New IPCC report emphasizes the urgency to act

The IPCC maps out four path­ways to achieve 1.5°C, with dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of land use and tech­no­log­i­cal change. Refor­esta­tion is essen­tial to all of them as are shifts to elec­tric trans­port sys­tems and adop­tion of car­bon cap­ture tech­nol­ogy.

And 1.5°C is a best-​case sce­nario. With­out an extremely rapid global push to zero out all fos­sil fuel emis­sions and remove car­bon diox­ide from the atmos­phere, much higher tem­per­a­tures than even 2°C will occur in this cen­tury. Vir­tu­ally all of the coal plants and gasoline-​burning vehi­cles on the planet would need to be quickly replaced with zero-​carbon alter­na­tives.

Revers­ing the cur­rent trends is essen­tial if the world has any chance of stay­ing below 1.5°C.

Since the Paris cli­mate talks in 2015, the gap between sci­ence and pol­i­tics has even widened. Don­ald Trump has promised to with­draw the US from the Paris agree­ment. Brazil’s new pres­i­dent Jair Bol­sonaro threat­ens to do the same and wants to pri­va­tize the Ama­zon rain­for­est and open it for exten­sive log­ging and min­ing.

It can be done within the laws of physics and chem­istry. Then the final tick box is polit­i­cal will.Jim Skea

Britain is push­ing ahead with gas frack­ing, Nor­way with oil explo­ration in the Arc­tic, and the Ger­man gov­ern­ment who orig­i­nally helped imple­ment­ing the Paris agree­ment and was long praised as cli­mate fore­run­ner doesn’t ful­fill his cli­mate goals and even blocks more ambi­tious EU goals.

At this year’s UN cli­mate change con­fer­ence in Decem­ber in Poland, the new IPCC report will be pre­sented to the gov­ern­ments which then have to take a major steps and final­ize the guide­lines for the coun­tries to take action on, con­sid­er­ing the find­ings of the new report.

“We have pre­sented gov­ern­ments with pretty hard choices. We have pointed out the enor­mous ben­e­fits of keep­ing to 1.5°C, and also the unprece­dented shift in energy sys­tems and trans­port that would be needed to achieve that,” said Jim Skea, a co-​chair of the work­ing group on mit­i­ga­tion. “We show it can be done within the laws of physics and chem­istry. Then the final tick box is polit­i­cal will.”

But since even pro-​Paris deal nations are highly involved in fos­sil fuel extrac­tion, nec­es­sary actions could be under­mined com­pletely. Con­sid­er­ing that only 100 com­pa­nies are respon­si­ble for about 71% of all CO2 emis­sions world­wide, pol­i­tics has to act in our all inter­est against the inter­ests of the fos­sil fuel firms.

As cli­mate sci­en­tist Michael Mann puts it: the “sin­gle biggest way to have impact on cli­mate change and other envi­ron­men­tal crises is through col­lec­tive pres­sure on pol­i­cy­mak­ers to act in our inter­est rather than spe­cial inter­ests”.

The main find­ing of the new IPCC report is the need for urgency. And it makes espe­cially one thing very clear, that we have to act imme­di­ately and press politi­cians and com­pa­nies to act on a large scale, in the inter­est of every­one on this planet, all species and future gen­er­a­tions!