From geophysics to sociophysics

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By LUIZ CÉSAR MARQUES FILHO*

Societies are now exhaustively alerted by science about what the coming years of this decade and the next have in store for them.

In 2017, just five years ago, we lived on another planet. A planet on which work published by Richard J. Millar of the University of Exeter and nine co-authors in the journal Nature Geoscience could still be titled: “Carbon budgets and trajectories consistent with limiting warming to 1,5oC".[1] Its authors then suggested that the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement, that is to say, to limit the warming of the global land and sea average temperature combined to 1,5oC above the pre-industrial period (1850-1900), it was not yet “a geophysical impossibility”:[2]

“Assuming emissions peak and decline below current [2015] levels by 2030, and continue thereafter at a much steeper decline, which would be historically unprecedented but consistent with a standard ambitious mitigation scenario ( RCP2.6), such an assumption results in a likely range of warming peaking 1,2°C to 2°C above the mid-2th century. If CO2100 emissions are continuously adjusted over time to limit warming to 1,5 to 2°C, with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation, future cumulative net CO250 emissions are unlikely to be less than 540 GtC and greater than XNUMX GTC.

So limiting warming to 1,5°C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but will likely require meeting reinforced 2030 pledges, followed by defiantly deep and rapid mitigation. Strengthening short-term emission reductions would shield against a high climate response or against subsequent economically, technically or politically unviable reduction rates.”

Richard Millar and colleagues claimed, in short, that radical reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would offer a 66% probability of keeping warming below 0,6oC above the average temperatures of 2015. Let us remember that in 2012 the average global warming was around 0,85oC (0,65 - 1,06oC) above 1880, as pointed out in 2013 by the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).[3] According to data from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS/NASA), this warming would reach 1oC in 2014 compared to the reference period 1880-1920. The survey results by Millar and colleagues seemed, therefore, to bring great news and it is not surprising that they received a lot of attention in the press.[4]

It is true that the scientific community received the work of Millar and colleagues with reticence, which I tried to register in two articles also from 2017,[5] relying mainly on a review by Jeff Tollefson,[6] a columnist of Nature. In any case, the work's proposal was encouraging: if GHG emissions declined over the third decade of the century below their 2015 level and continued to decline vigorously after 2030, nothing in the laws of physics still excluded the possibility of contain global average warming by 1,5oC above the pre-industrial period (1850-1900). In 2019, five of the ten authors of the 2017 article returned to the load in another work, whose first author was Christopher Smith, from the University of Leeds.[7]

Published in the magazine Nature Communications., the article was entitled: “The current infrastructure of fossil fuels does not yet condemn us to a warming of 1,5oC".[8] His main thesis reinforced the idea that the warming limit of 1,5oC was still within reach:[9] “We focus on committed warming from current fossil fuel assets. Here we show that if carbon-intensive infrastructure is decommissioned at the end of its useful life from the end of 2018, there is a 64% chance that the peak global average temperature increase will remain below 1,5° W. Delaying mitigation until 2030 considerably reduces the likelihood of containing warming to 1,5°C, even if the rate of decline in fossil fuel use accelerates. While the challenges set by the Paris Agreement are daunting, we indicate that 1,5°C remains possible and achievable with ambitious and immediate emission reductions across all sectors.”

 

The second phase of accelerating warming after 2015

As controversial as it was, the thesis that an average global warming limited to 1,5oC was still on the list of geophysical possibilities and was perhaps sustainable until 2019. To continue supporting this thesis in 2022 would be totally inappropriate. As stated above, we live today on another planet. Droughts, floods, heat peaks, fires, health crises and pollution, resulting in increased food insecurity, including in rich countries, are now phenomena whose magnitude is unprecedented in historical records.

Such catastrophes become more intense, more frequent and potentially more lethal day by day, as happened in the summer of 2021 and in the current summer, in the northern hemisphere. Its impacts now occur at nearly every latitude on the planet, killing people, causing untold suffering and widespread destruction of infrastructure. These impacts are now on a much more aggressive acceleration curve, and it is very important to pay attention to the fact that the aggressiveness of this curve was not predicted by the models. Not enough emphasis has been placed on the statement in the Sixth IPCC Report:“The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are greater than those estimated in previous assessments (high reliability)”.[10]

In fact, nobody predicted that in 2021 Canada would experience a temperature of 49,6°C. Nor was it anticipated that by 2022 large perennial rivers such as the Po, the Rhine, the Loire, the Rhone, the Danube, the Thames,[11] the Yangtze in China (the largest river in Asia) and the Colorado in the USA, among many other large rivers, to reach such low levels or even dry up completely in long stretches, compromising navigation, cooling of nuclear reactors and the water supply. Nobody foresaw, finally, that the fires in the countries of the European Union in 2022 would devastate more than 700 thousand hectares until August 19,[12] with predictions of 1 million hectares burned by the end of the year. The area burned in these countries until mid-August is twice the area burned on average for the period 2006-2021, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Area burned (ha) in European Union countries until mid-August 2022 (red), average and minimum and maximum areas burned for the period 2006-2021 (Source: European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), 15/VIII/2022)

In Russia, the fire situation is getting worse from year to year. According to official data, between January 1 and July 31, 2022, at least 3,2 million hectares of forests were consumed by fire and the Russian government declared a state of emergency in seven regions of the country.[13]

One of the main causes of this generalized worsening of climate imbalances lies in the fact that since 2016 there has been a second phase of acceleration of warming, shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Mean surface, land and sea temperatures combined, relative to the base period 1880-1920, based on GISTAMP data. Annual averages: curves with black squares (blue); average curves every 11 years (red) and best linear trend between 1970 and 2015 (green), with average warming of 0,18oC per decade. The arrows mark the effects of the 2 “Super El Niños” of 1998 and 2016 (Source: James Hansen, Makiko Sato & Reto Ruedy, “Global Temperature in 2021”, 13/I/2021. Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program. Earth Institute, Columbia University).

In the first phase of acceleration of warming, this evolved from a rate of 0,07oC per decade (1880-2018) to 0,18oC per decade (1970-2015). The second phase of this acceleration shows a jump to the current rate of 0,32oC per decade, with a trend towards an average rate of 0,36oC per decade between 2016 and 2040. Table 1 summarizes these two phases of accelerating warming:

Table 1 - Warming rates per decade for three periods (1880-2040), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Earth Institute (EI)

periods

1880-2018 1970-2015 2016-2040
warming /decade 0,07°C (NOAA) 0,18°C (NOAA/EI) 0,36°C (EI)

Sources: Global Climate Report 2019, NOAA; James Hansen & Makiko Sato, “Global Warming Acceleration”. Earth Institute, Columbia University, 14/2020/13; James Hansen & Makiko Sato, July Temperature Update: Faustian Payment Comes Due”. 2021/VIII/XNUMX.

The planet that prompted the work of Millar, Smith and colleagues was going through a slow warming period – between 1999 and 2014 – a period sometimes called the “hiatus” in global warming.[14] Today the reality is another. As James Hansen and Makiko Sato put it: “Our expectation is that the global warming rate for the quarter century 2015-2040 will be about double the warming rate of 0,18oC per decade over the period 1970-2015 unless appropriate measures are taken”.[15]

This means that contain the heating in 1,5oC, as proposed in 2015 by the signatories of the Paris Agreement, not only became impossible; it also means that this limit must be breached much earlier than expected, that is, still in this third decade of the century and perhaps even in the next El Niño. In February 2022, Nafeez Ahmed published an article titled: “COP26 Pledges Will Have Catastrophic Consequences, Says Former Director of NASA Climate Science.”

In it, Ahmed summarizes well this new reality, expressed in four statements by James Hansen, according to which we will not only exceed the 1,5oC at some point in this decade, as we are already geophysically condemned to a heating of at least 2oC:[16] (1) “There is no chance of keeping global warming below 1,5oW". (“There is now no chance whatever of keeping global warming below 1.°C”). (2) “The ceiling of 1,5oC in global warming will be breached this decade” (“The 1.5 °C global warming ceiling will be breached this decade”). (3) “Global warming of at least 2°C is now baked into Earth's future”. (2) “That level of warmth will occur by mid-century.”

 

2020, the lost date

To maintain any chance of avoiding global average warming greater than 1,5oC it would have been necessary to start the process of reducing GHG emissions to 2020. This date emerges from a scientific consensus consolidated in 2017 in an article signed by Christiana Figueres and scientists from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Climate Tracker Initiative, among others, who called it “Three years to safeguard our climate”.[17] Aware of this deadline, Christiana Figueres and other climate leaders already created the “2016 Mission” in 2020, whose objective was to generalize the perception that the year 2020 was, in fact, the deadline for the peak of GHG emissions: “ If the proposal is to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, then we need to change the game by 2020”.[18]

On the same “Mission 2020” website, Thomas Stocker, co-director of the IPCC (2008-2015) reinforced the same verdict:[19] “Delayed and insufficient mitigation makes it impossible to limit global warming permanently. The year 2020 is crucial for defining global ambitions on reducing emissions. If CO emissions2 continue to increase beyond that date, the most ambitious mitigation targets will become unattainable”.

Already in 2017, Jean Jouzel, former vice-president of the IPCC, reiterated the deadline of 2020 in an interview: “To maintain any chance of remaining below 2°C, it is necessary that the peak of emissions be reached no later than 2020 ”.[20] In mid-2019, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and director emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, returned to the same point: “The mathematics of climate is brutally clear: if it is certain that the climate cannot be cured in a few years, it can be fatally injured by negligence by 2020”.[21] Finally, in an opening statement at COP25 in December 2019, Hoesung Lee, Director of the IPCC, warned delegates: “Let me remind you that our assessments show that stabilizing climate change requires that greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse effect will peak next year.[22]

Precisely in 2020, the pandemic brought down global CO emissions2 related to power generation by 5,2%, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)[23], and overall at 6,4%.[24] This drop in emissions was unprecedented and raised hopes that emissions had peaked. Totally unfounded hopes, because the increase in GHG emissions is inevitable in an economic system whose raison d'être is the accumulation of capital, so that any external stimulus, be it an economic crisis, a war or a pandemic, acts only ephemeral about this system. Therefore, in 2021, GHG emissions made the biggest leap after 2010, reaching almost the levels of 2019, and 2022 emissions may already exceed those of 2019.[25] With regard to CO emissions2 associated with power generation, they reached, according to the IEA, “their highest level in history in 2021”.[26]

 

The sociophysics of global warming

It would be interesting to know if Richard Millar, Chris Smith and colleagues, after five years and almost 300 GtCO2-eq emitted since 2018, still maintain their hypothesis that an average planetary warming limited to 1,5oC is not yet a “geophysical impossibility”. It does not seem likely that they will maintain it, but, as a matter of fact, their answer matters little because the question of the geophysical possibility or impossibility of containing global warming at a certain level, be it 1,5oC or 2oC, was never the central issue. The central issue, when talking about levels of warming that are still avoidable or already inevitable, is not so much understanding the laws of physics, but understanding the interactions between physics, the economic system and the legal order that guarantees the permanence of this system. Brazil is an exemplary case of interaction between physics and society.

Here, the destruction of all biomes by fires clearly reflects the climate crisis, given the droughts that recurrently devastate the country, but this destruction results above all from the criminal activity of agribusiness, which has long controlled the National Congress and has become the biggest driver of the ruin of the country. According to MapBiomas, in the first seven months of 2022 alone, almost 3 million hectares (2.932.972 ha) were consumed by fires. “In the Amazon, the fire reached an area of ​​1.479.739 hectares, while in the Pampa 28.610 hectares were burned between January and July 2022. and 7% in the Pampa (107 ha)”.[27]

Just to give an idea of ​​the magnitude of the climate tragedy and unpunished agribusiness crimes, the area burned in Brazil between January and July 2022 is greater than the area of ​​the state of Alagoas (27,8 km2). In this interaction between physics and society, the socioeconomic and political side has always been more decisive than the geophysical side and this is the reason why the answer to the question of inevitable warming in each historical moment must emerge from a dialogue between knowledges. To advance this new and essential dialogue, economists must understand that their “sustainable” economic growth formulas only serve to exacerbate the problem, since still very rare are those who admit that the economy is just a subsystem of the biosphere and, in general, , of the Earth system, which has dictated its limits for a long time, but in vain.

Sociologists and political scientists, in turn, must leave their comfort zones and become literate in Earth system sciences, as no political program can ignore these sciences anymore. It makes no sense, for example, to fight for a democratic agrarian reform, ignoring the fact that the climate system is very quickly making agriculture unfeasible. Therefore, any political program worthy of the name must today be a sociophysical program, that is to say, a program that combines the acceleration of social change and the equally drastic slowdown of climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution.

For their part, scientists need to understand the absurdity of recommending the mitigation of GHG emissions within the framework of a thermo-fossil civilization, destructive and polluting habitats and organisms. And understanding this absurdity implies, for them, taking radically anti-capitalist political positions. For the elementary functioning of globalized capitalism implies the disjunctive growth-or-crisis, and both situations only increase the anthropic pressures on the Earth system.

The recent “Open Letter to all climate scientists” written by an eminent scientist like Bill McGuire, urging them to assume their political responsibilities and to say things as they know they really are, is just the latest example of a attitude change that needs to be generalized:[28] “While our world is slowly going to hell, many of you, studying and recording his death, had nothing to say on the matter and remained in the shadows when it was necessary for you to hog the spotlight. The common justification is always the same: mumbled excuses about the need for objectivity, about how they shouldn't get involved in politics, about how they are just faithful recorders of facts; a silo mindset that protects them from having to make difficult decisions or engage with others outside their comfort zone.”

 

The failure of the Paris Agreement

Sociophysics is the science – capable of combining quantitative thinking and critical thinking – required by the new planet we live on. It is the science, in short, of the Anthropocene. In the light of sociophysics, the question of knowing when the goal of the Paris Agreement was definitely lost turns out to be a false question, since this goal was born unattainable. Not because in 2015 climate science disallowed it. On the contrary, nothing in science then implied the intrinsic unfeasibility of the goals of the Paris Agreement. But what good is this Agreement and all of climate science in a society where, just to give one example, private banks can funnel trillions of dollars into the fossil fuel industry after the Paris Agreement, in blatant mockery of scientific evidence and in open contempt for the conditions for the possibility of societies to survive?

We are talking here about financial resources in the order of 4,6 trillion dollars between 2016 and 2021 alone, as shown by “Banking Climate Chaos”:[29] “In the six years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the 60 largest private banks in the world have financed fossil fuels with US$ 4,6 trillion, with US$ 742 billion in 2021 alone. Fossil fuel financing in 2021 remained above levels 2016, when the Paris Agreement was signed. Of particular importance is the revelation that the 60 banks described in the report funneled $185,5 billion last year alone to the 100 companies that did the most to expand the fossil fuel sector.”

The Paris Agreement was stillborn because it always lacked the social and political conditions to be successful. Therefore, the decisive issue was never the text of the Paris Agreement. The decisive issue, which is being decided today, is the ability to radically change society, in order to stop global warming and the loss of biodiversity at levels that are still compatible with human adaptation and that of millions of other species. What cannot be lost sight of boils down to this premise: the Paris Agreement or any other agreement will not prevent the climate system from warming up beyond our adaptive capacity.

It will continue to heat up as long as capitalism continues to exist, and this for two reasons: (1) there was not, there is not and will not be in a discernible future, within the scope of the capitalist system, transition towards a decarbonized energy matrix. In 2000, fossil fuels satisfied 86,1% of global primary energy demand. In 2020, this percentage dropped to 84,3% and in 2040, according to projections by the World Economic Forum, fossil fuels will still satisfy 77% of this demand. It goes without saying that, in absolute numbers (and the climate system is unfortunately only interested in absolute numbers), the volume of fossil fuels burned was much greater in 2020 than in 2000, and will be even greater in 2040. Even if new pandemics are likely and new economic crises bring down this consumption once again, someone still believes, after the recovery of this consumption already in 2021, that CO emissions2 Will they fall by half in 2030, in relation to 2010, 2017 or any date of the kind, as the signatories of the Paris Agreement pretend to commit? The war in Ukraine was the last pretext to blow up what was left of that Agreement and the recent “Inflation Reduction Act” of Joe Biden in the US was celebrated by the fossil industry.[30]

(2) Even if an energy transition were to occur, it would require a momentary increase in the use of fossil fuels to mine the metals necessary for the large-scale construction of wind towers and photovoltaic panels, maintaining the current levels of energy consumption. Therefore, the only way to deviate from the collapse trajectory on which we are advancing with ever greater speed is to drastically reduce the current level of global energy consumption of the order of 580 million Terajoules (0,58 Zettajoules), or about 13,8 billion tons of oil equivalent per year.[31] And that assumes, of course, another social organization, in which the richest drastically reduce their carbon footprint so that the poorest can have their basic needs met. The rich will always have a hard time accepting this, but they must understand that this diminution is the only and last lifeline not just for their wealth, but for their lives.

 

What really matters

The discussion about the date on which global warming will momentarily and/or irreversibly exceed the targets of the Paris Agreement (1,5oC - 2oC) it may be interesting from a scientific point of view, but, for societies, what really matters are three central facts: (i) For humanity and other species, it is of minimal relevance to know whether they will suffer the brutal impacts of equal or greater warming to 1,5oC by 2030 or, at best, a few years later. Instead of trying to determine at what speed we are approaching chaos, what really matters is understanding the imperative need to change trajectory, in order to suffer the least possible heating in geophysical terms.

(ii) To stop and reverse the acceleration of warming in a timely manner, it is necessary to break with the capitalist system, embodied in the current energy and food systems, both globalized and acting in synergy. It will be necessary, in short, to deglobalize the economy and globalize politics within the framework of a new democracy of territories and a new care for the planet's natural heritage.

(iii) To those who claim, finally, that it is not realistic to consummate this civilizational rupture in this decade, it is necessary to answer that it is realism that brought us to this final crossroads. Unrealists are the professionals of gradualism. Since 1990, there have been 9 IPCC Reports and 26 Conferences of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). And despite these Reports and Conferences, GHG emissions and their concentrations in the atmosphere have not ceased to increase. Between 2012 and 2019, they increased at an average rate of 1,1% per year, and that's not counting emissions from land use change, especially deforestation! In 2019, they were about 59% higher than in 1990 and 44% higher than in 2000.[32]

If capitalism has always made the Paris Agreement unfeasible, realism covered it up and delayed as much as possible the admission of its congenital failure. The central agenda of the last two COPs was to establish the Rulebook of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the COP 27 agenda in Egypt will be to implement carbon markets, the magic recipe for turning the climate emergency into business opportunities. Societies today are exhaustively alerted by science about what the coming years of this decade and the next have in store for them.

Avoiding what is still avoidable requires, from now on, that they take the governance of the planet into their own hands, leaving militaristic nationalisms aside. Continuing to underestimate the existential threats that weigh on all societies, rich and poor alike, is tantamount to condemning oneself to suicide. In a word, surviving on this new planet presupposes the construction of an eco-democratic society, in which human rights are finally understood as a dependent and inseparable dimension of the rights of nature. Everything else, as important as it may seem, is an illusion. It's just another avatar of "realism".

* Luiz Cesar Marques Filho He is a professor at the Department of History at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Capitalism and environmental collapse (Unicamp edition).

Originally published on Journal of Unicamp.

 

Notes


[1] Cf. Richard J Millar et al., “Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C”. Nature Geoscience, 18/IX/2017.

[2] See Millar et al. (2017): “Assuming emissions peak and decline to below current levels by 2030, and continue thereafter on a much steeper decline, which would be historically unprecedented but consistent with a standard ambitious mitigation scenario (RCP2.6), results in a likely range of peak warming of 1.2–2.0 °C above the mid-nineteenth century. If CO2 emissions are continuously adjusted over time to limit 2100 warming to 1.5 °C, with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation, net future cumulative CO2 emissions are unlikely to prove less than 250 GtC and unlikely greater than 540 GtC. Hence, limiting warming to 1.5 °C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation. Strengthening near-term emissions reductions would hedge against a high climate response or subsequent reduction rates proving economically, technically or politically unfeasible”.

[3] Cf. IPCC, Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013. The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers, p. v: “Global average land and sea surface temperature data, as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0,85oC (0,65oC to 1,06oC) C over the period 1880-2012” (“The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C, over the period 1880 to 2012”).

[4] See, for example, “Chance of 1,5 oC is greater than previously thought (but still quite small)”. Observatório do Clima (Climate Observatory), 19/IX/2017; Damian Carrington, “Ambitious 1.5C Paris climate target is still possible, new analysis shows”. The Guardian, 18/IX/2017; “Limiter le réchauffement climatique à +1,5 oC est encore possible, si…”. The Express, 19/IX/2017.

[5] Cf. L. Marques, “Scientific hopes and basic political facts about the Paris Agreement”. Journal of Unicamp, 25/IX/2017; Ditto, “Too late for 3oC?”, Journal of Unicamp, 21/XI/2017.

[6] Cf. Jeff Tollefson, “Limiting global warming to 1.5 oC may still be possible”. Nature, 18/IX/2017: “some researchers are already questioning the conclusions”.

[7] The five authors in common in both works are: Richard J. Millar, Piers Forster, Myles Allen, Jan Flugestvedt and Joeri Rogelj.

[8] See Christopher J. Smith et al., “Current fossil fuel infrastructure does not yet commit us to 1.5 °C warming”. Nature Communications., January 2019.

[9] See Chris Smith et al., cit. (2019): “We focus on the committed warming from present-day fossil fuel assets. Here we show that if carbon-intensive infrastructure is phased out at the end of its design lifetime from the end of 2018, there is a 64% chance that peak global mean temperature rise remains below 1.5 °C. Delaying mitigation until 2030 considerably reduces the likelihood that 1.5 °C would be attainable even if the rate of fossil fuel retirement was accelerated. Although the challenges laid out by the Paris Agreement are daunting, we indicate 1.5 °C remains possible and is achievable with ambitious and immediate emission reduction across all sectors.

[10] See IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers, 2022, p. 8: “The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments (high confidence)”.

[11] Cf. “Drought intensifies energy crisis in Europe”. ClimaInfo, 15/VIII/2022

[12] Cf. “Forest fires have burned a record 700,000 hectares in the EU this year”. Euronews, 19/2022/XNUMX.

[13] Cf. “Siberian Wildfires Burn 3 Mln Hectares of Forest Since January – State Watchdog”. The Moscow Times

[14] Cf. Jeff Tollefson, “Global warming 'hiatus' debate flares up again”. Nature, 24/II/2016.

[15] Cf. James Hansen & Makiko Sato, July Temperature Update: Faustian Payment Comes Due”. 13/VIII/2021: “We should expect the global warming rate for the quarter of a century 2015-2040 to be about double the 0.18°C/decade rate during 1970-2015, unless appropriate countermeasures are taken.”

<http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/Emails/July2021.pdf>.

[16] See Nafeez Ahmed, “COP26 Pledges will have Catastrophic Consequences, Says Ex-NASA Climate Chief”. Byline Times, 16/II/2022.

[17] Cf. Christiana Figueres, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Gail Whiteman, Johan Rockström, Anthony Hobley & Stefan Rahmstorf, “Three years to safeguard our climate”. Nature, 29/2017/XNUMX.

[18] See the website of Mission 2020: “If we are to reach net zero emissions by 2050, we must turn the corner by 2020”.https://mission2020.global/about/>.

[19] “Both delay and insufficient mitigation efforts shut the door on limiting global mean warming permanently. The year 2020 is crucial for the definition of global ambitions on emissions reduction. If CO2 emissions continue to rise beyond that date, the most ambitious mitigation goals will become unachievable.”

[20] Cf. Pierre Le Hir, “Réchauffement climatique: la bataille des 2C est presque perdue”. Le Monde, 31/XII/2017.

[21] Cf. Matt McGrath, “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. with the BBC, 24/VII/2019: “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can't be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020”.

[22] Cf. Statement by IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee, “Let me start by reminding you that our assessments show that climate stabilization implies that greenhouse gas emissions must start to peak from next year”.https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/12/IPCC-Chair-opening-COP25.pdf>.

[23] Cf. “Global Energy Review: CO2 Emissions in 2021. Global emissions rebound sharply to highest ever level”, March 2022.

[24] See Jeff Tollefson, “Covid curbed 2020 carbon emissions, but not by much”. Nature, 21/I/2021.

[25] Cf. Fiona Harvey, “Carbon emissions to sound in 2021 by second highest rate in history”. The Guardian, 20/IV/2021.

[26] See IEA, “Global CO2 emissions rebounded to their highest level in history in 2021”. 8/III/2022.

<https://www.iea.org/news/global-co2-emissions-rebounded-to-their-highest-level-in-history-in-2021>.

[27] Cf. MapBiomas, “Amazon and Pampa lead fires from January to July 2022”.

<https://mapbiomas.org/amazonia-e-pampa-lideram-queimadas-de-janeiro-a-julho-de-2022>.

[28] See Bill McGuire, “An open letter to all climate scientists”. Brave New Europe, 25/VII/2021: “While our world has been going to hell in a handcart, many of you studying and recording its demise have had nothing to say on the subject and have remained deep in the shadows, when what has been needed is for you to hog the limelight. The common justification you have used is always the same, muttered excuses about the need for objectivity, about how you shouldn't become involved in politics, about how you are merely faithful recorders of facts; a silo mentality that shields you from having to make difficult decisions or engage with others outside your comfort zones”.

[29] Cf. “Banking on Climate Chaos Report 2022”, produced by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Reclaim Finance, Sierra Club and Urgewald:

“The report documents that in the six years since the Paris Agreement was adopted, the world's 60 largest private banks financed fossil fuels with USD $4.6 trillion, with $742 billion in 2021 alone. 2021 fossil fuel financing numbers remained above 2016 levels, when the Paris Agreement was signed. Of particular significance is the revelation that the 60 banks profiled in the report funneled $185.5 billion just last year into the 100 companies doing the most to expand the fossil fuel sector”.https://reclaimfinance.org/site/en/2022/03/30/banking-on-climate-chaos-report-2022/>.

[30] Cf. Matthew Brown & Michael Phillis, “Climate change? The Inflation Reduction Act's surprise winner, the US oil and gas industry”. USA Today, 18/VIII/2022.

[31] See: “Terajoules of energy used globally this year”. The World Counts

<https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/energy/global-energy-consumption/story>.

[32] Cf. JGJ Olivier & JAHW Peters, “Trends in Global CO2 and Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions 2020 Report”. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 20/XII/2020: “In 2019, the growth in total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (excluding those from land-use change) continued at a rate of 1.1% (±1%). (…) “Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased, on average, by 1.1% per year, from 2012 to 2019. (…) The 2019 global GHG emissions excluding those from land-use change were about 59% higher than in 1990 and 44% higher than in 2000”.

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