Earth is in the danger zone, but we’re not out of hope just yet.
Interviewing 100 climate scientists — proper in-depth interviews, two cameras, lights, the lot — is a crash course in coping strategies.
There were many moments in my interviews with them when I shared their despair. Yet I have come away with some hope for the future.
Don’t get carried away by that notion. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But it has got a bit better: Five years ago, everybody was still pretending we were going to fix all this just by cutting our greenhouse gas emissions.
It was a complete fantasy. Global emissions have risen almost every year since scientists first sounded the alarm in 1988, but the climate orthodoxy insisted we could hold the warming down below 1.5 C until the end of the century by emissions cuts alone.
The climate is chaotic, so this could still be a false alarm. Air and ocean temperatures might yet return to the “new normal.” But that new normal was already very high, so our normal emissions will likely drive warming up to 1.5 C for good by 2030 even if the ocean anomaly disappears.
What can we do now?
The lost time hasn’t been entirely wasted. Solar and wind power have grown faster than anybody dared hope 10 years ago (though not yet fast enough to start cutting into the 82 per cent share of energy produced from fossil fuels).
But most importantly, a generation of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs foresaw that there would be a big demand for new approaches to curbing warming once the public realized the urgency of the situation.
A profusion of those new ideas and technologies is now spilling out onto the market, and if enough of them fulfil their promise, we may still get through this century without runaway global warming wrecking our future. But only on one condition.
We are already in the danger zone. Somewhere between 1.5 and 3 C hotter, most climate scientists believe, we will cross various tipping points that trigger “feedbacks” — extra warming from non-human sources.
However, that melting exposes dark rock and open water that absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it back into space. This causes more warming, which is also ultimately our fault — but it’s not under our control. We can’t turn it off.
There are about a dozen major feedbacks like that. We don’t know exactly when they will kick in, but scientists think we’ll trip them all at various points between here and 3 C. That is “runaway” territory, so we have to hold the temperature down while we work on our emissions — even if that means doing it artificially.
The good news is that there are promising ideas for how to hold it down. They will probably be needed. It will be a long, hard slog, but we are not yet doomed.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas From the World’s Climate Engineers. This is Part 1 of a two-part series; look for Part 2 on Thursday.