Continuing to say publicly the 1.5°C goal is still alive is not defensible
Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2022 10:25 pm
Excerpted from Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice mailing list
November 23, 2022
Continuing to say publicly 1.5°C is still alive
is no longer defensible
Below is an excerpt from an open letter being circulated by Scientist Rebellion for signatures from the academic community. SR states that “Over one thousand academics from more than 40 countries have now signed, including prominent scholars and IPCC contributors.”
Dear Reader,
Forty years after the first climate summit in Geneva in 1979, 11,000 scientists published a manifesto in 2019 to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to "tell it like it is”.
Almost three years later, and in a global context highly unfavorable to emergency climate action, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has proclaimed that humanity is facing “collective suicide”.
The response of scientists the world over must be decisive. How do we honor the public's growing trust in our expert community in the face of looming catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown? It is simple: academics must share with the public what they share with each other about the world's response to climate change and biodiversity loss.
The Paris Agreement’s goal of restricting global average temperature rise to below 1.5°C is a case in point. Senior academics accept there is no plausible pathway to 1.5°C. This requires global emissions to peak before 2025 and be reduced by 43% by 2030. Even that would likely lead to 1.5°C being exceeded within the next ten years. The most optimistic scenario reported by the IPCC rests on the hypothetical deployment of large-scale carbon dioxide removal technologies to drag temperatures back down by the end of the century.
A 2021 anonymous survey of world-leading climate scientists by the science journal Nature, revealed just 4% of respondents thought limiting warming to 1.5°C was likely. The majority thought the world is heading towards a catastrophic 3°C of warming by the end of the century.
Continuing to say publicly 1.5°C is still alive is no longer defensible, yet politicians, leading academics and the environmental movement persist in doing so. In response, polluting industries and policymakers are inadvertently being encouraged to resist rapid decarbonization.
See the full text of the open letter at
http://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-221123.html.
November 23, 2022
Continuing to say publicly 1.5°C is still alive
is no longer defensible
Below is an excerpt from an open letter being circulated by Scientist Rebellion for signatures from the academic community. SR states that “Over one thousand academics from more than 40 countries have now signed, including prominent scholars and IPCC contributors.”
Dear Reader,
Forty years after the first climate summit in Geneva in 1979, 11,000 scientists published a manifesto in 2019 to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to "tell it like it is”.
Almost three years later, and in a global context highly unfavorable to emergency climate action, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has proclaimed that humanity is facing “collective suicide”.
The response of scientists the world over must be decisive. How do we honor the public's growing trust in our expert community in the face of looming catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown? It is simple: academics must share with the public what they share with each other about the world's response to climate change and biodiversity loss.
The Paris Agreement’s goal of restricting global average temperature rise to below 1.5°C is a case in point. Senior academics accept there is no plausible pathway to 1.5°C. This requires global emissions to peak before 2025 and be reduced by 43% by 2030. Even that would likely lead to 1.5°C being exceeded within the next ten years. The most optimistic scenario reported by the IPCC rests on the hypothetical deployment of large-scale carbon dioxide removal technologies to drag temperatures back down by the end of the century.
A 2021 anonymous survey of world-leading climate scientists by the science journal Nature, revealed just 4% of respondents thought limiting warming to 1.5°C was likely. The majority thought the world is heading towards a catastrophic 3°C of warming by the end of the century.
Continuing to say publicly 1.5°C is still alive is no longer defensible, yet politicians, leading academics and the environmental movement persist in doing so. In response, polluting industries and policymakers are inadvertently being encouraged to resist rapid decarbonization.
See the full text of the open letter at
http://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-221123.html.