Donna Awatere Huata’s Herald Column, the latest Climate Scientist warnings and why radical Green Socialism will become a thing

The latest science is telling us we are rapidly running out of time and yet big corporate interests are still the ones shaping the debate.

On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped off a plane and waved a signed document with Hitler declaring “Peace for our time”. His appeasement pre-empted the invasion of Poland and I fear we have seen another appeasement in Poland 80 years later against a threat far more dangerous to our species than the fight against fascism.

The recent UN climate conference in Poland has been hailed as some sort of breakthrough, it was nothing of the sort. Refusing to wean the planet off fossil fuels, no clear target for 2030 was set. What amounts to little more than vague promises to record existing emissions is not a “breakthrough”, only a step in the right direction if the alternative was to do nothing at all.

The latest science is telling us we are rapidly running out of time and yet big corporate interests are still the ones shaping the debate while governments offer nothing more than appeasement to those big polluter interests.

To achieve the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit requires a worldwide cut of 45 per cent in gas emissions by 2030. Scientists are telling us the window of opportunity is fast closing, making this delay even more morally despicable.

The irony of the conference was that it was sponsored by the coal industry and Poland made it clear that coal, which fuels 80 per cent of its energy, is there to stay.

An audit of the Paris Agreement promises in 2017 tells us that if action against climate change is limited to just the current pledges the planet will still heat by 3C by 2100. That kind of warming would be catastrophic for many parts of our planet, to the point formal social structures in some countries would simply shut down.

While optimism is important to help stop people slipping into nihilistic apathy, we can not continue to appease corporate interests and must force immediate strategies to mitigate and adapt to the challenge of climate change, and to do this we need the economy on a war footing.

Global warming is as much an existential threat to our way of life as the fight against Nazism in World War II and demands a similar single-minded response if we have any hope of adapting in time.

We must look at an enormous upgrade of planting forests, we must look to be carbon neutral within a decade, not by 2050 and we must provide tax breaks for an economy that sustains, not pollutes.

The latest scientific research is grim — 14,000 tons of fresh water per second is pouring into the oceans from a melting Arctic while Antarctica is far less stable than we had previously believed. If the “Thwaites Doomsday Glacier” melts, we will see a 13-foot (4m) sea level rise.

But it gets worse. The latest paper in the journal Science shows these events are linked and can become feedback loops for far more disruptive climate events. The desalination of the water near vulnerable current pumps like the Labrador Sea could shut down the ocean conveyor belt that takes heat from the tropics and makes Northern Europe inhabitable. That shutdown could cause global climatic chaos.

These aren’t theoretical any longer, they are looming possibilities for a planet that hurtles towards a rapidly warming future. To continue with business as usual misunderstands the enormity of the problem facing us and is a cowardly appeasement that sells out future generations.

Now is the time for leadership and courage, not hollow words and empty deeds. It took a lot more than handwringing to defeat fascism.

Donna Awatere Huata, a former Act MP, is Ma¯ ori Climate Commissioner, an office set up by iwi to give Ma¯ ori a voice in the development of climate change policy.

…we are past the denial, action is required.

I’ve made the point last year that we need a new radical approach, because real action on climate change will require a political, social & economic revolution.

The truth is that the vested interests that create the pollution and economic framework that is making climate change the catastrophe that it is will not do anything meaningful to disrupt their interests.

Unfortunately, we have run out of time to allow incremental change. I have followed the IPCC reports on climate change since their first one and the thing that is striking is that the worst case scenario is fast becoming the only scenario. What most don’t appreciate about the IPCC is that they are an incredibly conservative group and still don’t include many of the feedback loops that will make climate change faster and far more damaging, so when they say we have 10 years left to make the adaption, we are in far more danger than that claim suggests…

UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.
Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge. “Amplifies” may be the better term. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.”

If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.

…the truth is we are in far more danger than we acknowledge…

Earth’s resources consumed in ever greater destructive volumes
Humanity is devouring our planet’s resources in increasingly destructive volumes, according to a new study that reveals we have consumed a year’s worth of carbon, food, water, fibre, land and timber in a record 212 days.

As a result, the Earth Overshoot Day – which marks the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate – has moved forward two days to 1 August, the earliest date ever recorded.

To maintain our current appetite for resources, we would need the equivalent of 1.7 Earths, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research organisation that makes an annual assessment of how far humankind is falling into ecological debt.

…which leaves us with few options other than radical revolution…

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us
It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?

A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?” We had no answer.

Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.

Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed.

Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide. For example, when Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the positive feedbacks this triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat, melting permafrost releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex) could render runaway climate breakdown unstoppable. When the Younger Dryas period ended 11,600 years ago, temperatures rose 10C within a decade.

…so what is to be done?