I ran across this post on LinkedIn of a mom describing extreme climate events that her daughter had to face this year:
What is terrifying about this story, (multiplied many times over globally) is that this is all happening against a backdrop of ~1.5ºC of heating.
It is 97% certain we will cross 2ºC on our current fossil emissions trajectory. At the current decadal heating we should reach this in the next ~18 years.
Young people will bear the brunt of this as illustrated vividly in this graphic:
We are rapidly moving into a brand new world, one marked by increasing physical breakdown. The number of people on the font lines of this is staggering. 3.3-3.6 BILLION people live in hotspots of high vulnerability to climate change.
There are 2 extremely important questions that need urgent answers:
- How do we prevent the rise of global temperatures beyond 2ºC?
- How do we adapt our systems to cope in a world at 2ºC?
In its most recent reporting the IPCC identified the barriers to our taking action on both mitigation and adaption. Here they are:
- Limited resources
- Lack of private sector & citizen engagement
- Insufficient mobilization of finance (including for research)
- Low climate literacy
- Lack of political commitment
- Limited research and/or slow and low uptake of adaptation science
- Low sense of urgency.
If we don't change the above soon we have a lot of suffering ahead.
“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation [reduction of emissions] we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”—Dr. John Holdren, 2007