Why we should fear climate change much, much more!

I'm a scientist - or I was a couple of decades ago, at least. Scientists like me were told time and again that we're poor communicators, and that we needed to "sell" the idea of a climate future we'd aspire to; That "the inconvenient truth" was too dystopian a future for people to process, and that painting a picture of a clean, green, economy would be more powerful.

Honestly, I bought it.

Sure, I'd read the IPCC reports, and countless papers showing pretty horrific predictions for the future if we did little to curb our obsession with products and services reliant on fossil fuels. I understood that, unabated, I'd see dramatic climate shifts in my own lifetime, let alone my kids'. But I had enough trust in governments and business leaders that they'd steer the ship away from the iceberg on the horizon. I mean, they had to, right? There was so much certainty, so much evidence, so much to lose. On top of that we had seen tumbling prices and availability for alternative fuels; renewable energy and batteries making new coal and gas power financially uncompetitive; and such impressive energy efficiency improvements in our home appliances that the average Australian home actually consumes less energy than it did ten years ago - despite our love for the latest tech'. Surely we couldn't lose?

Did leaders need more? Ok, sure: how about jobs. We care about jobs. In the US, there are less than a quarter of the jobs in coal than in renewable energy. Back in Australia, modelling we did with the Climate Council showed that 50% renewable electricity by 2030 would create almost 50% more employment than the 'business as usual' trajectory.

Look, I appreciate that turning off our energy, transport, and heavy industry infrastructure overnight wouldn't work; but by the time we all knew that climate change would be the largest economic disruption in the 21st Century, all we needed to do was ease back, reduce our emissions trajectory, by between around 2 and 3 percent globally per year. Challenging, yes; impossible, no.

2018 was a record year for greenhouse gas emissions. It was a record year for temperatures; a record year for extreme events. We're not doing enough, and we're not doing enough fast enough! According to our leading brains, we need to be at net zero carbon emissions by 2050 to have any hope of avoiding the most dangerous impacts, meaning halving current levels in just 11 years time. If we miss, and head toward the global mean average of 4 degree warming or worse, the implications read like a Stephen King novel: weather disasters annually that would have been 1:500 year events just decades ago; uninhabitable geographies (both from too much, and too little water); peaking weather extremes that in Australia could be as much as 14 degrees above current highs; sea level inundation reclaiming low-lying cities like Jakarta; not to mention crop yield reductions, biodiversity loss, and devastated ocean and land ecosystems.

As Wallace-Wells sets out in his depressing new books "Uninhabitable Earth", climate wars will be very likely, and we'll see a global political future galvanized by the need to act - just like we saw on human rights, post-WWII. Since the UN Convention on human rights, allied countries have acted to intervene in foreign matters when those countries were denying their own people basic human rights. Will, then, the economically and defensively well-positioned actors of the future take dramatic action against countries undermining the global need to de-carbonise? It's not out of the question.

Despite all this, our analysis consistently indicates that early action to move to the zero carbon economy provides economic advantages over the mid-term for those that do. So, it even makes economic sense.

I'm a supporter of capital markets leading the change, but as I reflect on it today, I worry we may need a bit more fear to fuel its urgency.