greenhouse gas. Parties = all nations which signed on to the 2015 Paris Accord. NDC = how much GHG countries plan on emitting.

Did you catch that?

After all these years of science, of activism, of big declarations, of innovation, of proclaiming climate change to be an existential crisis for the human  – after all of that, civilization is planning on making the climate crisis worse. 

For some context, here’s what we’re supposed to be doing, according to the same report:

[T]o be consistent with global emission pathways with no or limited overshoot of the 1.5 °C goal, global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions need to decline by about 45 per cent from the 2010 level by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050.

We’re not doing that.  Instead, “such an increase [that 16% rise], unless actions are taken immediately, may lead to a temperature rise of about 2.7C by the end of the century.”  (That’s nearly 5 degrees F, for Americans.) So we’re blowing right past 1.5C.

It’s worse than it sounds.  All of this is in the open. The UN report is based on public declarations, the figures governments decided to publish.  This is the optimistic projection, the positive spin version. How much worse will the reality be, if we don’t change?

We’re not hiding this idea. We know what we’re doing right now. Instead of cutting back our GHG, humanity is going to make  even more greenhouse gasses and loft them into the atmosphere. We are doing this with our eyes wide open. Yes, even as the weather rages around us, with fires and storms on multiple continents.

This increase in emissions, this deliberate and public drive to worsen the climate crisis, this is what civilization in 2021 proclaims to the future.

Think about how this report and the series of decisions it describes will look to the future. Imagine that world after a 2.7C temperature rise.  When they consider us from their drowned cities, ruined agriculture sectors, acidic oceans, spreading deserts, and staggering human catastrophe, how will they view the human race of 2021? I do not think their judgement will be kind.

The UN report came out last week and the global response looks like… a big shrug. COP21 is coming up.  China just vowed to not build any more coal plants.  The United States is struggling to try passing a watered-down, massively cut bill which could have some climate mitigation measures. Britain is vaunting a green agenda while firing up a new coal plant.  The overall effect is one of resignation laced with a short-sighted drive to get the last goods out of fossil fuels while the getting is still good.

In higher education the report seems to have passed with summer temperatures and the start of fall term.

Overall, the report has not prompted us to revolt in the streets, even though its findings were widely discussed.  There has been no calling out of governments for proclaiming their willingness to hasten an existential crisis.  There is certainly nothing like mass civil disobedience, much less violence.

The very kindest verdict anyone can pass on us at this moment is that we are profoundly unserious about the climate crisis. Perhaps we are too exhausted from the global pandemic. Maybe climate positions have just hardened so much that shocking news like this only confirms each party in their pre-established view.  It could be that there still is little traction for ordinary people outraged by this, beyond altering selected shopping preferences.

What might a harsher verdict resemble? That, I leave to your imagination.

Personally, it’s making my book darker.  It’s harder for me to treat my best case scenario as plausible in any way, and easier to see staggering disaster as scheduled to hit us over the next two generations.

The question I have is: what are we going to do now?