intro
Only a few years ago, it looked as if global emissions had plateaued and had perhaps
even peaked, and many hoped that the world
had started down the long, hard journey toward weaning itself off carbon-based energy.
Over the past decade, renewable energy use
did indeed expand dramatically—but so did the burning of oil, gas, and even coal.
That growth outstripped any carbon-neutralizing
gains from renewables.
There's a limit—a budget, essentially—to how much carbon dioxide we can release and
still avoid a level of climate chaos that
would fundamentally transform modern life. And we're increasingly at risk of blowing
right past it.
"We are at a pivotal point in the history of human civilization on our planet," says Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas
Tech University and one of the authors of the U.S. government's recent National Climate Assessment.
As international leaders gather at the COP24 meeting this week to once again push
for a climate-friendlier future, they are faced with
the reality that the world is still moving in the wrong direction. And the need for
change grows more urgent by the day.
To get where we need to go, "we need all hands on deck," Hayhoe says.
Or, as one German researcher put it, we need "love, rage, and imagination."
Unmistakable signs
Just in the last few months, scientists have unveiled a slew of new reports that lay
out how significantly climate change has altered
the globe—and how much worse it can get.
"We know what's coming down the pike,” says Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, “because part of it isalready here.”
Hurricanes such as Maria and Harvey were stronger and more damaging, and intensified
more swiftly thanks to soaring temperatures.Rising oceans now lap at the foot of Texas’s
coastal oil refineries and New York City’s water treatment facilities.
Ocean heat waves are wiping out coral reefs and fueling toxic, deadly algal blooms.
Heat waves on land last longer than they used to, sparking drought and feeding wildfires
like the savage blazes
that killed at least 85 people in California in November.
The problem can seem intractable and confusing. But out of the deluge of data, a simple
truth emerges: To keep warming from wreaking too much
havoc on the planet, we must put hard limits on how much more carbon dioxide collects
in the atmosphere. And just cutting carbon out of our
daily lives and economy probably won’t be enough: To keep climate change in check,
we will also have to suck some of that carbon back out of the atmosphere.
The budget game
At heart, it's a simple budget exercise.
Scientists know roughly how much each belch of CO2 from a truck, coal plant, or decomposing
tree warms the planet. T
hey know how packed full of greenhouse gases the atmosphere is already. By setting
a desired temperature “cap,” they
can figure out how much more we can release. That is our carbon budget.
Coal-fired power plants are still emitting vast quantities of carbon dioxide each
year.
The size of the budget depends on the target. In 2015, signatories to the Paris Accord agreed to limit warming to 2 degrees
Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. But many scientists maintained even then
that holding warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F)
would be far safer.
to limit temperature to 1.5 degrees, the total amount of carbon dioxide left to emit—by
everyone, ever, around the world—is 580 billion metric tons. For scale,
's as if you covered California, Nevada, and Arizona in a blanket of coal as tall as a person. That’s all we’ve got left to burn.
And if we barrel ahead at the rate we’re going now, we'd deplete that carbon budget
in less than 15 year
The love and rage solution
To avoid that fate, an October report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposes that the world reduce carbon emissions to
zero by 2050. Many countries, states, and cities have adopted that goal. Just last
week, the European Union —collectively responsible for 10
percent of global emissions—laid out its own plan for reaching that target.
Globally, however, hitting that goal won't be easy. Today's report shows emissions
are expected to jack up 2.7 percent in 2018. And many positive gains from the past
few years seemed to evaporate:
The US backslid on fossil fuel use, posting an increase in emissions this year after a
decade of decline. Oil use, too, is on
the rise around the world after a dip that many hopedwould be permanent--even as the
number of electric vehicles doubled to 4 million in the last two years.
Even in a progressive country like France, riots just this week forced Prime Minister
Édouard Philippe to suspend a rise in the gasoline tax
And even if we meet those goals, it's almost certainly impossible to limit warming
to 1.5 degrees without also grabbing carbon from the
Still, it's important to not get discouraged, Cobb says. We can't afford to just throw
up our hand
“From scientific perspective, this is not a pass-fail class,” says Cobb. “It's never
too late—but the sooner we act, the better.”
Late last month, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany, tried to summarize what's necessary.
"We need something like love, rage, and imagination," he told the German radio network
Deutschlandfunk. "Love for our fellow humans and for coming generations and other
creatures. We need rage as well,
to stop the game played by some businesses. And we need a whole lot of scientific
and technical imagination, maybe artistic imagination too. The mix of all that could
actually do it."
The third part, imagination—that's what National Geographic plans to focus on in our
upcoming climate coverage.
In the coming months we'll be looking at engineering and ecological approaches to
taking carbon back out of the atmosphere, at tipping points
in the climate system that make the task more urgent, and at ways that communities
around the world are already adapting to the change that
is upon us—and that we're all going to be adapting to for a long time.