An Unthinksble Legacy
“Humanity is on thin ice and the ice is melting fast.” Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, doesn’t mince his words when he speaks to world leaders. You remember his ‘Code Red for Humanity’ in 2021?
His latest warning came as the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) published its most recent report in March. It makes for grim reading.
Yet still I hear politicians say glibly that ‘Technology will save us.’ That is the most irresponsible myth! Technology has for years been producing brilliant solutions to the crises we face, and they are getting ever better. But we have lacked the political will to invest enough in them and make the urgent transition from our fossil fuel economies to the new clean solutions.
The massive international fossil fuel companies, which exert powerful pressures on global decision making, have been in the real driving seat.
Let’s take the oceans. The equivalent of 5 Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy goes into our oceans every minute. 300 bombs every hour. This is heat from the sun which should be bounced back into space but is trapped by our Greenhouse Gases. I felt the heat of the oceans as I sailed around the world and experienced the massive weather events that result from all that energy.
There is no little gizmo we can dangle in sea to extract all that heat. The only solution is to massively reduce our emissions, get them to zero by 2050 or sooner and then, over the next few centuries, with the sun’s energy bouncing once more back into space, allow the oceans to cool and bring down the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events as they do so.
But while we wait for the world to move away from fossil fuels, we have set some massive positive feedback loops into operation. One is Arctic Ice. As it melts and retreats, it exposes more deep, blue-black ocean. The oceans absorbs the heat that was previously reflected by the ice, and so more ice melts, revealing even more ocean… The process is accelerating and I have no idea how it will ever be reversed. There is no technological gizmo for that either!
Another positive feedback loop is Siberian and Canadian permafrost. Ice that has lain under the vast swathes of tundra for millennia but which is now melting. Whole towns that have been built on the solidity of the ice are now buckling and collapsing as the ground turns to mush. The problem is that as it does so, it releases vast quantities of methane. Methane is 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. It does indeed break down in the atmosphere in about 20 years, turning into CO2, but that is time enough to have heated more tundra, melted more permafrost, released more methane and accelerated the warming process yet again.
It is the stuff of nightmares. The Emissions Gap report estimates that the world will warm by 2.8°c this century if countries keep their promises; if we carry on as we are, the IPCC estimates that we will warm by 3.2°c. Neither of those outcomes is survivable. Our ecosystems will have broken down with repeated droughts, floods, hurricanes, biodiversity loss and harvest failures long before then: within the lifetimes of the children in our nurseries and infant schools. An unthinkable legacy!