Should we fight for Net Zero or adapt to climate change?

Oct 24, 2024 by

By Fabiano Micoli, Mercator. (Editor’s note: A little bit of sanity in the midst of all the ‘fear porn’)

How often do politicians, prominent leaders, and the mainstream media explicitly or implicitly conflate climate change with rising CO2 concentration? Very often. It occurs so regularly that they have effectively become the same thing. Here are two examples.

Here is the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in June this year: “In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

And here is Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, in 2021, in a speech which made her famous:

“Code Red. Code Red to the G7 countries, code red, code red to the G20. Earth the COP. That’s what it said. Earth to COP. For those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to listen and for those who have a heart to feel, 1.5 is what we need to survive. 2 degrees, yes S-G [Secretary-General], is a death sentence for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of the Maldives, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, for the people of Kenya and Mozambique, and yes, for the people of Samoa and Barbados. We do not want that dreaded death sentence and we have come here today to say, ‘try harder, try harder,’ because our people, the climate army, the world, the planet needs our actions now, not next year, not in the next decade.”

I agree with them that global warming is real; I disagree that it’s time to panic. Let’s unpack this.

About global warming

The lower troposphere (our atmosphere up to 8 km altitude) has been warming at 0.16℃/decade since Dec 1, 1978. A new record was set in August 2024: “each of the last 12 consecutive months achieved their highest value [global temperature anomaly] in the 45+ year satellite record”, according to the UAH Global Temperature Report.

The Copernicus Global Climate Highlights 2023 and NOAA’s Annual 2023 Global Climate Report report a bleak situation. And there’s plenty more bad news below in this chart.

Read here.

Related Posts

Tags

Share This