🔥 « The only good news: It is a choice to fail. Political leaders, academia and journalism have repeatedly chosen to fail on #climate for 30 years.
So it is a choice to fail and so it’s a choice to succeed. We can choose a different path.
But if we sit back and wait for the great and good to deliver this change then we will fail.
It comes down to all of us to play our role as best as we can in fighting the #ClimateCrisis. Hope arises from civil society. » 🙌🏻
Let’s be on the right side of History ✅
Prepare to confront very uncomfortable truths from a climate scientist. No sugar coating here from Kevin Anderson, one of UKs most senior climate scientists, professor for Climate Change at The University of Manchester and Uppsala University and Co-Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research:»
There is lots of rhetoric, lots of good words, lots of optimism about the future that you will hear about. But we are heading towards 3 to 4 degrees of warming across this century, an absolute climate catastrophe for all species including our own. And all we are doing so far is giving rhetoric and optimism and greenwash.
When we think about 3 to 4 degrees centigrade, we have no historical precedent in human history for these sorts of temperature changes. We are locking in very high levels of sea level rise, maybe 7-8 meters. We are also changing very significantly how and where we will produce our food and whether we produce enough food. And that’s because we’re changing weather and rainfall patterns as well as insect pollination of our crops.
So all of this plays out one disaster after another. Any single of them you might think we can deal with that. But when you bring all of these together, you’re talking about the collapse of our modern society.
Now countries make various promises about what they are going to do against climate change. These promises lead us to 2.7 degrees of warming which is a disaster itself and still this is overly optimistic because these promises only rely on future generations, our children and grandchildren to develop technologies that we don’t have today.
As an engineer I know that technology can achieve huge things but it cannot perform miracles. Pseudo technologies are just a facade to avoid asking the difficult political and equity based questions.
And be aware: 'Net Zero' is a real dangerous term in my view. Unpick it, reveal what’s behind it and you’ll realise that it really means NOT zero. I always say 'net zero' is latin for 'kick the can down the road'
But I have to be honest and say as someone who has worked on #ClimateChange for years, my best guess is that we are going to fail. We’re going to go for 3 to 4 degrees of warming and we’ll have to live through or die from all of the repercussions that this will have.
Whether we can still hold 1.5°C, it looks incredibly unlikely to me. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. It’s only impossible if we don’t try. And so the real trick here is to try really hard.
The only good news: It is a choice to fail. Political leaders, academia and journalism have repeatedly chosen to fail on #climate for 30 years. So it is a choice to fail and so it’s a choice to succeed. We can choose a different path. But if we sit back and wait for the great and good to deliver this change then we will fail. It comes down to all of us to play our role as best as we can in fighting the #ClimateCrisis. Hope arises from civil society.
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