By 2050 the world must have negative net carbon emissions to have a chance at keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius and avoiding ‘dangerous’ climate change.
That’s the story I was told throughout my bachelor degree. Arguably, we’re already experiencing ‘dangerous’ climate change. Scientists can now dust for climate change fingerprints in individual weather events using a technique called detection and attribution. Hurricane Harvey and the southeast European heatwave, nicknamed ‘lucifer’, were likely made worse due to climate change than if these events had occurred before the Industrial Revolution. By 2050 we must stop emitting greenhouse gases. Reducing emissions is like procrastinating a university assignment, where the more you put off doing the assignment, the more work you have to do right before the due date. If you’d worked on it a little bit each day in the weeks leading up to the due date, you would have endured far less stress and panic. Except this is a group assignment, and one group member is going on holidays before the assignment is due. A considerate group member would do their share of work before going on holidays so everyone in the group does a fair amount of the work. A terrible group member, the kind every student dreads being paired with, would do no (or very little) work before buggering off to Bali. In 2050 I’ll be 54 years old. The average age of Australian politicians in the 43rd Australian federal parliament was 51. In 2050, me and my peers will be governing this country. That means we’ll be the people submitting the assignment. The current leaders are the group member who is going on holidays. The less effort and money spent on emissions reductions now, the more me and my peers will have to pay – that’s not including the cost to repair damage due to more intense weather extremes we’ll have to endure anyway. We’re not just bleeding heart rebels without a cause trying to ruin the economy. We are interested in climate change policies because they affect us socially, economically, politically and personally. We will bear the consequences of current leaders failing to act. “Silence is an advocacy practice,” declared Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate division, when he spoke at the annual Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society conference in February this year. I won’t be silent when our politicians fail to do their share of the group assignment. I won’t be silent when my own university department invites fossil fuel companies to visit the school. The ‘future generations’ people like to talk about in regards to climate change mitigation are no longer an abstract entity. We are here now and we want a fair go too.
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AuthorPostgrad scientist. Researching rainfall and stumbling into the wild world of science research and academia. ArchivesCategories |