Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumNPR: 3 massive changes you'll see as the climate careens toward tipping points
By Rebecca Hersher, Lauren Sommer
For the past eight years, one of the primary objectives of the annual negotiations has been to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the temperatures in the late 1800s. That temperature goal was established after a landmark international scientific report laid out the catastrophic effects of exceeding that amount of warming.
But that goal is no longer plausible, scientists say. Humanity has not cut planet-warming pollution quickly enough, and the planet will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, likely in the next decade, according to a recent United Nations report.
However, all is not lost. If countries can cut overall greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2035, scientists say the planet would quickly return to lower levels of warming.
"We must move much, much faster on both reductions of emissions and strengthening resilience," U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell told world leaders at COP30. Right now, countries are pursuing policies that would cut emissions by just 12% by 2035.
NNadir
(36,954 posts)I suppose this wild eyed optimistic scenario will be coupled with rhetoric about covering 50% of the world's land area with wilderness industrialized for solar farms and and wind industrial parks.
How's that working out?
Here's a clue: "By 2035" almost half of the world's solar and wind junk now covering vast areas of ruined land will be landfill bait.
I'm an old man. I lived through "by 1985," "by 1995," "by 2005," "by 2015," and most recently "by 2025."
Here we are; the worst rate of emissions ever observed not "by 2025" but in 2025.
The whole time, through all these "by xxx5,"
I observed antinukes gloating about how they prevented nuclear energy from doing what it might have done by caterwauling about how great so called "renewable energy" is.
They gloat still. "Nuclear energy will not save the world," they say. Right they are on their own doing. They're thrilled with their dubious success at killing the last, best, hope of the human race.
The crocodile tears are unimpressive.
Interestingly, this reactionary pose, making energy supplies depend on increasingly unstable weather, mining, and rendering vast stretches of wilderness into industrial parks, was never addressed at attacking fossil fuels. It was always about attacking nuclear energy. That of course represents its only success. It is, again, now too late for nuclear to do what it might have done.
The die is cast. Dumping responsibility on the future is an old, tiresome, and, frankly, a wholly immoral dodge.
As Lady Macbeth put it in the play after having participated in a murder, "What's done cannot be undone."
Perhaps even better, from Goethe's Faust, " Welch erbarmlich Grauen fasst Ubermenchen dich!"
Welch Grauen indeed!
Consider me unimpressed with the rhetoric.
red dog 1
(32,160 posts)Nigrum Cattus
(1,115 posts)here is the proof
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/