Earth’s temperatures are rising, but our survival rates aren’t
It was during the end of the industrial revolution, around 1850, that glaciers around the world started melting. People back then didn’t know enough to care. But now, recent studies done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that there is a 50% chance that at the rate greenhouse gasses are emitted right now, global temperatures could reach or worse, surpass 1.5 ℃ (2.7 ℉) by 2040. That temperature might not seem like much, but as the temperature gets closer to 1.5 ℃, there is a “growing risk” of something called the runaway greenhouse effect, which is also known as runaway warming. This effect happens when a large amount of greenhouse gasses gets accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere and this amount is enough to block thermal radiation from getting out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Again, this event might not seem life threatening, but if such an event were to take place, it would stop the Earth from cooling down and therefore, not having any liquid water, which could then eradicate us all. And if this effect doesn’t take place, Earth and us still aren’t spared, there will be more extreme weather events, a rise in sea levels, a high risk to both marine and terrestrial life, and a major health issue to us due to the high temperatures, including a high risk of skin cancer.
As research on this topic has improved over the years, so have the emission rates. Although emission rates between the year 2000 and 2019 have slowed down by about 0.8%, emission rates are still increasing. About 5 years ago, in 2019, there were 59 million gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, which is 12% higher than that released in 2010 and about 54% higher than that released in 1990. As it continues to rise, even if it does so at a relatively slower rate every year, problems mentioned before could come into action and worsen the condition of our planet’s condition. Scientists from the British Geological Survey say that our goal should be to keep global temperatures from going past 2 ℃. A scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Haewon McJeon says is confident that we will go past the “1.5 ℃ limit in the next couple of decades,” and that how fast we can bring it down will be the key when we breach that limit. So if we don’t bring global temperatures down within the next few decades, there is an ever growing chance that the human race could get eradicated due to runaway warming. Mobilizing the governments is key to surviving.
Moving on, talking about what governments are doing, countries all around the world are following or mostly following their climate pledges, and governments of numerous major countries are trying to limit greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, the U.S., which produced the second most amount of GHG emissions, is optimistic about reducing GHG emissions by about 1 gigaton by cutting energy waste, changing energy sources, switching fuels to non - CO2 fuels and electrifying vehicles. Another example is India, where emissions have almost doubled since the start of this century. India plans to generate 50% of the country’s energy requirements from renewable forms of energy by 2030.
But, what’s ironic is that even if countries achieved their climate pledges, World Research Institute’s (WRI) research shows that they could only reduce GHG emissions by only 7% of emission levels in 2019, by 2030, which is low, compared to the 45% needed to keep global temperatures from getting past 1.5 ℃. So, having 2030 just a few years away, this rate would NOT be enough to stop the devastating effects of climate change after global temperatures get past the limits, we didn’t want it to go past. Hence, at this rate, the highly ambitious Paris Agreement, which required countries to reduce their GHG emissions by 45% by 2030. At the rate it is at right now, it would take much longer than that.
Now, we still have time, and if governments make strict and steep cuts to reduce GHG emissions, there is still a possibility of preventing the breach past the 1.5 ℃ limit. If we don’t worry about it today, our next few generations will most likely have a hard time facing the problems we arose. It’s always better to start earlier, and this is one of the times where we, as humans, have to come together and fight a problem we all could face in the future. And we could do this through spreading awareness about what climate change could possibly do to us and the future generations in the next couple decades.
Climate change isn’t science fiction, the more we just think about it without taking any action, the closer we come to killing ourselves using our own hands and past actions. As humans, we have always tried to find a cure to fighting problems we faced, but we can’t keep doing that forever. Nature will punish us in its own ways sooner or later. The only solution to climate change is to remove the root causes. Let’s all do that before it’s too late to save ourselves and our future fellow humans.
The author has used various sources to research material for this article. To preserve some kind of integrity, the citations have been written below.
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