Our earth is finite, but it looks infinite when we look out across the sea or up into the sky. This is a dangerous illusion. We have created gyres of waste plastic in our oceans, and plastic has entered our food chain. We continue to emit greenhouse gases and to heat our climate.
We have known about the science of greenhouse gases for close to 200 years, and yet we consistently fail to take action at the scale necessary to halt, let alone begin to reverse global warming. We would all like others to bear the cost of reducing emissions, preferring to continue “business as usual” until an alternative to burning fossil fuels becomes cheaper. That makes economic and business sense.
As Robert Carlyle pointed out a decade or so before we discovered the science of greenhouse gas emissions, economics is a “dismal science”. It is arguably a poor science, constructing grand theories and equations while ignoring externalities. If businesses had to carry the costs of the pollution they cause on their balance sheets, less polluting technologies would be adopted rapidly and extensively. Presently, businesses incur the cost only of their inputs; the costs imposed on us all by the pollution they cause are externalised, removing the incentive to change the business model.
The “Just Stop Oil” campaigners have it right. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. We are not achieving this. As the graph below shows, we have neither slowed nor dented our carbon emissions. In September, Atmospheric CO2 reached 422.03 parts per million.
The news agenda is congested – there is an election in the US, wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan, and in the UK, the news media are focussed only on the budget and sport. Climate change is largely ignored and yet it will impact all of us for many generations – and we are going on making it worse.
The United Nations points out that “current national climate plans fall miles short of what’s needed to stop global heating from crippling every economy and wrecking billions of lives and livelihoods across every country. (…) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut 43% by 2030, compared to 2019 levels. By 2035, net global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by 60% compared to 2019 levels. This is critical to limiting global heating to 1.5°C this century to avert the worst climate impacts. Every fraction of a degree matters, as climate disasters get rapidly worse.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns that the “Emissions Gap report is clear: We are playing with fire,” he said. “But there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.” There is currently a 100% chance that global warming will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius unless every nation fulfills pledges for net-zero emissions, but even then, there is still a 77% chance of hitting that threshold.
Annual greenhouse gas emissions reached an all-time high last year.
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) October 24, 2024
Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster – with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most.https://t.co/aOS0cfsYh2 pic.twitter.com/Mqtc3lwAxm
If global policies continue as is, the likelihood of 2 degrees Celsius of warming is 97%, with a 37% chance of warming hitting 3 degrees Celsius, the report said.
Weather is, of course, variable. People, you and I can all too easily dismiss a drought, flood, wildfire, or storm, however damaging, as mere weather events, as once-in-a-hundred-year events even as they occur more frequently. This, too, is an illusion our climate is changing, and that imposes costs on us all.
The tourism sector, too, is impacted by climate change. We need to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change, and some destinations will gain while others lose; climate change is impacting seasonality and the relative attractiveness of destinations.
