Episode 1: When the Levee Breaks
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay
Climate change will be the single biggest challenge humanity faces in the coming 50 years. We have already seen its destructive force impacting ecosystems, cities and individuals. Wildfires rage through Australia, floods terrorise South Asia, drought saps East Africa and El Niño chokes Central America. More than 60% of the Australian Great Barrier Reef has bleached. And we are losing Arctic sea ice at a rate of 13% per decade.
Global average temperatures are currently 1.2˚C above pre-industrial levels. As per the IPCC’s sixth report, current temperatures place us at a ‘high’ risk of severe ecosystem destruction and extreme weather events. At 1.5˚C of warming, the IPCC predicts a ‘very high’ risk of the irreversible destruction of ecosystems. At 2˚C, they predict not only a very high risk of severe and irreversible extreme weather events but also a high risk of large scale singular events.
We aren’t just facing more rain, slightly warmer days at the beach, or lower sales of winter clothing.
We are facing Manhattan being inundated in over 7.5ft of water, which is expected to happen every 5 years by 2030. For context, floods of this size historically only hit New York City once every 500 years.
We are facing mass migration away from uninhabitable ‘hot zones’, which are predicted to become 19% of the world’s landmass by 2070, up from 1% now. By 2100, in certain hot zones within India and China, going outside for more than a few hours is expected to kill even the fittest humans.
We are facing a loss of life on an astronomical scale. A recent study predicts a mass extinction of ocean species by 2300, on par with the extinction of dinosaurs.
The real danger
But more importantly, we are facing disastrous ‘tipping points’, which could set off cascading, self-perpetuating and irreversible cycles of higher temperatures.
Clouds cover around two-thirds of the earth’s surface at any one point in time, reflecting a lot of the sun’s energy. With higher temperatures comes less cloud coverage, increasing the amount of heat absorbed by the earth. A Caltech study found that low-lying clouds near the equator (which have the largest cooling effect) will break up at 4˚C of warming, causing a further 8˚C of warming. As Quanta magazine puts it,
“to think of 12˚C of warming, think of crocodiles swimming in the Arctic”
Scientists also predict the entire Arctic permafrost will thaw if we reach 3˚C of warming, unleashing up to 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon mummified in the ice, almost double the amount currently in the atmosphere.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science investigates the ‘melt-elevation feedback loop’ of the Greenland Ice Shelf. This is the process by which global warming melts ice, causing a thinner ice shelf, exposing the ice to accelerated rates of melting. They found the ice shelf could reach a tipping point, beyond which this feedback loop would spiral out of control, at lower than 1.6˚C of warming.
We’re currently at 1.2˚C...
Scarily, it’s not so much that these tipping points exist, but rather that it might only take reaching one of them to set off a chain reaction that triggers the rest. It could be that triggering the irreversible melting of the Greenland Ice Shelf at 1.6˚C could eventually cause more than 12˚C of warming.
If it keeps on raining, the levee is well and truly going to break. And if it does, we will not have a place to stay.
What can we do?
According to the Global Carbon Project, we have emitted over 2 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Now, in order to keep temperature rises below 1.5˚C, and prevent the most destructive impacts of climate change, we can only emit 400 billion metric tonnes of CO2 from 2020 onwards. This is the ‘climate budget’ we have to work with.
Only if we reduced our emissions over the next 30 years such that by 2050 we were ‘net-zero’, meaning we removed as much carbon from the atmosphere as we emitted, could we stay within this 400 giga-tonne carbon budget.
This is the bold new target vast swathes of countries, investors and companies have committed to in the past few years. Nations representing over 90% of the world’s GDP have committed to net-zero targets.
And yet, in 2021, we emitted more carbon dioxide than ever before. At the current rate of emission of around 35 billion tonnes per year, we only have 10 years until the carbon budget runs out.
So, what’s going wrong?
A large part of the problem is that few people seem to actually know how to achieve net-zero. And therefore, our governments are never fully accountable for their climate policies. Only when the efforts of our leaders are directly compared to what needs to be done, can governments be pressured enough to whole-heartedly act. It is all well and good to hold up a sign and say “Prime Minister, do more for climate change!”, but if you don’t even know what they should be doing, are you really very effective?
A 3000 page IPCC report is useless to the average citizen. We need to inform and educate people in a digestible way. We’ve seen scientist after scientist publish long, complex, dense reports with all the required information. But, as far as I can tell, few people and organisations are attempting to tell it to the masses in a way that they understand, or in a form they will read. Before writing these articles, I considered myself reasonably informed about climate change relative to most. Only now do I realise how little I really knew.
The Climate Project
And so, over the coming months, I will be releasing a series of 10-15 fortnightly articles on climate change, providing you with the information I believe every informed citizen should know. I will show you where we are now, where we need to be by 2050, and how we can get there.
40% of our carbon dioxide emissions come from electricity and heat generation, followed by industrial processes (25%), transportation (21%), and real estate (9%). I have structured my articles more or less upon this list, discussing the technologies and actions needed to decarbonise each sector. I will then publish articles on the crucial topics of methane and carbon removal, followed by articles on various solutions including environmental investing, carbon markets and carbon taxing.
I hope my research and writing will make you realise just how dire our situation is, and give you the knowledge and passion to push for effective change. We must act now and we must be smart about it, or else we risk a terrible future for ourselves and generations to come.
Please reach out if you want to help with my research; I want to create a community out of this project. I have already met with experts in science, academia, policy and business, as well as passionate students, to inform my writing. Comment on my posts or arrange to meet with me to discuss what I’ve said or anything you’re interested in.
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The party is over