Our All Hands On Deck Moment

I remember the moment climate change shifted from an uncertain threat somewhere in the distant future to a very real issue affecting my life in the present. I woke up in the middle of the night in October 2017, and smelled smoke in the hallway outside my bedroom. The next morning friends awoke to the same, posting on social media, wondering if their neighbor’s house was on fire. Little did we know that smoke was coming from a wildfire in Calistoga, 75 miles away. While wildfires are a regular threat in California, never in my twenty years living in San Francisco had one had a direct effect on the city. Smoke filled skies have become a regular October occurrence for San Franciscans in the two years since.

Suddenly it seems the climate crisis is unavoidable. If you haven’t been directly affected by a climate related natural disasters, you likely know someone who has. Most of us have been inundated with headlines about fires in the Amazon, global student strikes, and species extinction.

Still, it’s hard to get a real handle on the situation. While words like crisis, emergency, and catastrophe inundate our news feeds, how are we to discern reality from hyperbole? Where do we stand, really, as a planet, with respect to our response to climate change?

I’ve gone deep on climate over the past year, after a client project thrust me into the topic. The UN IPCC report, Global Warming of 1.5°C is one of those things you just can’t unsee. This post serves to highlight what were for me consciousness shifting takeaways from that report. For a more complete overview of the current state of climate change, I refer you to this excellent, comprehensive overview.

While there are significant degrees of uncertainty in predicting what happens at various degrees of warming above pre-Industrial temperatures, there’s a global scientific consensus that things will be really bad if we don’t contain global warming to under 2°C. So for the purposes of this post, let’s take it as a given that the goal of the Paris Agreement — to contain the increase in global temperatures to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” is the correct one.

With that in mind, a few key data points to know:

• We hit a global warming level of 1°C above pre-Industrial levels in 2017
• That number increases by about .2°C per decade based on past and current emissions
• Globally we generate ~42 GtCO2 equivalent greenhouse gas emissions per year
• Global per capita emissions are approximately 5 metric tons per year (vs. 16.5 metric tons per capita in the US)
• Cumulative emissions since pre-Industrial era estimated to be 2200 (+/- 320) GtCO₂
• IPCC estimates we have a remaining “carbon budget” of somewhere in the range of 420–770 GtCO2 equivalent in order to stay below 1.5°C with reasonable probability (as in, a coin flip or ⅔ chance, depending on which numbers you use).

We meet our goals of containing global warming below 2°C by reducing emissions and capturing the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, in order to stay within our budget. Keep in mind it’s not just a matter of decarbonizing the current state of the global economy, emissions need to decline sufficiently to offset increases due to both economic and population growth. This requires a transformation at an unprecedented scale and pace.

The IPCC report states that in order to stabilize at 1.5°C, global emissions should decrease to ~25 GtCO₂ equivalent per year by 2030, reaching net zero by 2050. To stay below 2°C, those numbers shift to ~32 GtCO₂ equivalent and reach net zero around 2070.

How are we doing, as a planet, relative to the stated goals agreed upon in Paris? The agreement is non-binding, and does not state how each country will meet the stated goals. Rather, after signing the agreement, each country determined what it would do, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). The current NDCs focus on the next decade, through 2030.

What happens when you add up all of the world’s NDCs? We see global GHG emissions increasing from 42 GtCO₂ equivalent per year today to 52–58 GtCO₂ equivalent per year in 2030.

Let that sink in.

It’s not that we aren’t reducing emissions fast enough. We aren’t reducing them at all. We’re tracking towards a 25+% increase in emissions over the next decade, instead of the 40% decrease required to meet our goals — with no clear plan for what happens after 2030.

Moreover, according to the report, “pathways reflecting current nationally stated mitigation ambition until 2030 are broadly consistent with cost-effective pathways that result in a global warming of about 3°C by 2100, with warming continuing afterwards.” And this is before we consider the impact of the the US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

One can’t help but read that and conclude our governments are utterly failing us. No one says this quite like Greta Thurnberg did at the UN Climate Summit last September (it’s really a must watch if you haven’t seen it).

“Tell the truth, and act like the truth is real.” That’s the rallying cry of Extinction Rebellion, a global activist network promoting civil disobedience to provoke policy makers to act. Once you see and begin to internalize the truth — that we are headed towards at least a 3°C increase despite a global commitment otherwise — it starts to feel irresponsible to go on living our lives as we have been, trusting that our governments or technology will solve the problem for us.

Now really feels like an all hands on deck moment. The next ten years will make the difference between containing the worst of global warming and leaving a host of unconscionable challenges for our children to address. It’s abundantly clear the status quo won’t get us there.

Once you know the truth you can’t in good conscious look away. Whether it’s changing your own behaviors, striking on Fridays, funding climate organizations, launching a new initiative within an organization you’re a part of, or redirecting your career — denial and business as usual is no longer an option.

It’s time to take your place on the decks.