Hope by degrees

John Crump

By GRID-Arendal

December 5^th, 2018

This article was originally written for Trefoldighet, a magazine produced by the Norwegian Church. The theme for the Christmas season edition of the magazine is Hope. Soon after the magazine was released, the 24th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change got underway in Katowice, Poland. That meeting is focussed on finalising the "rule book" that will bring the Paris Climate Change Agreement into force in 2020. The first day of the two-week session included a speech from British naturalist Sir David Attenborough who called climate change "our greatest threat in thousands of years."

Sometimes I wonder why I spend so much time trying to raise awareness about climate change and other environmental problems. It would be easier to be complacent and to live my life, to go shopping and not worry.

But inaction and complacency are not the answer. They are the problem.

When my children were born I realized that I was more than an individual, that I was part of a great chain of being stretching into the future. While I worried, I now shared the hope of all parents that I had a greater stake in that future. I gained a long-term perspective beyond my own life.

That’s how we need to think about climate change, other environmental challenges and the future. We need a long-term perspective. We need to understand that our decisions will make a difference in the future. And we need to maintain a sense of hope to inspire collective action.

We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we’re really talking about, if we’re honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.(1)

“1.5 to stay alive!” is a rallying cry frequently heard at global climate change negotiations. It refers to the upper “safe” limit of global temperature increase – and it’s the main message in a new report recently released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report, which examines the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, was requested after countries at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations reached the historic Paris Agreement in 2015. That agreement contains a commitment to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’’ and to try “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C."

This effort will require "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," the IPCC report said.

If temperatures rise to 2°C, all of the world’s existing coral reefs will die out. Global sea-level rise will be around 10 centimetres, exposing another 10 million people to risks of flooding. Ocean temperatures will increase along with ocean acidity, which will threaten the marine environment’s ability sustain life. On land, crops like wheat, maize and rice will be threatened.

There is hope embedded in this scientific report. The faster the world moves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the better chance we will have in averting the worst effects of climate change and limiting warming to 1.5°C. We can do this though adaptation – improving irrigation systems to deal with drought, increasing flood protection and safeguarding fresh water supplies. We also need to change the systems in which we live: reducing our own consumption, changes in farming, diversifying crops and planning our cities better. We know how to do all of these things now.

The IPCC report says new policies, new ways of investing, new technologies, changing energy sources, are vital. The public needs to be better educated and new approaches need to be implemented that “can accelerate the wide scale behaviour changes consistent with adapting to and limiting global warming to 1.5°C.”

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.(2)

While we can’t go back to a time before our climate began to change, “what it's really about is degrees of success or degrees of failure,” climate scientist Michael Mann said in a recent interview (3). There is “a dramatic worldwide move away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy, and we have seen carbon emissions begin to plateau.”

Most important, Mann said we need to maintain a sense of hope:

“Despair and hopelessness lead us down a path of inaction much the same way that outright denial does. That would be a self-fulfilling proposition, for it would ensure that the worst impacts of climate change do play out. It's all up to us.”(3)