An intergenerational crime against humanity
Notes from a climate scientist: Three things you need to know about climate change
Condensed and edited from an essay by Dr Joelle Gergis published in What’s the Big Idea?, Australia Institute, 2024, with commentary by WCC member Honey Nelson
How much time do we have left to avert planetary scale disaster? Or should we be talking climate disaster right now?
Dr Joelle Gergis worked with the IPCC. She advises us most stringently that present global warming is unlocking irreversible climate change, and that moreover, the speed and extremity of this will be impossible for our human societies to adapt to. Let alone the Earth’s suffering (and already direly depleted) population of animals and plants.
Dr. Gergis sees the climate crisis escalating so fast, that despite scientists being ‘apolitical’, it is intolerable for her to remain silent any longer.
She stresses three imperative messages to us all from climate and Earth scientists:
1. The situation is bad
Indeed, it is much worse than most of us think or believe.
The world temperature is on a big overshoot of the 2016 Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees Celsius (⁰C) above pre-industrial (c.1900) levels. At present rates, it is 90% likely that the Earth will heat by 2.3 to 4.5⁰C by 2100 (estimated 3.5⁰C) Moreover, even if all national efforts comply, it will inevitably rise by 2 to 3 degrees (estimated 2.4⁰C).
We are already warmed by 1.2 ⁰C. The world is manifestly experiencing the miseries of this early heat increase: massive storms and floods, often in exceptional locations, extraordinary winter forest fires, a rising terror of bushfires in dry-country summers.
Heating will increase by three times this level, by the year 2100. Can we even imagine the exhaustions and sufferings by our grandchildren and beyond??
These extreme conditions bring unprecedented environmental and social destructions and disruptions to life on Earth, far beyond prior and historic human experience. (JG’s words)
Abrupt climate change is triggered by lower levels of global warming than science anticipated. We are inexorably headed into major Earth transformations, even if we met with all the Paris Agreement conditions.
Tipping points:
Such transformations of climate, land and ocean conditions are largely irreversible, despite any remedial measures: because like any complex organic system, once critical tipping points are over-reached, unstoppable cascades of changes are launched.
For example:
The vast, climate-critical ice sheets of western Antarctica and of Greenland are disintegrating rapidly; their melt-down due to our present global warming (currently within Paris Agreement advisory range of 1.5 to 2⁰C).
The melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet will deliver a global sea-level rise of up to 4 metres. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet will deliver a sea-level rise of up to 7 metres.
These great melted ice-sheets will not re-freeze for thousands of years, no matter what efforts we make. These disastrous rises in sea-level will be effectively permanent.
For each rise of 1 metre in sea-level, our coastlines retreat by an average of 100 metres inland.
Thus even under present conditions approaching 1.5⁰C rise: this still commits our Earth and future life to a sea-level rise of 2 to 3 metres, for the next many centuries. Under a likely Earth temperature rise of 2⁰C, the consequent rise in sea-level is 6 metres.
Can we imagine the scale of the destruction and loss? - even with 1.5⁰C and 3 metres, let alone 3.5⁰C and 7+ metres by the year 2100.
This is a horrific legacy to future generations, and indeed all life. It will not be possible for people to adapt to such high rates of global heating. In fact, it is delusional and dangerous to pretend that we can.
2. The situation is going to get worse
Paris Agreement ‘net-zero’ aspirations rely heavily on commitment to ‘carbon capture and storage’ (CCS) technology, which allows fossil fuel plants to continue as usual as long as they use CCS to ‘abate’ their emissions.
Carbon capture and storage entails condensing carbon emissions into a liquid, which is then injected deep underground or offshore into ‘permanent’ geological storage.
However, the CCS industry is not yet fully scientifically assessed, let alone regulated.
Moreover, CCS doesn’t work at the huge scale necessary for reducing global emissions. The 2023 total CO2 storage was 49 million tonnes, where the world emission output of CO2 is 41 billion tonnes: that is, CCS captures 0.1% only of world output.
CCS is thus deceptively and meaninglessly used to justify the continued burning of fossil fuels.
This is an unforgiveable betrayal of future generations that will guarantee the destabilisation of the Earth’s climate.
3. Our political leaders are not doing enough to address the crisis
Despite ‘zero’ pledges, by 2030 world governments are working towards double the permissible production of fossil fuels, within the conditions of 1.5⁰C rise in global warming.
Coal production is planned to increase until 2030, and oil and gas production until 2050.
The IMF states that in 2022, world governments subsidised fossil fuel industries by $7 trillion. Australia in 2024 subsidised them with $14.5 billion.
82% of CO2 emissions since 1960 are from fossil fuels. The rapid elimination of these vast emissions is necessary to avoid irreversible changes to our planet.
Indeed, the shutting down of fossil fuel industries is politically difficult. But trying to ‘adapt’ to an uninhabitable world will be infinitely harder.
Every day we delay, we lock in more permanent changes into the climate system.
Our leaders need to put a price on carbon, and accelerate the clean energy transition urgently.
And we as citizens need to keep pressure on leaders to enact science-based policies to secure a liveable future.
‘If we fail to rise to this challenge, people in the future will look back at the world’s collective failure to shut down the fossil fuel industries during the 2020s, and see it for what it really was – an intergenerational crime against humanity.’ (Joelle Gergis, 2024).
Artwork by Honey Nelson.