It won’t cause extinction

That’s part of the reason that climate scientists have criticized activist rhetoric that humans have until 2030 to stop dangerous climate change. Sure, it might soon be too late to meet some of our most ambitious climate goals, such as keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, yet any amount of action in the present will help create a less overheated planet in the future.

So is climate change an existential threat? According to the scientific definition, likely not. As far as scientists can predict, a warming planet won’t cause changes so severe that they threaten the survival of the entire human species. And there is evidence that some of our most pessimistic projections may be exaggerated (though a Hothouse Earth wouldn’t be so fun).

That’s the sort-of good news. The bad news is that saying climate change won’t kill all of humanity is … pretty much the lowest bar possible.

In the meantime, politicians should be careful not to deploy the term “existential threat” too loosely. In all likelihood, they don’t mean that human life on the planet will go extinct. They mean that climate change is a really, really big deal and must be taken seriously. That should be sufficient reason to act.

nse debate took place around the third, Loss and Damage, the name of a mechanism to compensate for the destruction that Mitigation and Adaptation cannot prevent. Developed countries by and large have sought to marginalize the Loss and Damage pillar, as they have long sought to marginalize Special and Differential Treatment for developing countries in trade and investment agreements. “Finance is something that really rich countries, particularly the US, have made sure that there is no progress and not even discussion on”, remarked Harjeet Singh, senior advisor at Climate Action Network International. (16)

My “forecast” is that in the next two to three decades to midcentury we will make rapid progress in scientific knowledge about weather and climate, helped by longer and more accurate satellite and ocean records and by a new generation of climate models that operate at one to ten kilometers scale (as distinct from the current models’ 50 kilometer scale). We will probably continue to make rapid progress in decoupling GHG from GDP growth, with a combination of state direction-setting and private innovation focused on transformations in energy, transport, buildings, industry and agriculture, using incentives like research and development subsidies and tax credits for technology investment, and penalties for carbon-intensive activities. (17) In transport, this entails coordination across urban planning decisions, public transport investment, future of remote working, infrastructures for electric charging and hydrogen loading. (18) Transformations in these systems are already underway, and the prospect of vast new green investments, supported and under-written by the state, will intensify them. These green investments will open productive investment opportunities previously limited by stagnant wages and rising debt, which have driven investment into increasingly speculative ventures. If by two or three decades ahead it looks as though the second half of this century could well experience globally extreme climate and ocean events, we will be much more knowledgeable about what to do than we are today. (19)