Right now a number of countries seem keen to slow down progress. Just a few weeks ago in Bonn, further objections from Saudi Arabia meant it was again dropped from the UN negotiations, much to annoyance of small island states and developing nations. There will be significant pressure on the host country to ensure substantial progress.
But if there's ongoing political turmoil around Brexit then the government may not have the bandwidth to unpick the multiple global challenges that climate change presents. But the movement here has barely started to think about how to apply sufficient pressure. At the launch of their review of progress made by the UK government on tackling climate change, the country was found not to be on track despite legislating for net zero emissions by If we don't see that, I fear the government will be embarrassed at COP And it's not all about climate change.
While the decisions taken on climate change in the next year or so will be critical, there are a number of other key gatherings on the environment that will shape the nature on preserving species and protecting our oceans in the coming decades. Earlier this year a major study on the losses being felt across the natural world as result of broader human impacts caused a huge stir among governments. To address this, governments will meet in China next year to try to agree a deal that will protect creatures of all types.
The Convention on Biological Diversity is the UN body tasked with putting together a plan to protect nature up to Next year's meeting could be a "Paris agreement" moment for the natural world. If agreement is found it's likely there will be an emphasis on sustainable farming and fishing. It will urge greater protection for species and a limit on deforestation. Next year, the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea will also meet to negotiate a new global oceans treaty.
We will be asking all nations to sign up to that goal. If all this comes to pass, the world might have a fighting chance of preserving our natural environment. But the challenges are huge, the political involvement patchy. Yes, in , sea levels might be three or more feet higher than today, which will be bad for low-lying nations like Bangladesh and U.
That would mean losing large swaths of coastal areas worldwide. This is not alarmism; this is where the science takes us. We are, at best, now thinking decades into the future, while pressing our foot hard on a CO2 accelerator that virtually guarantees climate chaos for millennia to come. So what is the way out? Opponents of strong action to curb greenhouse gas emissions say that this is alarmism, highly uncertain, and that to aggressively pursue a low-CO2 path would be onerous and cause widespread economic damage.
Most countries are either, by default, choosing inaction or are moving far too slowly to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. But as renewable energy experts, we believe climate change presents opportunities: for cleaner air, new industries, job growth, and stronger economies. Many solutions are well-known and are readily at hand.
The first step might be enacting simple and transparent carbon taxes that begin to reflect true current and long-term costs of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere — costs that are in no way factored into the present-day global economy.
That is what truly conservative, pro-growth, pro-jobs policies ought to look like. Then there is carbon accounting across the public sector — including with the companies that want to do business with the government — and divestment of fossil fuel assets on the part of pension funds and financial institutions, as well as entities in the private, non-profit, and educational sectors.
This is already happening in Northern Europe as renewables are simply growing much more attractive than dirty fossil fuels. And we need initial government support for clean-energy industries, as well as long-term funding for research and development on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and battery technologies. These technologies use energy to operate themselves, and the scale of the challenge is immense, which is why we must immediately take concrete steps to drastically lower global emissions.
There is some reason for hope. Numerous European Union countries including Germany, and several U. China is doing a lot more lately, though far, far more is needed. It is not a record high. Praying for cornfields in the tundra. Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them.
And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts. Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity.
Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By , without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China.
Remember, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at million globally. What happens when the bubonic ice melts? Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less.
Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them.
Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2, present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra. What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical.
Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. As it happens, Zika may also be a good model of the second worrying effect — disease mutation.
But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by , 5.
A rolling death smog that suffocates millions. Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1, ppm by At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected.
Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood. Already, more than 10, people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, , people die from wildfire smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season in the U. By , according to the U. Forest Service , wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold.
What worries people even more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in , for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40 percent, and more burning only means more warming only means more burning. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides 20 percent of our oxygen.
Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. Literally unbreathable. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country. The violence baked into heat. Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures.
But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict.
In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century. This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U. What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict?
Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now.
But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation.
And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave. Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world. The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.
Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.
The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1. This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor.
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