{"id":52306,"date":"2025-07-09T20:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T20:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/52306\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T20:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T20:43:10","slug":"is-there-still-time-to-be-hopeful-about-the-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/52306\/","title":{"rendered":"Is There Still Time to Be Hopeful About the Climate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past five years, a red digital clock the size of a bus, attached to a building in New York City\u2019s Union Square, has been counting down to zero. Climate Clock, the group that installed it, describes the time that remains\u2014about four years\u2014as \u201cthe most important number in the world.\u201d It represents humanity\u2019s shrinking opportunity to limit global warming to a long-term average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Earth is already hot enough that climate disasters are spreading and intensifying; in the past week, deadly heat waves<\/a> have broken records, and flash floods<\/a> have killed more than a hundred people in Texas. But it will get worse. The U.N.\u2019s committee of top climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), warns that every additional tenth of a degree makes forecasts more dystopian: megastorms escalate, sea levels rise more sharply. And so, in the Paris Agreement, nearly every nation on Earth agreed to work toward the 1.5-degree target. Climate Clock called it a \u201cpoint of no return.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it is also where we\u2019re going. Last year, the hottest ever recorded, was about 1.55 degrees warmer than the world before the Industrial Revolution. Long-term averages are lower\u2014perhaps 1.36 degrees<\/a>, depending on how one measures\u2014but they\u2019re rising rapidly. (Scientists usually measure temperatures at the Earth\u2019s surface and average it out over a decade\u2014so by the time they confirm that the line has been crossed, it may be behind us.) Global emissions haven\u2019t even started to decline from all-time highs, and President Trump is taking months off the clock by jackhammering pillars of environmentalism, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. \u201cCurrent policies mean we would have 3\u00b0C of warming by the end of the century,\u201d Piers Forster, a physicist who co-authored several landmark I.P.C.C. reports, told me in an e-mail. \u201cWhat we should do is acknowledge that our inaction\u2014or insufficient action\u2014has generated death and destruction,\u201d Marina Romanello, the executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a research initiative focussed on health and climate change, said. \u201cThat is a cross that we will have to carry.\u201d The moment the line is crossed, she added, should serve as a grim occasion to renew global ambitions. \u201cIt\u2019s not to give us more space, or time, or wiggle room,\u201d she told me. \u201cIt\u2019s about keeping temperatures as low as physically possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The knowledge that we can\u2019t afford to crash past 1.5 degrees, and that we\u2019re on track to do so nonetheless, has sparked a debate about whether the goalpost should move. \u201cIt would be a huge mistake to deviate from 1.5,\u201d Johan Rockstr\u00f6m, the co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told me. Beyond that point, he said, there\u2019s an escalating risk of climate tipping points\u2014the collapse of ice sheets, the disruption of ocean currents, the sudden thawing of permafrost. He preferred the metaphor of a landing zone: the more we overshoot, the rougher the landing, and the more we\u2019ll struggle to remove carbon from the atmosphere in the future. \u201cIf we readjusted the target every few years, any sense of urgency would be lost,\u201d Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a former vice-chair of the I.P.C.C., said. (He has a necktie that says \u201cI \u2661 1.5\u00b0C\u201d\u2014although on the day we met, at an awards ceremony for environmental scientists called the Frontiers Planet Prize<\/a> awards ceremony, it was too hot for him to wear it.) Even if it\u2019s difficult to make highways safer, he pointed out, no leader would ever set a target of hundreds of thousands of traffic deaths per decade. Why aim for lethal levels of warming?<\/p>\n

One problem with countdowns, and with points of no return, is that they don\u2019t tell you much about what comes afterward. \u201cI think we need to be honest about where we\u2019re most likely headed,\u201d Daniel Swain, a climate scientist who studies extreme weather at the California Institute for Water Resources, told me in an e-mail. \u201cBest-case scenarios from a decade ago are, unfortunately, probably off the table.\u201d He urged not only emissions cuts but also adaptation to a hotter and more dangerous planet. The climate crisis has been described as a ticking time bomb, but this gives the false impression that the bomb has not gone off yet; in truth, we are not so much working to defuse the explosives as we are trying to contain the blast. Still, Swain argued that a second number in the Paris Agreement\u2014\u201cwell below 2\u00b0C\u201d\u2014could still be reachable, with a fight. The good news is that we know how to get there: by phasing out the coal, oil, and gas that caused the crisis; by protecting the ecosystems we depend on; by electrifying buildings and vehicles; and, as Bill McKibben wrote<\/a> on Wednesday, by scaling green-energy sources such as solar.<\/p>\n

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and climate advocate, does not identify as an optimist. Even so, she is the author of a book called \u201cWhat If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures<\/a>.\u201d When I asked her about the 1.5-degree target, she told me, \u201cSome people feel like, if you exceed it, it\u2019s all over, and you can just give up.\u201d But the difference between a narrow miss and a big one, she went on, could be hundreds of millions of lives. It could mean whether or not the places you love continue to exist. At well below two degrees, coral reefs struggle to survive; at two degrees, they may simply go extinct. \u201cAll I can really come up with is, like, Don\u2019t be a quitter! Why are we giving up on the future of life on Earth so fucking easily?\u201d Johnson said. \u201cWhere is our tenacity? Where is our fortitude? We can do hard things.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the past five years, a red digital clock the size of a bus, attached to a building…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":52307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[285,746,39038,39039,159,4352,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-52306","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate-change","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-environmental-protection-agency-e-p-a","11":"tag-paris-agreement","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-trump-administration","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114825226552910114","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}