‘We can’t make it better again’: what Europe’s wildfires tell us about the climate crisis (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by streetfestival@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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“When you’re among young people, it’s hard for them to understand how long we’ve known all the basic facts about climate change,” said Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who has worked on the topic for 35 years. “Even when I started as a PhD student in the 1980s, it was very clear that our emissions were causing global warming and all the consequences it would have.”

Yet even as Europe’s leaders acknowledge the scale and cause of the problem, they have weakened the very rules in place to stop it from getting worse. Two weeks ago, the European Commission proposed watering down the continent’s emissions trading system, a form of carbon market widely hailed as its most successful tool to cut pollution.

“What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”

A study Rahmstorf co-authored in 2023 found ExxonMobil’s predictions of global heating over the following decades to have been mostly accurate, as skilful as independent academic and government models, and also very much at odds with its public statements on the matter.

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[-] Foxer@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

We haven't got the technology now, never mind in the past

Even if we eliminated every single car and switched to buses and trains and every single one of those buses and trains was electrically driven and there were no fossil fuels, which at this point in time is pretty much impossible, it would still only reduce fossil emissions in the transportation sector by about 40%. The rest would still be there, and that doesn't address any of the other sources of carbon such as power generation which would be necessary to provide all of that electricity so we'd lose about half the benefit right there.

Right now we couldn't come close, to be blunt we couldn't even make a significant difference as near as I can tell. Which is why politicians keep making great promises to make the public happy and then fail to deliver

Which is why we should have been worrying about adoption and that's where our focus should be today. Absolutely we should also be putting energy and resources into developing the next generations of technology that we will need to eventually eliminate fossil fuels, but that isn't going to save us in the short term

We need massive advances in battery technology more than anything else. When it becomes as easy, efficient and cheap to store electricity as it is to store oil then this fight is over. And we need for environmental groups to get behind "not perfect' solutions. For now the latest nuclear tech is amazingly safe and pollution free but many such groups still fight it tooth and nail, even though it could massively cut fossile fuel use.

But while we wait to get there, we need to be doing what is necessary to adapt. Changing laws about making cooling options mandatory in new buildings and homes, having detection and firebomber capacity to deal with wildfires properly, figuring out how to deal with water issues etc etc.

We can't stop climate change right now. We can't even substantially slow it down. The day will come but it's not here