Individual action won't achieve 1.5℃ warming - social change is needed, as history shows
October 10, 2018 6.07am EDT
Following the 2015 Paris Agreement to hold the global increase in climate to below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was asked to produce a report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5℃. The report focuses on what must be done if we want to avoid warming above 1.5℃, and the difference between 1.5℃ and 2℃ warming. The general message is that the ecological and social impacts of 1.5℃ are significantly more manageable than 2℃ half a degree of warming is a big deal.
The IPCC thinks we still have a chance of keeping warming to 1.5℃. But current nationally determined pledges to take action to reduce warming, when combined, are emphatically not on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The window of opportunity is small and shrinking perhaps 12 years before a 1.5℃ target is unattainable, assuming in the meantime there is concerted global action to rapidly scale back carbon emissions. Without that action researchers find very few (if any) ways to reduce emissions after 2030 sufficiently quickly to limit warming to 1.5°C.
The report is also pretty explicit in claiming that unprecedented changes are required to limit warming to 1.5℃. The language is dry and technical, so its easy to be lulled into a techno-fix mindset. For example, the required system transitions can be enabled by an increase of adaptation and mitigation investments, policy instruments, the acceleration of technological innovation and behaviour changes.
But look closer, and in an important sense, the IPCC report is all about change and upheaval, especially for the well-off citizens of the developed nations. But it is change on a scale we have never experienced before: There is no historical precedent for the scale of the necessary transitions, in particular in a socially and economically sustainable way.
https://theconversation.com/individual-action-wont-achieve-1-5-warming-social-change-is-needed-as-history-shows-104643
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)narrow window before us. We can either accept it and by that I mean, corporations wake up, governments wake up or we sink.
And we will sink and those who have profited all these years will sink too, there is no where to go to hide from it. Their children, if they love them, will not have the future they imagine without major changes.
People, governments can change, it is possible.
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)I hope evolution does a better job the next time it creates so-called intelligent life.