2 weeks Ago
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- This has been the hottest year in recorded human history. Its unprecedented temperatures stoked devastating wildfires, floods, cyclones, droughts and heat waves that cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage. At the rate we’re going, it will also be one of the coolest, calmest years any of us will ever experience again.
Just how much hotter and more destructive the atmosphere will become depends on the choices humanity makes, starting today. At the moment, we’re still making too many bad ones. On Monday, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said 2024 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, with global average surface temperatures about 1.
6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages. That will top the previous record, set all the way back in 2023. Significantly, this will also be the first year on record with global temperatures 1.
5C above preindustrial averages. That was the fingers-crossed, best-case global-heating goal the world set for itself in the Paris Agreement of 2015. Breaching 1.
5C for one year doesn’t mean that goal is a lost cause. The Paris Agreement referred to long-term averages, not one-year anomalies. But let’s be honest: 1.
5C is basically a lost cause. The world has wasted most of the decade since that goal was set, during which it became ever more of a stretch. The greening promises that countries and companies have made aren’t nearly enough to hit that target, much less Paris’ slightly more realistic primary goal of less than 2C of heating.
Given current policies and practices, the world isn’t even on track to limit warming to 2.8C, a recent United Nations report warned. In just a few years, the window to hold heating to 1.
5C will slam shut. So what, you might be thinking. How much worse is 3C than 1.
5C? If you’re talking about its effect on an afternoon in the park, it’s not significant. If you’re talking about a long-term global average temperature, each tick higher brings devastating consequences. One climate scientist has compared it to having a fever.
Every slight rise in temperature puts more strain on your body, and it’s not long before the heat becomes life-threatening. The mere 1.3C of long-term warming the planet has experienced so far has already raised the risks and destructive power of those wildfires, floods, cyclones, droughts and heat waves.
And warming won’t happen uniformly around the world. Some heavily populated areas, including sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean and Central Europe, will reach 3C far more quickly than others, a study published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters found. Making matters worse, global heating has apparently accelerated in recent years.
The planet has warmed by an average of 0.18C per decade starting in 1970, but since 2015 that rate has jumped to 0.3C per decade, Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has written (acknowledging the geologically teensy time scales make such measurement somewhat uncertain).
After considering the many other factors possibly causing this, from volcanic eruptions to the end of sulfur-dioxide pollution from shipping, the biggest factor heating the planet is still humanity burning fossil fuels and spewing greenhouse gases. In fact, acceleration at this point is what a lot of climate models expect, Hausfather points out. The better news is that stopping our greenhouse gas emissions would also stop the warming in its tracks, Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler pointed out recently.
Unfortunately, in some important ways, humanity seems further from reaching that milestone than it was in 2015. The following year brought the first election of Donald Trump, who pulled the US out of that Paris agreement and otherwise did everything in his power to frustrate a clean-energy transition. The transition survived Trump’s first term, and President Joe Biden made some progress in accelerating it during his four years in office, including rejoining the Paris accords.
But now Trump is coming back for another four years. This time he’s armed with the blueprint of Project 2025, which calls for ending government support for green energy, boosting fossil-fuel production and leaving the Paris agreement yet again. In Europe, meanwhile, right-wing parties gained power in the summer’s parliamentary elections at the cost of green parties, driven partly by rhetoric hostile to climate action.
The shifting political mood has been reflected at increasingly unproductive UN climate confabs that have been derailed by fossil-fuel interests. The world can barely agree on the necessity of phasing out fossil fuels, much less come up with credible plans for doing so. The hotter the planet gets, the more destabilized global politics will be, making concerted climate action even more difficult.
We are losing our nerve for action at the worst possible moment, in other words. Global carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and land use reached a new high this year. To keep heating below 2C, the world will need to start chopping emissions by 4% every year until 2035, UN scientists have argued.
The longer we delay that process, the bigger the task will be. The more the cost in economic losses and human lives will grow. There’s still time to start making the right choices, but not much.
More From Bloomberg Opinion: This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.
com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion ©2024 Bloomberg L.
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