- The Guardian
- Issue #2158
Extreme weather events are on the rise with no continent spared. Massive flooding, cyclones, out-of-control wildfires, drought, and extreme heat are taking a huge toll in human life, property, as well as causing the death of coral reefs, massive toxic algae blooms, and loss of biodiversity. These weather events are not natural, they are being driven by human-caused climate change. The burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and massive land clearance play a central role in the earth’s warming.
The Paris climate conference (COP21) in 2015 agreed to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Since then the focus has been on limiting warming to 1.5°C. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mid-range projection for warming to reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was 2040.
Sir David King, the former UK Chief Scientist and advisor to British governments who initially adopted the 1.5°C target now says he was wrong. King said that US climate expert James Hansen – widely disbelieved at the time – was right in 1988, when he warned US Congress that we should not pass 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2). We have now breached 415 ppm and are fast approaching 500 ppm, King said. “With over 40 billion tonnes released each year at present, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise – driving increasingly dangerous global warming,” warns the World Meteorological Organization in its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
As recalcitrant governments, including Australia’s, continue to approve massive expansions of fossil fuel production, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise. The long lifetime of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere locks in temperature increases for generations to come.
The NGO 350.org, was established in 2008, on the basis that to be safe, total emissions should be less than 350 ppm and warming less than 1°C, a position based on the work of former NASA climate chief James Hansen.
The past two years have broken all recorded temperatures. The increase in 2023 was 1.5°C and in 2024 reached 1.6°C. If that pattern continues and is not a random fluctuation, then to quote UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “the earth is on fire.”
Many lines of evidence show that systems have/will have passed their tipping points at 1.5°C, including at both poles. Coral reef systems have been in a death spiral for more than a decade. Permafrost, boreal forests and the Amazon are becoming net carbon emitters. Eminent coral researcher, Australia’s Charlie Veron, told the Royal Society in London in 2009 that a safe boundary for reef systems was 0.5°C. The evidence grows that the 1.5°C target was never a safe target for humanity.
Scientists say it is a big mistake to think we can “park” the Earth System at any given temperature rise – say 2°C – and expect it to stay there. The late Professor Will Steffen and his coauthors in their widely-read 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper warned that “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to 2°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”
“The evidence grows that the 1.5°C target was never a safe target for humanity … So it cannot be an advocacy endpoint either, from a ‘science-based’ perspective,” warns climate policy advocate scientist David Spratt.
This doesn’t mean it’s too late. It means action is needed now.
