A wonderful summary of the climate problem
Writing in New York Magazine, @EricLevitz explains the real issues with the terrible article by Franzen in the New Yorker (”Jonathan Franzen’s Climate Pessimism Is Justified. His Fatalism Is Not”). As part of his article, he summarizes with accuracy and nuance the true challenge we face regarding climate in this long but wonderful paragraph:
“We have already burned an unsafe amount of carbon, and nothing we do now is likely to prevent the climate from growing evermore inhospitable for the rest of our lives. We cannot know with certainty quite how much ecological devastation we’ve already bought ourselves, or exactly how much carbon we can burn without triggering mass starvation, civilizational collapse, or human extinction. Those 1.5- and two-degree warming targets you’ve heard so much about are informed by science, but they’re still inescapably arbitrary. Keeping warming below 1.5 degrees won’t be sufficient to prevent wrenching ecological disruptions (some of which will be tantamount to “end of the world” for those most severely afflicted). And at the rate we’re going, we almost certainly not going to keep warming below even two degrees, anyway. A better climate (than our current one) is not possible; at least, not for us, or our children, or their children. But the faster we decarbonize the global economy, the better our chances of sparing the world’s most vulnerable communities from near-term destruction — and our civilization from medium-term collapse — will be.”
Read it carefully. It’s the real deal.
Addendum: We can still keep warming below 2C (or even 1.5C) but it will require us to reduce emissions as fast as possible and as much as possible, starting immediately. Whether we will or not is up to us.
Addendum 2: Dr. Kate Marvel concisely nails it here, writing in Scientific American (“Shut Up, Franzen”): “Climate change is real and things will get worse—but because we understand the driver of potential doom, it’s a choice, not a foregone conclusion”
