Excerpts
from an essay, “The
summer ahead“
by Dr.
Joëlle
Gergis, ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society, writing in The Monthly, September 2023:
The
climate disasters unfolding in the northern hemisphere are a sign of
what’s in store here, as governments fail to act on the unfolding
emergency…
As
one of the few Australian climate scientists who worked on the latest
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
global assessment report, witnessing the unrelenting procession of
extreme heatwaves, floods and wildfires battering the world right now
is becoming harder and harder to bear. After four years spent
immersing myself in the minutiae of the global climate emergency,
it’s painfully clear that the extremes we are witnessing right now
are simply a prelude of what’s to come. For those of you trying to
avoid the news, here’s a very quick wrap-up of what’s been going
on. So far in 2023, brutal heat has swept across southern Europe,
North America, China and South-East Asia. Temperatures soared to
48.2°C on the Italian island of Sardinia on July 24 – just shy of
the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe – while Sanbao in
China’s Xinjiang province registered 52.2°C on July 16, setting a
new national temperature record. In Canada, record-breaking wildfires
continue to burn enormous tracts of boreal forest, forcing 120,000
people to evacuate from their homes and polluting the air for
millions of people across North America. Meanwhile, biblical rain has
pounded many parts of the world, with India, Korea, Japan and China
particularly hard hit. In the final days of July, the Chinese
capital, Beijing, recorded its heaviest rainfall since records began
140 years ago, logging 744.8 millimetres in just 40 hours, eclipsing
its average rainfall for the entire month of July. Torrential rain
saw roads transformed into rivers, washing away cars and submerging
the ancient courtyards of the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing.
As
the dramatic month came to an end, the World Meteorological
Organization declared July 2023 the hottest month ever recorded by
modern measurements. António Guterres, secretary-general of the
United Nations, responded by declaring that, “The era of global
warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” While
cynics might dismiss his comment as hyperbole, the scientific
community know he’s not wrong. Using geologic records that extend
centuries back in time, scientists estimate that temperatures are now
the warmest they have been in at least 125,000 years, when the Earth
was last in a lull between ice ages. Current levels of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere are 418 parts per million – the highest they have
been in at least two million years, around 1.7 million years before
modern humans evolved. The IPCC pointedly states that human influence
on the climate system is now “an established fact”. The evidence
is so indisputable that it’s like stating the sky is blue or the
Earth is round. Our report also concludes that virtually all of the
1.2°C of global warming we have experienced since the Industrial
Revolution has been caused by human activities, namely the burning of
fossil fuels. Or put another way, scientists can now definitively say
that humanity’s use of coal, oil and gas is cooking the planet.
Although
I’m writing this on a rainy Sunday from the safety of my peaceful
home, I can still feel my anxiety rising as I pore over the technical
reports detailing the mess we are in. Things are now so bad that
scientists like me are starting to wonder how we can be most helpful
during this time of crisis. Despite the endless demands of an
academic job, many of us feel compelled to keep trying to sound the
alarm, even though it often comes at great personal and professional
costs. It forces us to face the confronting reality of our
destabilising climate in graphic detail; it’s an unspoken
occupational hazard that people in my industry now face. But because
our profession demands fierce objectivity in the face of hostile
scrutiny, sharing our emotional response to our work has long been
considered taboo – people fear it will undermine our rationality.
Scientists are often pilloried if we dare to share the emotional
impact our work is having on us. But experience has taught me that
when experts fail to engage authentically in public conversations
about climate change, others will step in to fill the silence.
Commentators unconstrained by the professional ethics and rigour of
our discipline have generated rife misinformation that has led to the
shameful complacency plaguing the political response to the climate
change problem for decades.
As
someone who understands the seriousness of what is at stake, some
days it’s hard to not be consumed by despair, anger and grief…..
If
I’m honest, most of the distress I feel about climate change these
days does not stem from the sheer scale of the destruction we are
experiencing in every corner of the world. Although watching
communities and ecosystems being needlessly destroyed is incredibly
difficult, the real stress comes from knowing that all the solutions
we need to stabilise the Earth’s climate exist right now. One of
the key messages of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report is that
there are options available today across all sectors that could at
least halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Most of the
reductions come from solar and wind energy, energy efficiency
improvements and habitat conservation. Yet despite the enormous
potential of these low-hanging fruit, our leaders are instead
choosing to support the expansion of the fossil fuel industry to the
bitter end.
Here
in Australia, the sunniest continent on the planet, less than 15 per
cent of our electricity is currently generated by solar power.
Despite the federal government’s renewable energy target of 82 per
cent by 2030, only 36 per cent of Australia’s energy is generated
by clean energy sources. Instead of providing unprecedented support
for the immediate deployment and scaling up of renewable energy
technologies, our political leaders continue subsidising the fossil
fuel industry, the culprits squarely responsible for ushering in this
new era of “global boiling”. In 2022–23, Australian federal and
state governments assisted fossil fuel industries with $11.1 billion
in spending and tax breaks, with a particular focus on gas projects
such as the Middle Arm oil and gas hub in Darwin. And just as the
world’s warmest month on record came to an end, on July 31 the UK
government announced its intention to grant hundreds of licences for
new North Sea oil and gas extraction in an attempt to “boost
British energy independence and grow the economy”. These moves
blatantly ignore one of the key messages of the IPCC report, which
states that around 80 per cent of coal, 50 per cent of gas and 30 per
cent of oil reserves cannot be burned if warming is to be limited to
2°C. And if we want to achieve the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target,
which aims to avoid unleashing millions of climate change refugees,
those numbers need to be significantly lower. Banking on carbon
capture and storage – a technology that currently only captures one
tenth of 1 per cent of annual global carbon emissions – to
reverse-engineer our way out of the problem is nothing short of
insanity.
Nonetheless,
expect to hear more of the carbon capture industry’s virtues during
COP28, the next UN climate summit, to be held in December this year.
The event is being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, one of the
world’s largest oil and gas producers, and headed by Sultan Al
Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Given
that COP28 is being run by a top fossil fuel executive who has plans
for a large expansion in his company’s production, it’s easy to
feel extremely pessimistic about the likely outcomes of this meeting.
It is clear that the urgency of the clean energy transition is being
downplayed by vested interests with a criminal disregard for science
and morality. As researcher Pascoe Sabido from the Corporate Europe
Observatory bluntly observed in The Guardian: “The UN climate talks
have become an oil and gas industry trade show, not the flagship for
climate action. An entire industry has successfully co-opted the
process and is leading us in a death spiral to climate catastrophe.”
Despite
the IPCC clearly demonstrating that the burning of fossil fuels is
causing the type of extreme conditions being experienced right now,
our political leaders are not prepared to be brave and shut down
these polluting industries fast enough to avoid locking in
destructively high levels of global warming. We know – without a
shadow of a doubt – that increasing levels of carbon dioxide from
the use of coal, oil and gas is leading to a rise in global
temperatures, which causes heatwaves to become hotter and extreme
downpours more intense. Unless we urgently reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, the global-scale disruption we experience in 2023 will
soon be considered mild compared to what is to come. Right now,
climate policies implemented globally have the world on track to warm
between 2.5 and 3°C by the end of the century, with temperatures
continuing to rise until we begin to drastically remove greenhouse
gases from the atmosphere and reach net zero emissions. The world’s
collective policies represent a catastrophic overshooting of the
Paris Agreement targets, which promises to reconfigure life on our
planet as we know it.
If
the political commitment to achieving net zero targets ends up being
nothing more than empty promises based on dodgy carbon credit
accounting schemes and the “business as usual” exploitation of
global fossil fuel reserves, the latest climate models show that
under a very high emissions pathway, global average temperatures
could warm as much as 3.3 to 5.7°C above pre-industrial levels by
the end of this century, with a central estimate of 4.4°C. Under
this fossil fuel–intensive scenario, land areas of Australia are
projected to warm between 4 and 7°C above pre-industrial levels by
2100, with a central estimate of 5.3°C (note that, on average,
Australia has already warmed 1.47°C since national records began in
1910). Such catastrophic levels of warming will render large parts of
our country uninhabitable, profoundly altering life in Australia. The
IPCC report patiently explains that the risk of heat extremes
increases substantially with higher levels of warming. For example,
heatwaves that used to occur once every 50 years on average in
pre-industrial times will be nearly 10 times more frequent with 1.5°C
of warming, and 40 times more likely at 4°C. Even with 1.5°C of
global warming, 40 per cent of the largest cities in the world will
become heat-stressed, endangering the lives of millions of people
each year. Unless we rein in the burning of fossil fuels, we risk a
future where humanitarian disasters are likely to play out every
summer across the world.
The
truth is that some scientists fear that the writing is already on the
wall. If we are struggling to cope with the major disruption to
society caused by the 1.2°C of global warming we have experienced so
far, then what will warming of 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees, or 3
degrees or beyond bring? Once again, the IPCC report provides
detailed information on what we can expect in every single region of
the globe. We know from the geologic record that 1.5 to 2°C of
warming is enough to seriously reconfigure the Earth’s climate. In
the past, this level of warming triggered substantial long-term
melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, unleashing six to
13 metres of global sea-level rise that lasted thousands of years.
Once 2°C is passed – which could happen as early as the 2040s on
our current trajectory – the only glaciers that will be left will
be limited to polar areas and the highest mountain ranges, such as
the Himalayas.
The
current loss of ice means that we are already committed to a cascade
of changes – even if we manage to stabilise our greenhouse gas
emissions – as the world’s oceans reconfigure to increased
influxes of meltwater, altering the behaviour of ocean currents that
distribute heat around the planet. This process is now irreversible
and will go on for centuries. Bear in mind that a quarter of a
billion people already live on land less than two metres above sea
level. The IPCC report doesn’t mince its words here, stating that
beyond 2°C, adaptation is simply not possible in some low-lying
coastal cities, small islands, deserts, mountains and polar regions.
We are tragically unprepared for the warming that is already in the
pipeline, and we haven’t seriously begun the colossal task of
decarbonisation.
Unfortunately,
this coming summer will be a grotesque showcase of what we can expect
as our planet continues to warm. As the northern hemisphere summer
comes to an end and the El Niño ramps up in the Pacific, it will be
the south’s turn under the climate blowtorch. Coral reef scientists
are already panicking, as global reefs are being besieged by record
ocean temperatures. On July 24, sea surface temperature around the
Florida Keys in the United States reached a staggering 38.4oC,
a level commonly found in a hot bath. Record heat has now triggered
severe coral bleaching in the region, which has already seen 90 per
cent of coral cover disappear since the 1970s. As awful as this is,
these impacts are entirely consistent with what scientists expect.
The IPCC warns that even with 1.5°C of warming, which we are set to
breach in the early 2030s, 70 to 90 per cent of the world’s coral
reefs will be destroyed. That number rises to 99 per cent with 2°C
of warming, which could happen as early as the 2040s. An entire
component of the Earth’s biosphere – humanity’s planetary
life-support system – could be lost in under 20 years. Given that
25 per cent of all marine life depends on these areas, it’s hard to
comprehend the domino effect that will be unleashed as these key
ecosystems start collapsing globally…..
It’s
hard not to feel cynical about the politics playing out here.
According to James Cook University’s Professor Terry Hughes, one of
the world’s foremost experts on coral reefs, “The Morrison
government successfully lobbied individual members of the world
heritage committee to ignore UNESCO’s recommendation for an
in-danger listing in 2021.” And since November 2022, Labor’s
environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has been pressuring UNESCO to
ignore the scientific reality of the degradation of the site, saying
that there is no need to “single the Great Barrier Reef out in this
way”. It’s pretty easy to understand why Australia wants to avoid
an “in-danger” listing – tourism on the Great Barrier Reef
supports around 65,000 jobs and generates more than $5 billion for
the Australian economy each year. Any tarnishing of the reef’s
condition on the world stage will cost our tourism sector dearly. But
the truth is, warming ocean temperatures from the burning of fossil
fuels is the biggest threat to the reef, and our government is still
committed to the expansion of the very industry responsible for
making things worse. No amount of political spin can hide the fact
that the Great Barrier Reef is in terminal decline; we must face the
fact that we are soon likely to witness the death of the largest
living organism on the planet. I dread to see what this summer will
bring.
As
overwhelming as all of this is to take in, the imminent demise of the
world’s coral reefs isn’t the only thing keeping scientists up at
night right now. There is something far more sinister plaguing our
minds – the possibility that the Earth might have already breached
some kind of global “tipping point”. The term refers to what
happens when a system crosses into a different state and stays there
for a very long time, sometimes even permanently. We know that once
critical thresholds in the Earth system are passed, even small
changes can lead to a cascade of significantly larger transformations
in other major components of the system. Key indicators of regional
tipping points include dieback of major ecological communities such
as the Amazon rainforest, boreal forests and coral reefs; melting of
polar ice masses such as Arctic sea ice and the West Antarctic ice
sheet; and disruptions to major circulation systems in the atmosphere
or oceans, including changes in the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s
pretty safe to say we are witnessing dramatic new developments in all
of these elements right now…..
Read the complete essay at:
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/september/jo-lle-gergis/summer-ahead
