We're Out of Time. You Have to Choose a Side.

It’s a trite cliché to say the time has long since past the critical tipping point when humanity can no longer have it both ways. Every human must, sooner or later, once and for all, choose which side of the debate they’re on and then accept the consequences of whichever side is chosen.

                                                           - Jerome Irwin

Another day, another climate scientist pouring her heart out. Theirs is about the most miserable profession of the lot. Highly educated, determined, and living with the reality that no matter the peril to humanity the decision-makers will ignore the science no matter how dire the warning. Nowhere is this more burdensome than inside the petro-states, the fossil energy giants.

Joelle Gergis is a climate scientist and writer from the knuckle-dragging capital of the southern hemisphere, Australia. If you glance at the charts in the previous post you'll see that Australia is neck and neck with Canada when it comes to carbon production and emissions. Shame on you, Australia.

Here are a few of the more telling excerpts from Ms. Gergis' address:

Preparing for this talk I experienced something gut-wrenching. It was the realisation that there is now nowhere to hide from the terrible truth.

...The results coming out of the climate science community at the moment are, even for experts, similarly alarming.

We know that CO2 concentrations have risen from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to approximately 410 ppm today, the highest recorded in at least three million years. Without major mitigation efforts, we are likely to reach 560 ppm by around 2060. 

...When the UN’s Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, it defined a specific goal: to keep global warming to well below 2°C and as close as possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (defined as the climate conditions experienced during the 1850–1900 period). While admirable in intent, the agreement did not impose legally binding limits on signatory nations and contained no enforcement mechanisms. Instead, each country committed to publicly disclosed Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce emissions. In essence, it is up to each nation to act in the public interest.

So how is the Paris Agreement actually panning out? 

...To restrict warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to triple its current emission reduction pledges. If that’s not bad enough, to restrict global warming to 1.5°C, global ambition needs to increase fivefold. 

...Increasingly after my speaking events, I catch myself unexpectedly weeping in my hotel room or on flights home. Every now and then, the reality of what the science is saying manages to thaw the emotionally frozen part of myself I need to maintain to do my job. In those moments, what surfaces is pure grief.  ...Being willing to acknowledge the arrival of the point of no return is an act of bravery. 

But these days my grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. Volcanically explosive rage. Because in the very same IPCC report that outlines the details of the impending apocalypse, the climate science community clearly stated that limiting warming to 1.5°C is geophysically possible.

...Although the very foundation of human civilisation is at stake, the world is on track to seriously overshoot our UN targets. Worse still, global carbon emissions are still rising. In response, scientists are prioritising research on how the planet has responded during other warm periods in the Earth’s history. 

The most comprehensive summary of conditions experienced during past warm periods in the Earth’s recent history was published in June 2018 in one of our leading journals, Nature Geoscience, by 59 leading experts from 17 countries. The report concluded that warming of between 1.5 and 2°C in the past was enough to see significant shifts in climate zones, and land and aquatic ecosystems “spatially reorganize”.
These changes triggered substantial long-term melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6 to 13 metres of global sea-level rise lasting thousands of years. 

Examining the Earth’s climatic past tells us that even between 1.5 and 2°C of warming sees the world reconfigure in ways that people don’t yet appreciate. All bets are off between 3 and 4°C, where we are currently headed. Parts of Australia will become uninhabitable, as other areas of our country become increasingly ravaged by extreme weather events.

...There is a very rational reason why Australian schoolkids are now taking to the streets – the immensity of what is at stake is truly staggering. Staying silent about this planetary emergency no longer feels like an option for me either. Given how disconnected policy is from scientific reality in this country, an urgent and pragmatic national conversation is now essential. Otherwise, living on a destabilised planet is the terrible truth that we will all face.

We still have time to try and avert the scale of the disaster, but we must respond as we would in an emergency. The question is, can we muster the best of our humanity in time?

What I would ask you to do after reading the preceding post and this is to consider who, with a shred of concern for Canada and our young people, could support the handmaidens of the petro-state, Scheer or Trudeau, this October.  There is "nowhere to hide from the terrible truth" of what they are doing. Parliament's declaration of a climate emergency is nothing more than a dark farce, a sop to appeal to the environmental vote. Scheer is reprehensible. As for Justin, his words mean nothing. His deeds speak for themselves.

As Jerome Irwin writes, you have to choose which side you're on. Humanity can no longer have it both ways.

h/t Graeme Decarie
h/t The Arbourist