The 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth
Overview
It is around 20 years ago now that I helped write part of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report. Back then we had gained enough confidence to affirm that humans were the leading cause of the extreme temperature changes in the latter half of the 20th Century.
As a community we were all still buzzing about the Kyoto protocol and were excited by the international efforts to bring the CDM into reality and the giant leaps forward we were going to make.Never did I think that 20 years later, environmentally we would be in a much worse place that we are now. GHG emissions have increased by nearly 25% (10Gt per year), Arctic sea ice area has fallen by 2 million km^2 and in the last few years we have seen the highest temperatures global surface temperatures on record by some margin.
Worse still is that we told the world this was going to happen, pretty much everything that the scientific community has said is coming true, as this paper, and others, nicely (or should I say horrifically) demonstrate https://lnkd.in/eHrpHWgE.
As I spelled out here: https://lnkd.in/eAY_eDyQ. It is frustrating that countries are making bold statements in their NDCs and companies are spouting out climate action goals, when a few changes to the law to make all of us, governments, corporates and individuals accountable and mandate action and we could choke further climate change, drive innovations and help provide social improvements and benefits across the globe.What is it going to take for us all to act? Where do we start? For me, it is not about banning fossil fuels but more about removing the demand.
To do that we need to invest in cleaner energy (renewables need to increase by around 500% to meet our needs) and better and less environmentally harmful batteries. Carbon markets are a good way to fund climate actions and incentivize innovation.
I prefer mandating a compliant carbon credit market (I.e. making the VCM mandatory, or MCM for short) rather than a carbon tax as I have a fear that the latter could create protectionism rather than helping funds flow into developing nations.
The fact that we are continuing going backwards speaks volumes. Climate continues to play second fiddle to economic growth and until that changes, as we seen in the last 20 years things are only going to worse. We know that the impacts of climate change get worse with warming, and we also know that the rate at which impacts get worse per degree also gets worse with warming so the longer we wait, and pathetically argue over accounting rules, the more it is going to cost, both economically and socially.
Why are we still dragging our heels? Is it through paralysis or a lack of understanding, or is it the case, that until it starts hitting people in the pocket, they don’t give a damn!?
Read more here:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/74/12/812/7808595?login=false
