Today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report landed with a thud. It says, basically, that we’re screwed unless we take immediate action to reduce our burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant release into the atmosphere of carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases. That’s the bad news. But there’s also good climate news, which almost no media outlets are reporting.
This good news appeared Friday in a Washington Post story reporting that warming can be slowed much faster than previously thought, as long as we drastically and immediately cut emissions. Previously, the best science showed that 25 to 30 years of warming is “baked in” based on gases we’ve already put into the atmosphere. The idea was that the climate is a big thing to turn around, and, like slowing an aircraft carrier, there would be a lag between cutting emissions and slower warming. But, research shows that isn’t true. According to Michael Mann, one of the world’s top climate scientists, if we “stop emitting carbon right now…the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.” The lag effect isn’t decades, but “more like three to five years.”
The conclusions are obvious and empowering: What we do now can have an almost immediate impact. Rather than some long-distant future, where we might slow the warming after many of us are dead, we can effect change now. Right now. (Okay, three to five years, but you get my point.)
This isn’t new news. I spotted it in last week’s Washington Post story, but 60 Minutes interviewed Mann in October 2020, where he shared the research. The Guardian has also covered his report. Maybe it got lost in the pre-election hype or maybe the media gets more clicks with apocalyptic reporting, but this is the most exciting climate news I’ve heard since I first learn about global warming 30 years ago. Why aren’t more people talking about it? Why aren’t each and every one of us sending this to our elected representatives and all of our friends?
Many of my days are spent bouncing between climate-related sadness, frustration, feelings of powerlessness, and then rationalization, justification, and/or whistling past the graveyard. Climate impact infuses almost every decision I make, and still, my heart aches that I’m not doing enough. Poor Justin (Housman): Every week he has to talk me off some climate ledge. He reminds me that we’re doing a lot. He reminds me that our actions are a drop in the bucket. He reminds me that the idea of a personal carbon footprint was a dark, manipulative effort by the oil and gas industry to shift perceived responsibility onto consumers.
All that’s true. But what’s also true is that every action by every person counts. While the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions come from industry, who do you think creates the demand for that industry? Who do you think makes it possible for all those airplanes to be in the sky, for all those UPS trucks to be on the road, for all the cows in those giant feedlots? It is our individual consumptive demands writ large.
Our actions matter. They’ve always mattered. But this research by Michael Mann and his colleagues should help us snap out of our complacency, inertia, depression, cynicism, and feelings of powerlessness. Even if Treehugger argues that Mann is putting a positive spin on old data, I say that it adds hope to what often seems hopeless. I’m not naive, I understand the magnitude of the problem, but I believe that this news should empower us to change whatever we can, to pressure industry and the corporations we patronize to change whatever they can (for a list of top corporate hypocrites, go here), to put the heat on our elected representatives, no matter how divided our country or frustrated we are with politics, and to do it now.
Photo by Sander Lenaerts
“…warming can be slowed much faster than previously thought, as long as WE drastically and immediately cut emissions…” (emphasis added).
Recent events – actually world history – evinces that getting the world population, or “WE” to cohesively approach nearly any issue in agreement is a monumental task. Sure, I state the obvious pessimism but an individual can become calloused and less hopeful.
WE live in a time, when, for example, {A} certain local municipalities no longer agree to recycle glass for reasons including, but not limited to, recycling contractors’ employees have been cutting their fingers on the glass, or {B} Safeway places more import on their reading their corporate scripts to customers (1. Hello how are you today; 2. Did you find everything you are looking for? 3. Do you need help out with those?) rather than doing away with plastic bags.
WE are not all on the same page, and for every optimistic science article there seems to be published a negative science article. Sadly, catastrophe such as symptoms/effects of climate change resembles order until the last possible second. Thank you for the hope, however, Steve.
Amen.
This article is wonderful news! But – my fear is that any indication that there is a faster way to alleviate the warming crescendo will be grabbed by those averse to reducing or limiting the activities and industries as verification that they don’t need to do a thing. And, sadly, the enlightenment we received about how the general population will behave during a public emergency – not, as it turned out, in favor of the societal good – can be added to the general sense of hopelessness against overwhelming bad news. Still, those of us who DO care CAN do what we can by both taking individual action and being a positive face for those people around us who consider recycling a hassle and cheap oil and gas a given. BTW, in our community glass recycling was stopped because the cost of trucking the glass to the recycling center was considered too expensive. Meanwhile, our garbage is trucked to Georgia (we are in central Florida), and the trash mountains left behind by decommissioned garbage dumps can be developed. So many facets.
I’m assuming you mean the pandemic, in terms of how the population will behave during a public emergency, but that depends on where you live, of course (my neck of the woods is highest vaxxed in country, and people don’t fight about masks very much, for instance). But the point is well taken and I would have said I agree entirely even a week ago, but the way the world has reacted to the invasion of Ukraine has given me up hope that we can act quickly, and together, when the threat seems immediately existential. Not sure yet how we get there regarding climate change though.
Yes, it is heartening to see people gathering in support of the Ukraine!
As the general population is directly affected by climate change, they will come to understand that something greater than individual effort must be done. For instance, when they can’t visit their favorite beach because the highways accessing these places are inundated by tidal fluctuations -or- are forced to pay high prices for water at their hotels and rentals because there simply isn’t any potable source, they will start to realize the gravity of the situation.
Great article, thanks for writing something that I can completely relate to. I shall share especially with my fellow Climate Reality Leaders as we so often wonder whether we are having any affect.
Sadly, Smith said it best.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2adrUaiyI
“No individual raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood”. Until people actually give up driving, traveling on airlines, air conditioning, ordering crap on amazon, etc., (especially the young climate change fanatics), CO2 will probably continue to increase. On the plus side, humans, and most other creatures, do way better on a warm planet than they do in an ice age.