Climate change targets aren’t distant
Itold my daughter a story this week, not a significant one, but an illustration that feels relevant. remembered, I told her, watching the TV news in a hotel lounge in Cape Town when I was 9, during a family holiday in 1976. I have no memory of what was discussed, but clearly remember an ‘‘expert’’ using the phrase ‘‘By the year 2020 …’’.
Those words resonated with me, which is probably why my brain tucked it away for future reference. It was 44 years away, I realised. I’d be 53 that year. It seemed so far away and it was, literally half a lifetime.
Well, guess what? Here we are. It dawned on me on New Year’s Eve, as midnight approached. Looking back, it doesn’t seem nearly as long as it did from the other end.
That’s the point here. Not that my brain’s wired weirdly, but that we live in a world where we’re surrounded by targets related to climate change. We’ve had a tendency to view them as distant, which affects our urgency, but time disappears in the blink of an eye.
And anyway, the real targets are not far away anymore.
The United Nations Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, published in October 2018, talks about the benefits of keeping overall warming within that range.
If it gets to 2C, it says, that would have impacts including exacerbating extreme weather – as if there’s not enough extreme weather already – rising sea levels and ecosystem destruction. Those are just three. There are plenty more.
The report says to limit warming to 1.5C will require emissions to be reduced by around
45 per cent by 2030. That’s only 10 years away.
And the Aussies are still mining coal like there’s no tomorrow.
The Australian government website says it’s on target to meet its 2030 emissions targets under the
2015 Paris Agreement, but the 2018 report makes things more urgent.
Of course targets are based on modelling, because we can’t predict the future with absolute certainty, and the bad news is suggestions emerging from the horrific bushfire season in Australia that things are further advanced than we thought.
AWashington Post report this week said temperatures in the bushfire-affected parts of Australia have been ‘‘soaring to heights scientists didn’t expect to see for decades’’ and new firerelated phenomenon have been emerging.
‘‘The blazes are so big they generate their own hellish weather.
‘‘Fire tornadoes – formed when spinning winds generate a massive rotating column of fire, ash, vapour and debris – are impossible to control.’’
Of course, weather and climate are not the same thing – even though Donald Trump has occasionally suggested global warming is a hoax in the wake of a
The perception that teenagers can’t have wisdom and insight because of their tender years is as flawed as the idea that age brings wisdom.
particularly heavy snowfall – and it will be interesting to see if the astonishing temperatures reached in Australia this fire season are the start of a new, higher trend.
But that doesn’t change the sense of something apocalyptic taking place across the Tasman this summer.
Talk on this side of the Tasman was about the all too real, and slightly ironic, possibility of Australian climate refugees fleeing our way.
It’s a scenario put forward by highly regarded author and columnist Gwynne Dyer, who toured New Zealand in 2008 promoting his book Climate Wars.
Conflicts over increasingly scarce resources and decreasing amounts of habitable land in places like Australia were mentioned. It sounded like doomsday scenarios at the time. They seem a lot closer now.
It’s scary, and the head in the sand approach, while only shutting out the inevitable for a while, is understandable in a sense.
But how do we face this effectively? Surely community – something Western society seems to have forgotten the real value of – is a key?
There was plenty of community spirit around when thousands of Australians had to hunker down on a beach.
And egos will have to be pushed aside. I see no shortage of letters and comments about climate change from those who object that people like climate activist Greta Thunberg, and Stuff columnist Mia Sutherland, have a point when they raise concerns about the state of our planet, and how it will affect their generation and those beyond it.
The perception that teenagers can’t have wisdom and insight because of their tender years is as flawed as the idea that age brings wisdom.
George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist who is one of the foremost writers on climate change, is happy to appear in videos with Thunberg, urging us to do our part, so what’s our excuse for regarding her as irritating and irrelevant?
If we’d been listening to the warnings, back when Thunberg was in nappies, things wouldn’t be as urgent now.
We’re all in this together is a twee cliche, but in this case we literally have no choice. We need to put our embarrassment aside and get on with it.