About a decade ago, after climate change had become an undeniable reality but before anyone in a position of real authority would admit that urgency was needed, there was already a huge gap between what the scientists and experts were saying and what the politicians and diplomats were saying. In an odd way, this gap was comforting. Yes, climate change was serious, but it wasn’t yet an immediately pressing concern. And since governments aren’t usually suicidal, it didn’t seem unreasonable to think that as it became more urgent, more avenues for action would open.
But a funny thing happened. As ice kept melting, violent weather kept increasing, and the probable climate change scenarios grew ever more dire with ever more data, at least some politicians and diplomats began to take it seriously, yet the gap between what the realists were saying and what the governments were saying actually got wider. The latest example of this cataclysmic failure of homo sapiens came amid an emergency, thirty-six hour extension of the latest U.N. climate talks in Durban, South Africa. After staying for a day and a half amid much acrimony, they managed to reach a token agreement. The result of that extraordinary effort? An agreement to try super hard to come to a real agreement by 2015. The BBC has the definitively absurd detail:
The conclusion was delayed by a dispute between the EU and India over the precise wording of the “roadmap” for a new global deal.
India did not want a specification that it must be legally binding.
Eventually, a Brazilian diplomat came up with the formulation that the deal must have “legal force”, which proved acceptable.
It’s become a reflex among climate hawks to say that we’ll never be able to explain to future generations why we didn’t act in time to save millions, if not billions, of lives. Silliness like that is why. The South African International Relations Minister who gaveled the conference to a close after that stunningly pointless 36th hour compromise declared, “We have made history.” She may well be right, but with each passing year it looks increasingly like it won’t be in the way she intends.
The goal of this historically toothless pledge to talk more (as though the issue would disappear if no further talks were agreed upon) is to limit global warming to a mere two degrees centigrade by the end of the century. But people with calculators and relevant data say that, even assuming everything goes perfectly from here on out:
The Climate Action Tracker estimates that global mean warming would reach about 3.5°C by 2100 with the current reduction proposals on the table. They are definitely insufficient to limit temperature increase to 2°C.
A two degree increase at century’s end, by the way, would already be catastrophically deadly and destructive. As you start nudging that number closer to four, you get into scenarios where heavy drinking is about all you can do:
There is a widespread view that a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organised global community, is likely to be beyond “adaptation,” is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable (i.e., 4 degrees C would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level).
That, boys and girls, is the premature death of billions of people, most of them today’s children and their eventual offspring, and that’s the optimistic outcome of the agreement in Durban that “made history”. Harsh numbers like that are why diplomats patting each other on the back for staying an extra day and a half are such a hideous farce. Humanity is trapped in a burning building, and its leadership is currently congratulating itself on crawling into a closet when it should be running for the front door.
There’s a lot of blame to go around for that, and plenty of it falls squarely on the shoulders of a few large dom corporations and their subs in various governments. It also doesn’t help that the United States, far from leading the fight, has been actively retarding it, even under Obama. But just as the concerns of the Cold War seem silly in hindsight, all our problems with corporate corruption and disingenuous climate denier campaigns will be outdated foppery thirty years from now when Bangladesh is drowning, Phoenix is a ghost town, and massive agricultural shortages are the norm.
The only good news is that we’re still in denial. A true mobilization of government, industry, and private citizens could pull us together, juice our economies, and crater our carbon emissions. We still have no idea of how much we’re capable should the warranted political will ever materialize, but at the moment the absence of that knowledge is the only legitimate hope. Agreements like the one in Durban this weekend are bad jokes. But hey, on the bright side, anything that gets the audience to start seriously booing could be a good thing.
