The main point here is that we’ve officially surpassed the lower target of warming that the Paris Agreement sought to avoid – 1.55 degrees above the comparison period of 1850-1900. But it’s hardly surprising. The Paris Agreement allows each country to set their baseline period and Australia, as one example, cynically chose years in which its carbon emissions were through the roof. This plus the laughable sideshow that COP has become demonstrates we’re not taking it seriously.
As early as 2019 we showed, using a simple analysis on publicly accessible data from BOM, that Australian anomalies had already surpassed 1.5 degrees from a baseline of 1950 alone! Moreover, the global attribution study that soon followed demonstrated that fully 30% of the increase in the updated McArthur Forest Fire Index was directly due to anthropogenic climate change, converging on an increase of 1.5-1.7 degrees from 1900 to 2019, plus a massive change in the return rate of catastrophic wildfires – from every 85 years in 1900 to every eight years in 2019.
The climate wars are over and the evidence is just piling on every year. The real news in this new finding from the WMO is not that we’ve officially surpassed the limit; the news resides in what is not being said – that we’ve consistently failed to act as a global community for decades, and still we have laughable, frankly wicked, contempt for what the WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo, rightly describes as ‘history playing out before our eyes’. When Australia was hit by megafires in 2019 the Trump administration tried to say that arson, and not climate change, was the main cause – this was nonsense as it would have required a 60-fold increase in arson.
What will Trump, this world-class denialist, say now that California is being hit by the same human-induced tragedy? We’re committing arson on a global scale and the effects will be felt by our children – forever. It’s high time that real action on climate was enacted. That Raworth’s donut economics, and the ideas of others like Guy Standing, are properly examined and the socioeconomic system that is destroying not just the planet but our sanity is reimagined in terms of sustainable wellbeing and human dignity.
The frustrations of modern living, the hopelessness of our young, are intimately related to the same system that is raising global temperatures as well as driving species to extinction. They are all related. It’s time to rise above the simplistic dichotomy of left versus right and rebuild an economic system that values the people and the planet. Otherwise, we’re stuffed. The world is on track for 4 degrees, the sustainable development goals will predictably fail, and inequality will make of us a planetary hellscape of neo-feudal slavery. This is a political issue and the most recent findings from WMO merely add to the mountain of evidence.