Phys.org reports:

We ignored the warnings, and now it’s too late: global heating has arrived with a vengeance and will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bombshell—landing 90 days before a key climate summit desperate to keep 1.5C in play—says the threshold will be breached around 2050, no matter how aggressively humanity draws down carbon pollution.

Years in the making, the sobering report approved by 195 nations shines a harsh spotlight on governments dithering in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential threat.

Nature itself has underscored their negligence.

With only 1.1C of warming so far, an unbroken cascade of deadly, unprecedented weather disasters bulked up by climate change has swept the world this summer, from asphalt-melting heatwaves in Canada, to rainstorms turning city streets in China and Germany into rivers, to untameable wildfires sweeping Greece and California.

“This report is a reality check,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who co-led hundreds of scientists in reviewing a mountain of published climate science.

“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed.”

Indeed, all but a tiny fraction of warming so far is “unequivocally caused by human activities,” the IPCC concluded for the first time in its three-decade history.

The world must brace itself for worse—potentially much worse—to come, the report made clear. [Continue reading…]

Kate Aronoff writes:

The point of this report is to identify “not just that it’s getting hot, but at what point things are unbearable,” Alex Ruane, a lead coordinating author on chapter 12 of the report and a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me by phone. That means exploring questions like, “At what point does the engineering of levees start to break?” and how hot airport runways can get before planes stop being able to take off. The report, he stressed, steers well clear of policy recommendations.

There are stark political implications, though. “There is no stable normal until we figure out a way of stabilizing the climate system,” Ruane told me.

In a summer of rolling climate disasters that have made that fact viscerally obvious, politicians around the world have already started offering platitudes about the need for “action” and “ambition.” Yet they mostly haven’t called for the rapid shift off fossil fuels that the report indicates is necessary.

It’s not that politicians in powerful countries have done nothing in the past two decades. The problem, rather, is that where they’ve done anything at all, it has tended to be the wrong thing, emphasizing subtle market tweaks and shiny new technologies instead of the core work of decarbonization: getting off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. There is not some reserve of sensible climate leadership ready to be unleashed if Republicans weren’t standing in the way. Happy talk about net-zero pledges and climate leadership in the last few years obscure decades of bipartisan speeding down the wrong track, toward an imagined future where polluters and the planet can both make out well in coming decades.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres Guterres called the report a “death knell” for fossil fuels. Having a better than 50-50 shot at capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report explains, means the entire world can only emit an additional 400 gigatons of carbon dioxide beyond what it has already emitted; last year global carbon emissions were around 36 gigatons. If emissions stay roughly constant, then—an optimistic scenario, to be sure—the world will cross that threshold in just over a decade. The United States is not poised to help reverse that trend.

These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail.

The Obama administration consciously chose to get opponents on board with extending clean energy tax credits by, in exchange, lifting the crude oil export ban that had been in place since the 1970s. At the time, clean energy groups framed that devil’s bargain as a win for the planet. The result was that fossil fuel exports and emissions skyrocketed.

The Biden administration is now on track to approve more oil and gas drilling on public lands—activity that accounts for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—than any administration since George W. Bush. Climate envoy John Kerry has balked at the idea of committing the U.S. to a coal phaseout. Politicians who call themselves climate hawks are still going out of their way to make clear that there’s a vibrant future ahead for the companies that funded climate denial, whose business model remains built around burning up and extracting as many fossil fuels as possible. Administration officials, meanwhile, have talked repeatedly about the need to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This is climate denial. These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail. [Continue reading…]