“The math is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Think about that headline for a moment. It suggests that 400,000,000 people will become climate change refugees flooding into Europe by 2100. How the hell is the world going to deal with an exodus like that when we can’t adequately deal with current refugees from war torn Syria? We also are incapable of dealing with the Sahel region of Africa where millions of people are dying of starvation caused by climate change and other factors such as war and the general chaos of a collapsing society.
Starving children in Africa’s Sahel region.Three years left to stop dangerous climate change warn top climate experts including the IPCCC and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. But it will require a worldwide herculean effort the signatories emphasize by governments, businesses, citizens and scientists. Three years! As my mother often said “goodness gracious”.
“The authors, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculate that if emissions can be brought permanently lower by 2020 then the temperature thresholds leading to runaway irreversible climate change will not be breached”, reports Fiona Harvey of The Guardian.
Warnings over global warming have picked up pace in recent months, even as the political environment has grown chilly with Donald Trump’s formal announcement of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. This year’s weather has beaten high temperature records in some regions, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the hottest years on record.
But while temperatures have risen, global carbon dioxide emissions have stayed broadly flat for the past three years. This gives hope that the worst effects of climate change – devastating droughts, floods, heatwaves and irreversible sea level rises – may be avoided, according to a letter published in the journal Nature this week.
As someone who follows the climate change story relentlessly, I can say with pessimistic certainty that we will not accomplish the 2020 target necessary to stop “disastrous climate impacts” noted by the signatories of the letter. Not that we don’t have the technology to prevent the worst case scenario (we do), but that a sizable chunk of Americans believe that climate change is somebody else’s problem ( women, people of color and the poor) and that they will not be impacted. Most importantly, we lack the political will to make the changes required.
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