I despair at the lack of climate urgency
Being an environmental science researcher, I’m inundated by revelations of the accelerating dissolution of our planet’s lifesupporting capacity. As I absorb this information I feel more and more detached from society. Despite the warning signs, all I see around me is business-as-usual, with economic growth still the supreme imperative.
I guess my feeling of disconnection is because there seems to be so little awareness of the reality of our dilemma, and no sign of any urgency or concrete movement towards the monumental changes required for civilisation to have a future.
I constantly struggle to understand this, while also realising I’m guilty of it myself. Why haven’t we made changes, or even slowed down? It’s like we don’t know what’s happening. Since I was child we have wiped out 60 per cent of animal populations; the current extinction rate is 1000 times higher than background rates. The biomass of humans and domestic animals is over 30 times higher than that of all wild animals on the planet.
In my childhood there were warnings about our perilous environmental situation. When the idea of modelling limits to growth came into being it was ridiculed, but these predictions have turned out to be chillingly accurate.
Then in the early 1990s came the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, and last year a more urgent ‘‘Second Warning to Humanity’’, this time signed by 25,000 scientists. Both
warnings unambiguously declared that if we don’t change the way we live, the planet will soon no longer support us.
In my lifetime carbon dioxide emissions have doubled. Even since the United Nations Climate Change Convention in 1992, they’ve grown by 60 per cent. Fossil fuel use is more than five times higher than when I was born. We are burning 80 per cent more coal than in the year 2000.
The impacts on the planet are obvious; in the last 22 years we have had the warmest 20 years on record, Antarctic ice loss is six times higher than when I was a child, and the Arctic Ocean has lost 95 per cent of its old ice.
Here in New Zealand many assume that
because we have a high proportion of renewable electricity, we have started the needed transition. But electricity is a small proportion of our primary energy use. Despite the hype around renewables, globally our energy supply is not transitioning; in fact, renewable energy has not replaced any other form of energy. It has only added to the mix. We now use proportionally more fossil energy than at any time in history.
The fact is that the world economy remains hopelessly coupled to fossil fuel use. We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 per cent a year from now until 2050 to have a hope.
GDP is inextricably locked to greenhouse gas emissions, so achieving that reduction would require ongoing reductions in GDP. You would think this would have economists worked up, but no. Will we march on to an inevitable collapse?
The only change I see is increased rhetoric about making changes. Despite dozens of international conferences on fossil fuel reduction and even an international treaty that came into force in 1994, human-made greenhouse gas emissions are still rising.
The agreements sound splendid, but they are unenforceable, they have no verification requirements and they do not require enough change to avoid catastrophe. Worse, they encourage people to think that the problem is being dealt with.
I hope that in my role as a scientist I can help raise the necessary public awareness. I am convinced that one reason the required changes are not made is because people are not aware of how bad things are. Politicians and policy makers avoid the hard choices, because they know the voter support isn’t there. It’s time we all woke up. The house is on fire. If we don’t put it out, our children are going to burn.