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climate science
4 Signs of Hope in a Burning World
Rapid and radical decarbonization is possible and is starting to happen on a near-global scale, but it must proceed very much faster.
Aug 21, 2024
The recent wildfires in Greece started on Sunday 11 August in Varnavas, 35 kilometres (22 miles) north of Athens. By the time they were brought under control three days later, they had reached the capital’s suburbs, having burnt through 25,000 acres of forest.
Though the fires fortunately did not get fully into Athens, it was a close call. Similar extreme weather events—whether wildfire, drought, storm, flood, or heat dome—are now seen on a near-daily basis somewhere around the world, and are often more intense than even a couple of decades ago. They are the most visible elements of climate change’s shift into climate breakdown.
We are also seeing clear worldwide changes. Last year was exceptionally hot—the hottest year since accurate weather records were first kept in the 1880s—but this year is perhaps more worrying. 2023 was an El Niňo year; one in which the sea surface temperature warms by 0.5°C above the long-term average. It’s a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to seven years and leads to temporary air temperature increases across much of the world in those years.
The future really does look grim. A world of devastating weather events, unliveable cities, gross food shortages, mass migration, and global marginalization beckons.
The problem is that El Niňo has been fading since February, yet the global pattern does not show the anticipated easing of temperatures. Instead, we are seeing the opposite; 15 national heat records have been broken so far this year, as have 130 monthly national temperature records. As Costa Rican climate historian Maximiliano Herrera told The Guardian: “Far from dwindling with the end of El Niňo, records are falling at even much faster pace compared to late 2023.”
In fact, June this year was the 13th month in a row to set a monthly global temperature record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, whose ERA5 satellite suggested that 22 July was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. The World Meteorological Organisation, meanwhile, has reported that at least 10 countries have already recorded temperatures above 50°C this year.
The implications are clear enough. We are heading for a global disaster at a level frequently warned of but even more frequently ignored—whether by politicians, business leaders, or others—while the fossil fuel industries and countries that exploit oil, gas, and coal continue to argue that the problem is grossly exaggerated.
More than 50 years ago, economic geographer Edwin Brooks, in a much-quoted remark, warned of “a crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes.” His warning focused on economic inequalities and was made before the full impact of climate change was apparent, yet it is more timely than ever.
The future really does look grim. A world of devastating weather events, unliveable cities, gross food shortages, mass migration, and global marginalization beckons.
The task of avoiding this dystopic future is huge. Four years ago, a U.N. report identified the need to decrease carbon emissions by 7% a year until 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. They are still rising, and the need now is for an annual reduction of at least 10%.
It is a predicament that will require a third societal transition. The first was the farming revolution over several thousand years and the second was the industrial revolution, which started close to four centuries ago and is still under way. The third will be learning to live within the limits set by the capacity of the world’s ecosystem to handle human activity, initially by preventing climate breakdown, which must be achieved in mere decades.
But there are some signs of hope.
The first is that climate science has come on by leaps and bounds in the past 40 years and there is much greater confidence in its predictions. This means intergovernmental panels—which have tended to be overly cautious about not exaggerating the impact of the climate crisis, due to a need to work in consensus—will able to be far blunter in their statements.
Then there is the evidence just about everywhere that climate breakdown is happening. The third reason is that the first two will combine to inspire more activists, both young and old, to act. Many are willing to engage in nonviolent direct action despite elite determination to maintain the status quo through harsh legal measures.
There is a fourth reason for hope: the extraordinary way that rapidly improving technologies mean it is so often (and increasingly) much cheaper to use renewable energy than relying on fossil carbon energy sources.
Rapid and radical decarbonization is possible and is starting to happen on a near-global scale. But it must proceed very much faster. Global net zero needs to be achieved by 2040, not 2050, and that means that richer states must aim for net zero by 2035 while providing funding to speed up the process right across the Global South. It is a huge task, but that is the way to prevent climate breakdown.
To put it in a wider context, three tasks face us all. The first is the most urgent: coming to terms with environmental limitations. The second is an evolution of the world economy to ensure a far more equal sharing of what we have, and the third is responding to security challenges without depending on the early use of military force.
It is a transformational task but thanks to the immediacy of climate breakdown there isn’t really any alternative. Luckily, for now, there is time to do it, just.
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'Startling Confirmation': Big Oil Funded Climate Research as Early as 1954
"This pushes back the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades," one campaigner wrote.
Jan 31, 2024
The fossil fuel and automotive industries knew that their products could destabilize the climate as early as 1954, new research published by DeSmog on Monday reveals.
The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation, whose contributors included major oil and car companies, helped to fund the early climate research of Charles David Keeling, who went on to create the famous Keeling curve tracking the rise in global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, DeSmog reported. The foundation was also informed of the potential implications of Keeling's research.
"This pushes back the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades," Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media posted on social media in response to the news. "Think of the damage and lives that could have been saved if we started researching and moving to clean energy back then."
"These findings are a startling confirmation that Big Oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years—for twice my lifetime—and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day."
The revelations were based on documents found in the California Institute of Technology Archives, the U.S. National Archives, the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and Los Angeles newspapers, which established that the foundation helped finance Keeling's early measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the U.S. West from 1954-56.
The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation was established in 1953 to help address the problem of smog in Los Angeles. Its members included 18 car companies such as American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. It also received funds from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now the Western States Petroleum Association. What's more, representatives from the Southern California Gas Company, the Southern California Edison Co., Chrysler, General Motors, and Union Oil—now Chevron—sat on its board of trustees, and beginning in 1955, that board was updated on findings by a "technical advisory committee" staffed with one API member and Richfield Oil Corporation—now BP—and Chrysler scientists.
In a November 1954 research proposal from Keeling's research director Samuel Epstein, the foundation was informed of the potential implications of Keeling's measurements of carbon dioxide levels.
"The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization," Epstein wrote.
DeSmog noted that this makes 1954 the earliest known date at which the fossil fuel industry both funded climate research and was informed of the possible consequences of its products. It comes five years before physicist Edward Teller spoke to API about global heating and around 25 years before ExxonMobil's research into climate change in the 1970s and '80s. In total, the foundation funded Keeling's early work for a total of $13,814, which would be around $158,000 today.
In reporting the news, Rebecca John pointed out that many of the same companies and industry associations that funded Keeling's early research would go on to fund a campaign denying climate science 35 years later, among them API, the Automobile Manufacturers Association, Chevron, and BP.
"It's important to know that the oil industry sponsored climate science research in the 1950s because it reveals a picture of a much more nuanced, closely connected world of science and the frontiers of scientific discovery than the oil industry has admitted to," John wrote.
Geoffrey Supran, who studies the history of climate disinformation at the University of Miami, toldThe Guardian that John's revelations "contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth's climate on a scale significant to human civilization."
"These findings are a startling confirmation that Big Oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years—for twice my lifetime—and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry's denial of basic climate science decades later."
The Center for Climate Integrity put it more succinctly on social media.
"They knew. They lied. They need to pay," the group said.
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We Must All Rise Together to Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground
This disastrous COP28 must be the end of vague political promises. The people of Earth are on to the lies.
Dec 15, 2023
The United Nations climate summit, hijacked by the fossil fuel cartel, has gifted a blank check to rich countries and Big Oil to kill one billion people and force billions more to flee their homes by 2100. The so-called ‘historic’ outcome of COP28 fails to deliver the most basic and necessary measures which would have prevented societal and ‘earth systems’ collapse, as outlined by the IPCC: eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and halt all new gas and oil projects. Instead, the new resolution includes numerous loopholes which will allow polluters to greenwash emissions through fictional carbon capture, meaningless carbon credits, and the re-classification of methane (“natural gas”) as a transition fuel. But to remain under 2°C of warming, we cannot afford to burn the fossil fuels we already have in reserve, let alone drill for more. COP28 has taken a few tentative steps in the right direction, but only thanks to the blood and sweat of many people on the frontline of our climate crisis. The summit’s overall trend to support “business as usual” will result in further delays in meaningful climate action and condemn us to miss “the brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”
Wealthy countries have once again manipulated the climate summit in order to advance their ecocidal colonialism. Rich nations have been pillaging the natural resources of poorer ones for centuries and have used their fuels to emit far more than their share of CO2. They bear the lion’s share of responsibility to decarbonize first and fastest and provide much-needed funding to poorer nations, which are already heavily impacted by the escalating climate crisis. Instead, rich countries are racing in the opposite direction: the US, Canada, and just three other countries are responsible for more than half of planned oil and gas expansion. UN governance failure is also to blame here, however, and urgently needs addressing. Even if COP had succeeded in a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, it could not be implemented without a binding treaty and enforcement mechanisms. Additionally, COP must demand reporting of any conflicts of interest and ban fossil fuel executives and lobbyists from tainting any more climate summits.
The Loss & Damage Fund could be an important first step, but without proper financing, it is condemned to fail. Loss and damage already costs more than $400 billion annually, but COP28 has only pledged $429 million in initial funding—a mere 0.1% of what is needed just for this year. By contrast, governments are using $7 trillion of our money every year to subsidize fossil fuels (despite the 1 in 5 deaths—12 million people annually—caused by air pollution alone) while the oil industry rakes in obscene profits.
That said, even a fully-financed Loss and Damage Fund can never fix a dysfunctional economic system which is fundamentally flawed, is based on endless growth, overconsumption, and extractivism, and is guaranteed to accelerate the global crisis. Studies have demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions are firmly linked to resource exploitation and GDP growth. We have no choice but to create an economic system which aligns with the goals of a fair and equal transition, because the current one has failed both humans and all other 10 million life forms on this planet. Implementing a low-carbon economy is cheaper than sustaining the catastrophic costs of climate change, but the need to maintain and grow profit is preventing any progress. Profit will never fix what profit has created.
1.5°C is dead, and 2°C will be dead by 2050, if not earlier, if we continue down this path. 2023 was the hottest year on record; we passed 2.0°C for the first time in history, and 2024 is projected to be even hotter. Human behaviors inflict massive planetary stress beyond the burning of fossil fuels. “20 of the 35 planetary vital signs are now showing record extremes.”
We cannot entrust the fight for all life to the very politicians, companies, and markets that forced us into this existential crisis in the first place and who are right now brutally marching us off the cliff. This disastrous COP28 marks the end of vague political promises. The people of Earth are on to the lies. It is time to listen to the scientists, hundreds of whom have been driven out of their labs and into the streets to engage in civil disobedience: if we want to avoid condemning both this generation and all that follow to the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, we must all rise together in order to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The time is now.
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