Despite America‘s spot as the second-greatest contributor to carbon emissions behind China, U.S. President Donald Trump announced recently that he will withdraw the country from the Paris climate agreement.
Through measures to restrict carbon emissions and adopt clean energy practices, the overarching goal of the agreement — backed by nearly 200 countries — is to limit the global temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels.
Climate experts reflect on particularly compelling climate-related data points that have stayed with them over the years and that they say make the case for staying vigilant.
Tipping Points and ‘Burning Embers’
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a partnership between the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization, created a ” burning embers” graph that summarizes how risks across a range of categories, from health to Arctic Sea ice, evolve as temperatures rise; a 2-degree Celsius increase emerges as a critical tipping point.
Peter Frumhoff, an ecologist and director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, points to this graph as an “aha moment” that translates climate science to broad real-world implications and an important framework to drive personal behavior.
“Climate change is a challenging issue because some view it as distant in space — it’s a problem for the polar bears — or distant in time — it’s a problem of the future,” he says. “But what’s happening globally is also happening locally and there is limited time to engage in choices.”
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Lasting Effects
In the early 1990s, somewhere between her work with the U.N. Environment Program in Nairobi, Kenya, and with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Annie Petsonk was astounded to learn that carbon dioxide can stay in the air for 100 years.
It was a small tidbit from Jonathan Weiner’s book “The Next 100 Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth,” but one that “just changes how you approach life,” she says, by thinking twice about the lasting effects of starting a car or tuning on a light. “Carbon dioxide just hangs out up there…and what goes up must come down.”
Petsonk, now an international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, was also reading up on World War I at the time and remembers realizing that Winston Churchill’s “globally significant” decision to switch from coal to oil to power the British Navy and outmaneuver the Germans had taken place less than 100 years ago. A few quick calculations show that about half of the emissions from Churchill’s oil-powered Navy remain in the air today.
Positive Disruption
For some experts, the most impressive climate data outshine doomsday scenarios with reason for optimism.
Jim Marston, vice president of clean energy with the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group, points to analysis from Lazard, an energy consultancy, that shows that the price of solar energy in the past decade has decreased by 90 percent and the price of wind energy is a third of what it was in 2009. This means that the transition to a low-carbon electricity system is feasible at a low cost and with little disruption, he says.
“There’s a lot of hope,” Marston says. “When I heard a couple years ago that the dramatic reduction of prices predicted (for alternate forms of energy) had come true, I thought, ‘Yes, we can do this. We can save the planet.'”
Climate change has always been a matter of social justice for David Levai, acting director of the climate program with the French nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.
Levai says the multitude of data on the effects climate change has on all aspects of life is what’s most compelling. He says he is encouraged by evidence showing economic growth has become independent of energy production.
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He points to the International Energy Agency’s 2016 World Energy Outlook report that marks 2014 as a tipping point in the decoupling of economic growth and energy production. It’s a “compelling transition.”
“We always talk about how Earth will not survive climate change,” Leavai says. “But it’s not Earth, it’s humankind. Earth will adapt — it wouldn’t be the first time — but humans may not.”
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4 Experts Share Significant Climate Change Facts originally appeared on usnews.com
