By now you’ve probably heard of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report last Friday regarding global warming. With several hundreds of scientists from around the world 95{e3829ec1db02d54faaf9fa2de0d48db26af01d7a7944a63c3b26976124791cab} sure that global warming is indeed happening and that humanity is contributing to it—that report is as definitive as it can get. And to think that, at that rate, those scientists were already being conservative with their pronouncements.
Polar bear on ice floe: climate change’s poster child. (Image from www.endangeredpolarbear.com/)
The report nevertheless admits it cannot explain the 15-year pause in warming, only stating that ““due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.” Deniers have repeatedly downplayed and discounted climate change precisely because of this pause in global warming, wherein surface temperatures have risen only 0.05 degrees Celsius for the last fifteen years.
On a more sinister level, climate change denial is mostly hinged on commercial and political interests. Remember what US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said back in 2012: “We don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.” There was a sense of smug and convenient resignation in his statement. In effect, it was just the same as: No one knows for sure, so why bother?
And yet there’s nothing evasive about IPCC’s “explanation.” It acknowledges that there is that pause in global warming. Still, that doesn’t cancel out the fact that the earth’s climate is changing and our weather is going awry.
Maybe we’ve just learned to cope with these extremes in weather better than people in the past—we’ve built sturdier buildings and infrastructures, we’re encased comfortably, safe and sound. We’ve come to accept these extremes in weather as normal. But for the countless of peoples whose lives are directly affected by the rising sea level and the new and dangerous unpredictability of the weather, this “normality” is simply unacceptable.
We could think of this pause as the calm that precedes a storm. In fact, we should be thankful that we’ve been generously granted this extended 15-year pause. But to expect that this pause, this calm, will be here for good—stable and unchanging—is nothing short of dangerous. What we do during the calm will prepare us for when the storm arrives.
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A virtuous motto of yesteryear is Save the Planet, which is in fact erroneously phrased. The earth needs no saving; eons after eons, the earth has recovered from the myriads of disasters that befell it. It’s us humans that need saving. After all, it’s our own fragile bodies and puny buildings that need to cope with the monstrosity of earth’s fury, not the other way around.
Now that the report is out, what’s next? Is it too late to do anything?
If anything, with the IPCC report, the global conversation on climate change has once again been refreshed and rejuvenated. We don’t need any more damning evidence and undeniable proof to convince us. We certainly know we humans are responsible for what’s happening—all the luxuries and convenience we enjoy right now—our 100{e3829ec1db02d54faaf9fa2de0d48db26af01d7a7944a63c3b26976124791cab} premium beef burger, our glorious carpet especially flown in from Turkey, that bottled water imported from France, our swanky metallic phones, etc., etc.— are products made at the expense of the environment one way or another.
Amidst all these is meteorologist Eric Holthaus, who heroically declared on Twitter that he will never fly again. He was a frequent flyer, and with Friday’s report on global warming and climate change, realized the carbon footprint entailed “[flying] not worth the climate.” He was quite emotional too with his Tweets, saying a science report has never made him cry before. At the risk of imitation, I admit I shared his sentiment too. Tears welled up in my eyes as we read the news on the phone that fateful day. We were on the bus, and as if by some stroke of emphasis, there was a rainbow gracing the horizon to our left, inchoate at first, yet arcing ever so completely by the second.
I was thinking: love, music, family, friendship, books, art, nature, technology, and all the other infinitely beautiful things in this world might or will be gone just because we were so adamant with our denial and inaction. This may sound outright sappy, but as Holthaus said, there is no neutrality anymore.
