“Humans aren’t well wired to act on complex statistical risks. We care a lot more about the tangible present than the distant future. Many of us do that to the extreme—what behavioral scientists call hyperbolic discounting—which makes it particularly hard to grapple with something like climate change, where the biggest dangers are yet to come”. Reuters Planet Policy
Good grief!
A new study spells it out for humanity. A warming world will not be taking any prisoners.
The year 2100 has provided to much cover for those who want to kick the climate change time bomb down the road for the grandchildren to deal with. Instead, we have 17 years to reverse the damage from greenhouse gases or our fates will be sealed.
In their latest paper, published in the February issue of Nature Geoscience, Dr Philip Goodwin from the University of Southampton and Professor Ric Williams from the University of Liverpool have projected that if immediate action isn't taken, the earth's global average temperature is likely to rise to 1.5°C above the period before the industrial revolution within the next 17-18 years, and to 2.0°C in 35-41 years respectively if the carbon emission rate remains at its present-day value.
Through their projections, Dr Goodwin and Professor Williams advise that cumulative carbon emissions needed to remain below 195-205 PgC (from the start of 2017) to deliver a likely chance of meeting the 1.5°C warming target while a 2°C warming target requires emissions to remain below 395-455 PgC.
"Immediate action is required to develop a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative future or, alternatively, prepare adaptation strategies for the effects of a warmer climate," said Dr Goodwin, Lecturer in Oceanography and Climate at Southampton. "Our latest research uses a combination of a model and historical data to constrain estimates of how long we have until 1.5°C or 2°C warming occurs. We've narrowed the uncertainty in surface warming projections by generating thousands of climate simulations that each closely match observational records for nine key climate metrics, including warming and ocean heat content."
Professor Williams, Chair in Ocean Sciences at Liverpool, added: "This study is important by providing a narrower window of how much carbon we may emit before reaching 1.5°C or 2°C warming. There is a real need to take action now in developing and adopting the new technologies to move to a more carbon-efficient or carbon-neutral future as we only have a limited window before reaching these warming targets." This work is particularly timely given the work this year of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to develop a Special Report on the Impacts of global warming of 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels.
A must read piece on why humans do not take the threat seriously.
Why the wiring of our brains makes it hard to stop climate change
It isn’t surprising, then, that most people don’t process information about extreme events the way scientists do. And they don’t do a good job of holding politicians accountable when the effects of political inaction are far removed from the policy failures that cause them.
The arrival of extreme events—hurricanes, wildfires, drought and torrential deluges—is not proof to many people that scientists are right and that a complete rethinking of climate policy is overdue. Instead, voters see these shocks more as evidence that things are out of whack. Change is needed, and voters deliver that verdict not by reevaluating policy but by casting politicians out of office.
Political scientists call such decision-making retrospective voting, and it too is rooted in how the brain deals with complex topics. It seems less than rational, but for busy voters, focusing on immediate, visible results and situations is a practical way to assess politicians, even if those results and situations are many steps removed from elected leaders’ actual responsibilities.
When it comes to climate change, this sort of brain-driven behavior tends to create churn in political leadership rather than the continuity needed for long-term planning. It ejects whoever happens to be in office, rather than the real culprits. It doesn’t help that when politicians know they are at risk of losing office due to disasters, they may pursue quick payoffs, neglecting longer-term policies like those needed for emissions mitigation and climate adaptation.