Even as President Biden prepares to host a White House global climate summit on Earth Day, April 22, new science shows that the climate crisis is accelerating and demanding greater emergency measures. Activists have urged Biden to pledge carbon emissions cuts of as much as 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, to stay on track with the key goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Such longer-term goals are crucial, but they risk distracting us from the importance of taking swift and effective action right now. If we don’t, mid-century deadlines may be too late. Former secretary of state John F. Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, puts it this way: “Scientists tell us this decade, 2020 to 2030, must be the decade of action.” But why this decade? Because leading studies now find that fast-rising temperatures over the next 10 years have a high chance of triggering potentially uncontrollable warming. By as early as 2030, if left unchecked by new actions, global average temperatures will increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Temperatures that high have a strong chance of setting off tipping points in key natural systems — like melting Arctic sea ice and Siberian tundra, or destabilizing the Amazon or Gulf Stream ocean currents — causing self-reinforcing, cascading warming that will be far more difficult to stop.
If temperature rise is allowed to reach 2 degrees Celsius, nearly a dozen additional tipping points could be triggered, further destabilizing climate systems and making hard-earned emissions reductions around the world much less effective at limiting warming. These higher near-term temperatures would also cause far more massive effects in the United States and globally in the next few years: crippling heat waves, catastrophic hurricanes, storms and flooding, rampant wildfires, water shortages, crop losses, and many other brutal events that would exact an immense human price in death and displacement, as well as economic costs in the trillions.
Read the full piece on Washington Post’s Outlook.
