v: The Climate Column
1.5 degrees— can Joe save the day? Patrick Dunne On April 22nd, 2021, we saw President Biden host a Global Climate Summit, complete with some good-looking promises, impressive-sounding targets, and 40 world leaders making the right noises about climate change. But what do the targets mean? How do they stack up against what we actually need to happen to keep global average heating below 1.5 degrees? This target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius was set at the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Paris 2015 (COP15) and agreed to by almost every country. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees, known as SR1.5. I know a bit about this the SR1.5 as, along with my partner and more than 100 artists, activists and members of the public, I took part in a mass reading (1) of the report at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which lasted for 50 hours. Staged readings also look place in London and at the Scottish Parliament, and the project has subsequently been taken up by local activists in Christchurch, New Zealand, and in Perth and Adelaide in Australia. SR1.5 is an extraordinary document, at once the most interesting, impenetrable and important thing I have ever read. It arrived during the activism explosion of late 2018, when Extinction Rebellion protests appeared on bridges in London, and a Swedish teenager sat on her own outside the parliament building in Stockholm. That same teenager (Greta Thunberg, of course) later submitted SR1.5 as evidence when she spoke to Congress in Washington, DC. The document is stunning in its depth and scope. To show people how much research went into it at our Fringe event, we printed the entire bibliography onto a banner; even using an 8pt font size, the banner was large enough to cover the whole side of a shipping container.
What did SR1.5 warn us about? What did it tell us we needed to do, and by when? The document detailed the projected— but meticulously researched —impact of global warming at 1.5 degrees higher than preindustrial levels on human and ecological systems. It then compared this to the impact of global warming of 2 degrees, a difference measured in metres of sea level rise, and in hundreds of millions of deaths and many more displacements. The document talks of ocean acidification, species loss, resource wars, droughts and other crises too numerous to list. We are beginning to see these effects already: the SR1.5 tells us that 'temperature rise to date has already resulted in profound alterations to human and natural systems'. The world is currently warming by an average increase of 1 degree— but we are hurtling towards 3-4 degrees: The current nationally determined contributions [i.e. the agreed levels of emissions per country, following the Paris Agreement] ... do not limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Depending on mitigation decisions after 2030, they cumulatively track toward a warming of 3 to 4 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100. (SR1.5 1:1) This is well within the lifetimes of children born in wealthy countries today; by this point, life as we know it will be threatened across huge swathes of the globe, with no one left unaffected. The ecological and humanitarian crises and increases in temperature and sea level caused by existing emissions are already locked in, perhaps for centuries; these effects are irreversible. But the SR1.5 report details some ways in which the worst outcomes arising from a further half degree of heating may be avoided— perhaps. As critics have pointed out, many of the
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