Nature Climate Change; 1.5C Paris Target A Dead Letter; Thx. To Failures In Deforestation & Farming

[hatrack]

Forget about us only having “12 years to reverse climate change” — the slogan picked up from a recent report — a new paper says that we are already too late to stop 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. That is, if we’re hoping countries somehow live up to the commitments made under the Paris climate agreement.

And while that’s no big surprise to climate wonks, it nonetheless ranks high in the most-depressing-things-ever contest. The paper in Nature Climate Change focuses on the Paris Agreement’s targets for “land use change.” Translation: farming in ways that sequester carbon, growing new trees and stopping deforestation. This stuff really matters because lots of countries’ pledges depend on these efforts. The European Union’s member states, for instance, rely on land use change for “up to 40 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030,” the authors pointed out.

EDIT

Finally, the authors argue, there’s the inescapable fact that since the Paris Agreement, deforestation has increased in many places that promised steep reductions. Deforestation “increased by 29 percent between 2015 and 2016 in Brazil and by 44 percent in Colombia.” Even worse:: “The rates of primary forest loss in the Congo and Indonesia are now 1.5 and 3 times the rate in Brazil,” they note.

The authors argue that we need to replace the Paris Agreement with an international climate policy that can lead, or even supersede the policies of individual countries. How would we get this global supergovernment? Is this where the nightmares of right-wing extremists come true? Would it be like a bigger European Union? The authors don’t elaborate.

EDIT

https://grist.org/article/paris-agreement-has-gone-up-in-smoke-new-paper-says/

[Moostache]

1. Humanity is doomed in its current incarnation...

21st century society will be the end point of human civilization because greed outweighs common interests and stupidity outweighs education. The world is burning and we're collectively asking how much more gas can we still pour on the fire...

And to think, in the 1980's we openly wondered if we could survive nuclear weapons...who knew we would not be able to conquer the internal combustion engine or electricity generation.