Running the numbers for climate action - would you bet on these odds?

What do we mean when we put a number on failure? In broadcasting, we talk about ‘broadcast critical’ - the assumption being that anything less than 100% is bad. 1% of a blank screen or a silent radio is obviously a failure.?

This was a difficult transition for broadcast engineers when computer technology began to overtake traditional broadcasting kit. In the culture of computing, downtime was accepted as being a normal part of operations. X% of downtime was allowed depending on the industry - with back up systems and fix procedures designed to kick in when failure happened, leaving just a small time of outage.?

Searching for a defined % for downtime in service level agreements brings up a wide range of durations and standards. Consider this. Even 99.999%, known as “five 9s” availability would therefore allow up to 1% downtime, or 3.65 days of unavailability in a year. Not acceptable in a broadcast context.?

At the same time as we see the world’s two biggest polluters, China and the United States, continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says that industrialized nations must join together to halve greenhouse gases by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the early 2050s.?

The report notes that if those two steps were taken, the world would have about a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The same warming likely to lead to catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction.?

Would you cross the road if you had a 50% chance of dying? Would you eat an apple if there was a 50% chance of being poisoned. Would you buy from a company that had accepted 50% downtime as standard service levels? That does not feel like a good chance to me. If I was gambling, I would not bet on something that gave me only a 50% chance of winning. And there is a huge IF in there too. We are lessening our odds daily with every inaction, and with every new fossil fuel project.

At the same time, could you cut your own carbon footprint by 50%. How about your organisation, your city, your nation? From this perspective, 50% also feels like a huge amount to achieve in a very short time. Halving greenhouse gases will take massive investment, radical society-wide behaviour change, carrot and stick policies that transform our infrastructure, cities and jobs, and will need vast amounts of political will.?

It feels impossible but it has to happen. Humanity can’t afford the downtime.

Photo by Kendall Scott on Unsplash