Stanford University

Elizabeth May

June 3, 2022

June 2022 marks 50 years since the first United Nations environment conference in Stockholm, and 30 years since the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio.

The Rio Earth Summit was successful in producing two major legally binding treaties – one to protect biological diversity (nature) and the other to protect our climate. In the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) all nations on earth pledged to prevent “dangerous levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.” Instead, in the 30 years since 1992, we emitted more greenhouse gases (GHG) than in the century before.

Now, in 2022 we are sleepwalking toward massive species extinction events and catastrophic levels of climate change. Throw in pandemic and war and it is easy to see why politicians of all political stripes are failing.

Part of the problem is that we discount the future. Facing a daily increased risk of the loss of human civilization, we compartmentalize. We are great at deflection and denial. This is true even for those politicians who claim to understand the threat. They dress up wholly inadequate climate policy as “ambitious.” They may even believe it.

Three past heads of the UNFCCC — Christiana Figueres, Yvo de Boer and Michael Zammit Cutajar — in a recent Guardian article, pulled no punches: “For 50 years, governments have failed to act on climate change. No more excuses.”

They cite the conclusion of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in February. The IPCC, established in 1988 with Canadian leadership, is humanity’s most rigorous, laborious and extensive peer-review process. Its recent series of reports comprise the Sixth Assessment, representing the last six years of cumulative effort to understand the climate threat. What was a future possibility in 1992 is now a daily climate emergency. The February report warned:

“Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action…will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

The April 4^th report of Working Group III gave us precision on how rapidly that window will close. Start thinking of the timeline for climate action not in decades, nor even in years. Start thinking in months.

To have any hope of holding to the Paris goals of 1.5 degrees C or staying well below 2 degrees C of global average temperature increase, global emissions must “peak between 2020 and at the latest before 2025” and from that point emissions must drop like a stone to half of 2010 levels by 2030.

That gives us 30 months to ensure we stop adding emissions and start subtracting.  Only if that steep decline occurs and then progresses to net zero by 2050 can humanity avoid deeply dangerous increases in global average temperature. Unhinged from pre-2030 deadlines, “net zero by 2050” is fraud.

Even if every government on earth achieves its targets, we are on track to as much as three times hotter. We can and must adapt to levels of climate change we can no longer avoid

Quoting from the three UN climate chiefs: “Science shows action this decade to reduce all greenhouse gases is critical. But the sum total of policies in place now will take us to a world hotter by 2.7C and perhaps a catastrophic 3.6C above pre-industrial levels.”

When these experts use the word “catastrophic,” what comes to mind?

More crazy weather? Heat domes – like the one that killed nearly 600 British Columbians in four days in early July 2021? Or more atmospheric rivers – like the ones that shredded major highways in BC while flooding out hundreds of people in November 2021? Or more derechos – that wicked windstorm that tore through Ontario and Quebec in late May, killing eleven people? Or maybe more wildfires spread by that new freaky phenomenon of pyrocumulonimbus clouds – clouds that spit fire?

No.

That is not what is meant by a catastrophic 3.6 degree C global average temperature increase. Right now, we are at 1.1 degree C increased global average temperature. It will not reverse. We are dealing with some big and immutable realities of physics and chemistry. These are rules we cannot re-write.

All of what we have experienced in recent dangerous extreme weather events has occurred at 1.1-degree C above pre-industrial levels. Even if every government on earth achieves its targets, we are on track to as much as three times hotter. We can and must adapt to levels of climate change we can no longer avoid. What seems invisible to policy makers is that there are levels of climate change to which we cannot adapt.

With every increased fraction of a degree of global average temperature, millions more lives are at risk. These increases are not only irreversible, but they propel faster global warming. We are gambling with exceeding tipping points leading to self-accelerating, unstoppable global warming.

Changes are occurring on a global scale – slowing ocean currents, shifting jet streams, leading to warm air being pushed over the Arctic and Antarctic. Both poles experienced unimagined warmth in March 2022. We are risking the stability of the systems that kept humanity safe since we first emerged as a species that walks on two legs. We are experiencing a marine heat wave as the ocean absorbs the heat energy of the equivalent of 7 Hiroshima’s every second. Since 1993, the rate of ocean heat uptake has more than doubled. Our oceans are getting hotter, as well as more acidic, due to carbon in the atmosphere mixing with ocean water. Simultaneously, oxygen levels in the oceans are dropping.

It is hard to take it all in. We read the news of one disaster after another without recognizing how they are linked. Just over the last few months, people dying of heat in India and Pakistan. Severe sandstorms sending 1000 people to hospital in Iraq and cancelling flights in Kuwait. Widespread and persistent droughts impacting the Canadian Prairies and sub-Saharan Africa. Tropical Cyclones increasing in frequency and severity in southern Africa with cyclone Gombe pummeling Mozambique in March.

“Catastrophic” means the human experiment on this planet could be over. At the Stockholm+50 events this week, US Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry warned we were at risk of drifting into “a suicide pact.”

We are standing at the edge of too late. But while it is still not too late, we have to fight. While it is not too late, we have to fight like our lives depend on it because our childrens’ lives do depend on it.

No more excuses.

Contributing writer Elizabeth May, House Leader of the Green Party, is the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands.