Getting real: what would serious climate action look like? Not…
The world’s governments want, in theory, to try to keep the average global temperature rise to not be more than 1.5C to 2C above pre-industrial. But so far, despite worthy intentions, instead of falling, global CO2 emissions continue to rise. Professor Kevin Anderson is an outspoken climate scientist, who prefers the reality of the climate science to the politically palatable version of it, that can be agreed by the IPCC. Climate science suggests that to have a 50:50 chance of not exceeding 1.5°C, humanity can emit about 400 billion tonnes of CO2. For a good chance of staying below 2°C, this value doubles to around 800 billion tonnes. 400bn tonnes is under 10 years of current emissions, and humanity is currently using up the carbon budget at a rate of almost 1% each month. We have had 30 years of failures, tweaks to business-as-usual, carbon markets, and the dodgy prospect of future technologies. We need rapid, huge cuts in CO2 emissions, Kevin says for example “an immediate moratorium on airport expansion and a plan to deliver a fair 80% cut in all air travel by 2030.” Also, no more new internal combustion engine cars would be built from 2025. And many other ideas. .Tweet Getting real: what would serious climate action look like? Prof Kevin Anderson, Manchester University, summarises the action necessary if governments and societies were really committed to keeping global temperature change close to 1.5°C – and how there would be wider benefits too. Article from Responsible Science journal, no.5; advance online publication: 19 March 2023 In signing the Paris Climate Agreement, governments have committed to hold the global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 to 2°C. However, as we understand more about the scale of impacts of rising temperatures, the emphasis has increasingly shifted towards 1.5°C as our primary commitment; and even 1.5°C is far from a safe threshold for many communities around the globe. People are already suffering and dying from the impacts associated with a rise of just 1.1°C, a situation we need to keep in the forefront of our thinking when deciding on what is and isn’t feasible. What we get from the science is a good approximation of the total amount of carbon dioxide we can dump in the atmosphere if we are to give ourselves a 50:50 chance of not exceeding 1.5°C. That’s about 400 billion tonnes of CO2. For a good chance of staying below 2°C, this value doubles to around 800 billion tonnes. That might sound like a lot, but 400bn tonnes is under 10 years of current emissions (from the start of 2022), and 800bn tonnes is less than 20 years, but of course with much worse climate impacts. We are currently using up the carbon budget at a rate of almost 1 percent each month for a 50:50 chance of 1.5°C. So, at the time of writing – in March 2023 – we’ve used up a little under 15 percent of the total 1.5°C budget. This is not a complicated calculation, rather just carbon budget values from the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a bit of basic arithmetic. Throw in our repeated commitment to give poorer nations a little longer to reach zero emissions, then we’re looking at the wealthy parts of the world needing to achieve zero emissions, that is zero fossil fuel use, by around 2030 to 2035, with the poorer nations having just
