As with every November, as the COP climate change summit gets underway the world’s attention has been somewhere else. There are wars going on, wreaking havoc and causing downstream consequences, from tensions in international politics to higher energy prices. We haven’t fully recovered from Covid’s effects yet and the high cost of living still hurts. Nevertheless, our attention should be on COP as so much is at stake.
With current policies, we’re on track for a global warming of closer to three degrees Celsius, rather than the Paris target of 1.5C. Three degrees of warming would be more than half the difference between global temperatures in the depths of the last ice age and the stable Holocene period that followed when human cultures developed.
With every bit of further warming, we expect more frequent and intense heat and drought events than we experience today, and more frequent intense rainfall. We would lose summer sea ice in the Arctic increasingly frequently, with severe consequences for Arctic wildlife and ecosystems.
However, one of the most worrying concerns is that many of the changes we are causing are not readily reversible. We are seeing rapid melting around Greenland and there are concerns around the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which is threatened by warmer ocean waters underneath its ice shelves.
Arctic wildfires, marine heatwaves
Every delay in mitigation will lead to large and long-lasting sea level rise, which will challenge some of our beautiful and ancient coastal cities. But we don’t even have to look at the future – we have already seen severe extreme events. Recent large fires following heatwaves in the Arctic, Mediterranean, Western USA and Australia were a surprise despite some prior warmings.
These fires burned forests and infrastructure, and released large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, along with smoke that created widespread health risks. Holidays in the Mediterranean are now threatened by wildfires and extreme heat.
The recent severe flooding near Valencia highlights the human and economic toll extreme events can cause, and adapting to their increased severity and cleaning up after them challenges economies.
Extreme marine heatwaves have already led to mass bleaching events of beautiful coral ecosystems and may threaten their survival. Warming, ocean oxygen loss and acidification have led to mass extinctions in the Earth’s deep past, and we all depend on the chain of life.
UK in danger of falling behind
Unfortunately, carbon concentrations are still rising in the atmosphere. To limit warming to 1.5C or even 2C would need greenhouse gas emissions to peak and then drop pretty much immediately, and progress on a path to ‘net zero’ emissions. The essential step to get there is to rapidly phase out burning fossil fuels (or capture all the carbon emitted from it).
The UK was the first country to set a legally binding carbon target, yet we are in danger of falling behind on this commitment. Scotland and England were pioneers of the use of fossil fuels, which enabled rapid development but also set us on this path to rapid global warming. It is fitting to be pioneers to move on from this path.
So, what do we need from COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan? First, we need strengthened action on emission reductions across the globe to put the world on a more convincing path to net zero. This is urgent as the momentum of climate change mitigation seems to have slowed while the world has been distracted by the political and financial situation. Yet it is particularly important to think about climate change, as it makes all our other challenges worse.
We are worried about immigration, yet continued, severe climate change in the tropics destabilises regions and sets people on the move. We are worried about cost of living, yet disasters are extremely costly. We are worried about food security, yet climate change adds costs to the food system and challenges food production, with extreme heat and drought threatening harvests. Climate change is a threat to biodiversity as it changes food webs and ecosystems.
Hope for a better future
COP29 also needs to determine how to support the Global South in the energy transition and in addressing the costs of climate change. The Global South is disproportionally hit by climate change, yet these regions have contributed least to the carbon emissions that caused it. When wallets and budgets are squeezed, it is unpopular to spend money elsewhere, but we cannot refuse to help them deal with a problem that is largely caused by the developed world. This is particularly true for low-lying islands, which struggle to cope with sea-level rise.
But the most important argument for addressing climate change is that it creates hope for a better future. A future where we generate our energy more cheaply and largely from renewables, such as wind and solar energy. While locally intermittent, the UK and particularly Scotland is blessed with ample wind resources across its regions.
Electric mobility pollutes less, and using more public transport and eating less meat will be good for our health. The transition to this future is not free – we need to invest in energy and car charging infrastructure, and improve our energy efficiency. However, there’s a lot to hope for from the move away from fossil fuels, and a lot to lose from stalling.
Burning rivers and ozone hole
We have solved environmental problems before. Rivers no longer go on fire due to chemical pollution as they did in the US in the 1960s, and the 1950s urban air quality problems are behind us following the introduction of regulations. We have avoided a planet where a depleted ozone layer threatens us all and also enhances global warming – yet it took many amendments to the Montréal protocol to reach the present stage where the ozone layer is slowly recovering.
We’ve done it before, although for a more limited problem. We have invested in our environment, and it worked. Let’s do it again, and move forward, not back.
Image credits: COP29 images: Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Spanish floods: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images: Offshore windfarm, Monty Rakusen/Getty Images
The article was originally published in The Scotsman on 9 November 2024.
