We're Losing The Fight Against Global Warming
Even as we feel the long-predicted effects of a changing climate, we just cannot kick our addiction to oil and fossil fuels. We're running out of time.
Photo credit: eric1513
Your car's tachometer tells you the engine's revolutions per minute, or RPMs. When you’re going too fast for the gear you’re in, the RPMs get very high, the engine whines plaintively and the needle or other indicator on the tachometer approaches a strip in red meant as a danger warning.
Today, our planet's environmental tachometer is in the red, but we just aren't shifting gears. The Earth keeps getting warmer and we are doing too little to slow or stop it. Instead we're stepping on the gas.
There are still plenty of people who dismiss or minimize the threat of climate change. But the evidence is in, just as there is compelling evidence that the Earth is round and not flat. But if we needed more, there is more. There has been a flurry of new reports leading to the same conclusion. And it is frightening. The world is in peril and we are not doing nearly enough to save it.
The environmental group Climate Central published a report two weeks ago based on its study of the period November 2022 through October 2023. It was, the group said, the hottest 12 months in more than a century; possibly the hottest in tens of thousands of years.
"It means that the planet is closer than ever to a global warming benchmark that scientists have predicted could irreversibly damage, if not destroy, entire ecosystems - 2.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels," said the Washington Post. "Data shows a surge of warming this year has pushed average planetary temperatures 1.3 to 1.4 degrees Celsius above 19th-century levels."
That same week, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that this past October was the fourth consecutive month of global record warm temperatures -- 1.7 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era. It's predicted to get even hotter as we go deeper into an El Niño weather pattern when a warmer-than-normal Pacific Ocean historically leads to higher temperatures around the world.
The following week the U.S. government's Fifth National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by Congress, was released.
"Without deeper cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated adaptation efforts, severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow," it concluded. "Each additional increment of warning is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic loss."
Photo credit: Len Radin
In October, scientists reported that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf is melting far faster than previously predicted and that it's already too late to stop it. If, or rather when, it goes, it will push sea level as much as 15 feet higher, which would make many coastal communities uninhabitable.
"It appears we may have lost control over the West Antarctic ice shelf melting over the 21st century," said Kaitlin Naughten, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. "That very likely means some amount of sea level rise that we cannot avoid."
In November came the annual report by The United Nations Environmental Programme and several partner research organizations found that the world - despite pledges by many nations to strive for net-zero carbon emissions - is on track to produce twice as much in fossil fuels in 2030 as the level believed necessary to hold the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"The addiction to fossil fuels still has its claws deep in many nations," wrote Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environmental Programme. "These plans throw the global energy transition into question. They throw humanity's future into question."
Photo credit: Richard Masoner /Cyclelicious
Exxon Mobil looked at the future and what it foresees is more of the same. A world full of oil junkies and, of course, the potential for record profits to be made from it. The company recently announced that it would buy Pioneer Natural Resources for $59 billion, giving Exxon Mobil another 850,000 acres of undeveloped oil and gas inventory in west Texas and New Mexico.
"[The deal deepens] its reliance on fossil fuel production even as many global policymakers grow increasingly concerned about climate change and the oil industry's reluctance to shift to cleaner energy," reported New York Times correspondent, Clifford Krauss.
Soon after, Chevron bought the Hess oil company for $53 million.
Photo credit: by-studio
According to polls, most Americans favor taking action to wean ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels. A Pew Research Center survey this past June found that 67 percent of Americans supported prioritizing alternate energy sources, such as wind and solar. Sixty-nine percent said they support the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050. Twenty-eight percent were against it. Yet where is the political will of our elected officials to act? Where is our will as citizens?
I will be the first to admit loudly that I am not a scientist. I have no scientific training. I am a lay person who knows only what I read. But while I am not a scientist, I like to think that I am a realist, that I have the ability, as Orwell put it, "to face up to unpleasant facts." The facts seem to lead me to an inescapable and disheartening conclusion: that it is an impossibility that the nations of the world will do what is needed to contain the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That opportunity is likely certainly gone. We actually may have passed that so-called tipping point a few years ago. As the U.N. Environmental Programme said a year ago, there is "no credible pathway to 1.5 degrees C in place."
We can still act to try to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. But that will take awareness, collective will and sacrifice. Are we capable of that? The fate of the world depends on the answer to that question.
"The party, so long and pleasurable, that gave rise to global warming is indeed still underway," wrote journalist Mark Hertsgaard in 2011 in his book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. "Despite years of warnings about overheating the atmosphere, we humans are still merrily riding in cars and airplanes, building pipelines and power plants, gobbling meat, clearing forests, expanding our houses and suburbs, and doing a thousand other things that emit greenhouse gases that cause the problem."
Dubai, photo credit: Jon Choo
On November 30, representatives from almost every country in the world will gather in Dubai for the 28th annual U.N. climate meeting, better known as COP28, to try to come up with strategies to fight climate change. Dubai, on the Persian Gulf, is roughly six feet above sea level. It wouldn't take much of a rise to swamp its gleaming, modern streets. There's irony for you. One of the biggest oil producers in the world is threatened in the not-so-distant future by the effects of the consumption of the fossil fuels that helped enrich it.
The host of this year's climate meeting? His name is Sultan Al Jaber. He's the head of the United Arab Emirates state-run oil company.
Can’t even read this. I just feel so hopeless. And I don’t know what to do. I’m conserving energy however I can. I’m helpless in the front of those who deny and won’t admit to what’s going on. I see the effects all around me in nature. Someone tell me how I can make a difference as a person! As one individual!