Vindication on climate change is small comfort...

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Carole Knight

When I attended a UNEP Financial Initiative Global Round Table some years ago, I had a respectful, but differing opinion to that of Mr Achim Steiner, Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UNEP. At the time an increase of 2C was being posited by UNEP as being an inevitable, but acceptable, ceiling for global warming this century, given the reality of unprecedented CO2 emissions and the likelihood that nations and national leaders would not rise to the challenge of capping CO2 emissions in a timely and wholehearted manner.

"The burning of fossil fuels is generating levels of what one might term “brown” and “black” carbon in the atmosphere and unless checked may take global temperatures above a threshold of 2C” – Blue Carbon: The Role of Healthy Oceans in Binding Carbon, Achim Steiner.

“Even the most optimistic scenario shows an emission gap of some five Gigatonnes between what countries have pledged so far and where they need to be in 2020 to have a running chance of keeping a global 21st century temperature rise under 2C” – 2010 Annual Report, UNEP, Achim Steiner.

Regrettably, the IPCC’s 1.5C Special Report vindicates my point of view, although this is small comfort at this momentous time.

This is what I wrote more than 15 years ago: “The margins that govern the Earth’s habitability are smaller than we might think. The difference between a warm temperate interglacial such as we are living in right now and an Ice Age is only about three degrees centigrade. And an average of just nine degrees centigrade separates the mean temperature of today from the very coldest points of both the last Ice Age and the penultimate Ice Age. With temperatures rising, a cumulative increase of three degrees centigrade would send shock waves throughout every living system on the planet. This is a small margin between a world, which although troubled, is still subject to the laws of civilization as we know them, and a world in which our civilization might well disappear.” –  Miracles of Hope: Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century, Carole Knight.