Reduced emissions not cause to celebrate
Some might take this news as a silver lining to an otherwise dark time: Harmful climate-affecting emissions are way down in China, Italy and elsewhere as social-isolation measures keep people at home. Declines in driving, flying, manufacturing and other economic activity account for the drop.
As with the decline in global emissions due to the 2008-09 financial crisis, this is not progress. Once COVID-19 is conquered and people return to work, emissions will rise again, absent new policy. More to the point: Addressing global warming cannot depend on economic hardship. Governments must manage the transition from fossil fuels so it occurs steadily and with minimal disruption.
Scientists continue to offer nothing but warnings. Even as the novel coronavirus spread, the United Nations announced this month that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record. El Niño, a natural cycle, boosted temperatures in 2016 — still officially the warmest year — and was largely absent in 2019. But the background on which El Niño and other natural phenomena occur is getting ever warmer. Last year would have been the warmest if it had seen a strong El Niño. Future El Niño years will no doubt break the record.
The long-term trend is key. “The past five years are the five warmest on record, and the past decade, 2010-2019, is also the warmest on record,” the United Nations found. “Since the 1980s, each successive decade has been warmer than any preceding one since 1850.”
Devastating effects already have arrived. “In 2019, heat waves, combined with long periods of drought, were linked to wildfires of unprecedented size.
This was the case in Australia, where millions of hectares were set ablaze, and in Siberia and other Arctic regions hit by wildfires of record intensity,” said Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.
But things can get much worse. A study published this month in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that areas currently home to 1.2 billion people will see extreme heat and humidity — enough to induce dangerous heat stress in humans — every year by 2100. New York, for example, would see about 24 days of extreme heat and humidity annually. That is if world governments limit warming to only 3 degrees Celsius, as their current path suggests. At 2 degrees, places that are home to 800 million people would see these punishing conditions yearly, and at 1.5, the number would be 500 million people.
As governments move from crisis to recovery, hardship will leave them less inclined than ever to grapple with climate change. But they should take recovery as an opportunity to emphasize sustainability. COVID-19 is the disaster of now.
Climate change will be the disaster that defines younger generations’ lives. It will unfold over the coming decades, it will be pervasive and it will be deadly, too.