Let’s imagine you are sitting comfortably on a plane that is waiting in line to take off. Suddenly you learn that one of the next ten planes that does take off will crash.
You don’t know which plane will crash but it could be yours.
What do you do?
You could do nothing. After all, you have a 90% chance your plane will not crash.
But then your family and close relatives are on the plane with you.
What do you decide to do?
Do Nothing? Or do Something?
Pretty sure we’d choose to do something to protect our families from a 1-in-10 chance of catastrophic harm.
Need-to-Know: We take an enormous risk by doing nothing
Keeping this unpleasant scenario in mind, consider the reality we find ourselves in.
At our current pace of carbon emissions, we will use up the remaining carbon budget for a 90% chance of keeping climate warming to 2 degrees C in just 12 years.
Yes, just 12 years from now.
In 2035 there can be no emissions from then on wards, otherwise, forget 2C.
What about well-below 2C?
All the nations in the world previously agreed to stay well-below 2C under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. At current levels of carbon emissions, 40 billion tons a year, the carbon budget for well-below 2C would be gone sooner, i.e., 2032 or so.
What about 1.5C?
This year’s 40 billion tons of emissions would have to effectively go to zero tons five years from now—2028. And emissions would need to continue to stay at net zero year after year to have a 90% chance at 1.5C
Not going to happen.
Even the climate scientists whose work this is based on say there is no way of keeping warming at 1.5C now. We’ve left it too late.
“We haven’t stopped emissions from increasing. Governments have failed to control emissions,” said Christopher Smith, a University of Leeds climatologist and co-author of the study published last week in Nature Climate Change.
These tighter carbon-budget timetables may seem surprising, but they’re only an update or refinement on what’s been previously established carbon budgets.
Need-to-Know: For every tenth of a degree means 100 million more people will suffer*
In a press conference, Smith and the other scientists urged us jurnos to convey the importance of limiting global warming to 1.6C or 1.7C because every tenth of a degree has enormous consequences for all of us. Every extra bit of warming increases the number and intensity of extreme weather including storms, floods, and droughts, and the risks of crop failures, wildfires, and water shortages.
“It is remarkable how risky we are willing to be,” said study co-author, Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
For context: Major oil producers had record profits for 2022.
Exxon $56 billion; Chevron $36.5 billion; etc. More than $200 billion in profits overall for the oil giants.
Here’s what the UN Secretary-General said about this today.
Fossil fuel barons and their enablers have helped create this mess; they must support those suffering as a result. I call on governments to tax the windfall profits of the fossil fuel industry and devote some of those funds to countries suffering loss and damage from the climate crisis.
Need-to-Know: Someone has to pay the climate bill.
Until next time. Be well.
Stephen
P.S. To be clear, I’m using the 90% chance budget, almost all jurnos, including myself, have previously used the 50-50 chance budget numbers. Pretty crazy to bet the future of human civilization and our well-being on a coin toss.
*A study shows that within 50 years, a billion people will either be displaced or forced to live in insufferable heat for every 1°C rise in global temperature.