The climate emergency: time to switch to panic mode?
James Schlesinger once uttered one of those profound truths that explain a lot of what we see around us: it was: “people have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic.”
So far, we have been in the “complacency” mode of operation in regard to climate change: it doesn’t exist, if exist it is not a problem, if it is a problem, it is not our fault, and anyway doing something about it would be too expensive to be worth doing. But the latest temperature data are nothing but spine-chilling. What are we seeing? Is this just a sort of a rebound from the so-called “pause”? Or something much more worrisome? We may be seeing something that portends a major switch in the climate system; an unexpected acceleration of the rate of change. There are reasons to be worried, very worried: the CO2 emissions seem to have peaked, but that didn’t generate a slowdown of the rate of increase of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If nothing else, it is growing faster than ever. And then there is the ongoing methane spike and, as you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
What’s happening? Nobody can say for sure, but these are not good symptoms; not at all. And that may be a good reason to switch to panic mode.
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