3…2…One chance.

The world’s most important climate goal today: limiting the Earth’s global warming to 1.5°C. It is the aspiration of global agreements, and a marker of whether some countries we know will continue to exist.

A study by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, teamed with the Washington Post, explored the 1200 possibilities for climate change in the upcoming century, based on models developed by the world’s leading climate scientists, and key papers discussed by the U.N Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.

Out of the 1200 odd scenarios for climate change in the coming century, some show a world inching closer to a catastrophically hot future. while others point towards a better future. These scenarios show us what needs to be done, and what we can still do.

Out of the 1200 paths – some with temperatures rising as high as 5°C above pre-industrial levels – only 230 paths leave our planet below 1.5°C by the end of the century. Each strand is carefully simulated based upon:

1. How fast economy and population will grow?

2. How quickly climate change technology will advance?

3. How rapidly we cut our use of fossil fuels?

4. The end temperature expected.

But the scenarios that show the temperature closing the century below 1.5°C present a big problem. With their dramatic plunges in emission levels by 2025, they increasingly conflict with reality. So by filtering out those paths that were at odds with reality, we are left with 112 paths that get us to 1.5°C by 2100. These depict 2 kinds of narratives – high overshoot and low/no overshoot scenarios.

1. High overshoot: 86 paths show the Earth’s temperature leaping far above 1.5°C before coming back down again. These raise the prospect, for example, of the world experiencing dangerous changes and even calamities such as the irreversible loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

This makes it worthwhile to focus on the 26 paths that allow only for a small overshoot (or none at all). Many of these scenarios require the world to go far beyond ‘ zero emissions/ net zero’, that has been long popularised. Rather, the world will have to be removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it is putting in – ‘net negative’. That will require wide scale deployment of carbon capture technologies to remove what CO2 is already present in the atmosphere, store it underground, and likely massive reforestation or other efforts to store carbon in the land itself.

Once we cross one section of planetary boundaries, like raising the Earth’s temperature, the risks start multiplying. Every one of these boundaries is deeply interconnected, but climate change and biodiversity are two key parts/boundaries that impact all others. 10 years ago, we saw the warning lights flashing, but there was no irreversible change that had taken place. Now however, we have rapidly begun moving out of this safe zone, pushing ourselves closer to this planet’s inevitable end…

Climate has reached a global crisis point. We have faced 10 years of record-breaking climate extremes – wildfires in Australia and floods in Bangladesh and India. We risk crossing tipping points that shift the planet from being our best resilient friend; dampening our impact, to start working against us to remove the most insensitive and overpopulative species off the surface of the planet.

For the first time, we are being forced to consider the real risk of destabilising the Earth. Children are walking out of schools to demand climate action, watching in disbelief at our inability to deviate a potentially catastrophic future. The next few years to 2030 must see the most profound transformation the world has ever known. And there are a few big, BIG problems:

1 – We are only a few decades away from losing arctic sea ice in the summer.

2 – Siberian permafrost is thawing at dramatic scales.

3 – Greenland is losing trillions of tons of ice, and may be approaching a tipping point.

4 – Atlantic Ocean current circulation is slowing drastically.

5 – The Amazon is weakening, its rainforest may start emitting carbon in just 15 years.

6 – More than half the coral in the Great Barrier Reef has died.

7 – The great forests of the North are burning, threatening to turn Earth into living hell.

8 – West Antarctica may have crossed its tipping point already today.

9 – The most solid glacier in the world, East Antarctica, is starting to become unstable.

Nine of the fifteen biophysical systems that regulate the Earth’s climate are on the move. They are responsible for regulating temperature and stabilising biodiversity and ecosystems. Tipping points like their downfall bring 3 major threats:

1. Sea level rise: We are already expecting upto 1m this century, endangering the lives of over 200 million people. When the melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica is added to the equation however, we might see a 2m rise that continues to slowly flood and submerge our planet.

2. If our carbon stores like permafrost and forests flip to belching out carbon themselves, it would make our job of stabilising temperatures that much harder.

3. All these systems are linked, and deeply connected to each other. By crossing one tipping point, we lurch closer to many others.

We must find a way to take a stance, and move forward against our own fate. Saving the planet is our only objective. This is our mission, our chance to make things right. This is – the final countdown…

#savetheEarth #ClimateAction #nowornever #onechance #myonepercent #shalmalisirsi