Where is this climate disaster? Despite decades of trying, we still haven’t crossed one of their imaginary tipping points.
World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies
Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits
by Damian Carrington Environment editorFri 28 Oct 2022 04.37 AEDTLast modified on Fri 28 Oct 2022 15.28 AEDT
Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits
The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe.
Collective action is needed by the world’s nations more now than at any point since the second world war to avoid climate tipping points, Prof Johan Rockström said, but geopolitical tensions are at a high.
He said the world was coming “very, very close to irreversible changes … time is really running out very, very fast”.
Emissions must fall by about half by 2030 to meet the internationally agreed target of 1.5C of heating but are still rising, the reports showed – at a time when oil giants are making astronomical amounts of money.
On Thursday, Shell and TotalEnergies both doubled their quarterly profits to about $10bn. Oil and gas giants have enjoyed soaring profits as post-Covid demand jumps and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The sector is expected to amass $4tn in 2022, strengthening calls for heavy windfall taxes to address the cost of living crisis and fund the clean energy transition.
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“Furthermore, the world is unfortunately in a geopolitically unstable state,” said Rockström. “So when we need collective action at the global level, probably more than ever since the second world war, to keep the planet stable, we have an all-time low in terms of our ability to collectively act together.”
“Time is really running out very, very fast,” he said. “I must say, in my professional life as a climate scientist, this is a low point. The window for 1.5C is shutting as I speak, so it’s really tough.”
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Record profits for oil and gas is a real vote of confidence in renewables, the “cheapest form of energy” /sarc.
Reading the Guardian article its difficult to see what bothers them most, all these imaginary tipping points we are always about to cross but never quite reach, or that profits in the oil and gas industry, which Guardian have been telling everyone to divest for years, are soaring into the stratosphere.
Time to find a new fake crisis guys. You had people for the first decade or two, since the climate crisis went big in the early 90s, but the long running movie is getting boring. Four decades and we still haven’t seen the monster. All we have are endless empty promises that it is about to get interesting.