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Extreme weather in Global North could bring climate change progress [1]
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Date: 2023-01
With two world summits on the global environment at the end of last year – COP27 and COP15 – there should have been the prospect of an immediate impact on the looming disaster of climate breakdown.
In reality, results were limited at best.
COP27 on climate change did agree to a ‘loss and damage’ fund that acknowledged the role of long-term emitters in the industrial world and the need for them to aid countries across the Global South.
Funding was proposed for accelerating the transition to renewable energy while responding to the impact of current and future climate disasters. What was lacking was any firm timescale and, even more importantly, COP27 did not secure an across-the-board commitment in the Global North to rapid decarbonisation.
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Just weeks after the summit, extreme weather events brought home the gravity of the situation. Severe floods in Brazil were followed by a devastating storm in the Philippines, bringing more floods and landslides. Then came Storm Elliott, causing destruction and scores of deaths across much of the United States and Canada. Scary events during the storm included sudden and unprecedented drops in temperature, with one temperature station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, recording a record 22°C drop in just 30 minutes.
Then it was Europe’s turn, not for snow storms but the opposite: record high temperatures, 15°C or more above normal, and ski resorts closed by rain. “We had a very warm new year last year, but this blows that out of the water,” said UK meteorologist Scott Duncan. “We observed long-standing records broken by large margins across several countries.”
Three years ago, the UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2019 said a 7.6% per annum decrease in emissions was required throughout the 2020s to bring carbon dioxide concentrations down sufficiently to keep the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Instead, emissions are still increasing. Three years of the decade have been lost and the yearly decarbonising rate now has to be closer to 10% to achieve the 1.5°C goal. No such commitment was made at COP27.
While COP27 failed to tackle its most crucial issue, the Biodiversity COP15 summit did result in an agreement to protect 30% of the world’s land ocean areas by 2030, reversing a biodiversity loss that has been going on for as many decades. This is good in theory but lacks detail and has few clear commitments on funding. Without those, it means little.
As their names reveal, neither COP27 nor COP15 were one-offs, and the existence of regular summits is a reflection of a long-term, growing awareness of the need for systemic change. Knowledge of what has to be done is clear enough, but the forces aligned to stymie change are massive, from political systems unable to embrace immediate action to prevent longer-term disaster to the deeply embedded and powerful interests of fossil carbon producers determined to maintain their immense profits.
That radical and rapid decarbonisation has to happen is clear enough, just as is the failure of the two summits, but are there are lessons to learn from three previous summits in the more distant past? To know this we need to go back 50 years, to the early 1970s. It was a time when the world economy was in turmoil, with oil prices rising over 400% in seven months from October 1973, a developing global food shortage, and rising concern over the state of the global environment.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/extreme-weather-events-global-north-climate-crisis-action/
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