Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
It’s 2016, and Corona is still just a weird type of beer, you can’t go anywhere without hearing Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself”, and in a quiet office in New York, the Paris Agreement has just been signed. This milestone piece of international policy promises to beckon a new era of global cooperation to fight climate change. The aim was simple, limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Celsius at most, by getting humanity to net-zero by 2050. There is an air of optimism that we can genuinely hit these targets. Seven years later, and that optimism has been crushed. Studies show we are on course for a massive 3 degrees Celsius of climate change, which would incur biblically disastrous extreme weather on the entire planet. However, this same research also showed how we can get back on track, but we have only one chance to do so.
One of these studies came from researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology and Lund University, Sweden. They considered current global carbon emissions and countries’ plans and projects to reduce these emissions over the next few decades to try and calculate what level of global warming we are likely to see. As expected, they found that we are far from doing enough to meet our climate targets, and instead are on course to fly right past them to 3 degrees Celsius of warming.
Now, 3 degrees of climate change might not sound like an awful lot, but it is enough to render this Earth into a hellhole. Extreme weather, like heatwaves, droughts, floods, snowstorms and hurricanes, will become far more potent, longer lasting, and more frequent. Vast swathes of polar ice will be lost, driving up sea levels by around 7 m. All in all, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes due to rising sea levels and their local climate becoming uninhabitable. Marine heatwaves will happen 30 times more often than they do today, decimating the global ocean ecosystem. It will be no better on land, with failing rains, widespread wildfires, droughts that last an entire season and flash floods rendering once verdant terrestrial ecosystems barren.
In short, 3 degrees of climate change is enough to topple governments, kill millions, and make the Earth far…
