Minimisation Is The New Denial – climate scientists and the false hope of net-zero
The temperature extremes of 2023 and those coming in 2024, tell us we face the possibility of climate catastrophes that cause the collapse of whole societies and threaten the lives of millions, not at some distant point in our children’s futures but within our own lifetimes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and public-facing scientists have raised awareness and concern but they failed to predict the speed of these accelerating changes and now minimise the immediate threats they pose.
In 2023 the average global temperature was close to 1.5°C above the 1850–1900 baseline, the limit which the 2015 Paris COP21 climate summit told us we had to avoid breaching — by the end of the century — to avoid calamitous global consequences. The 12 months to the end of February 2024 took us to 1.56°C and we’re still climbing fast. It is true, as the ‘expert minimisers’ rush to say, that when the current ‘El Niño’ ends temperatures will dip down but they will not get much below 1.5°C again, if ever. These extremes make a mockery of the underestimates in climate scientists’ models, on which humanity’s inadequate climate plans still rely.
This simple, devastating information should be on everyone’s mind, everywhere. Yes, terrible conflicts and injustices rage across the planet but none of them, with no disrespect to the suffering of the people involved, presents the same scale of risks as climate change, not even close. Everyone should be connecting this alarming heating to the increasing number of ever-worsening extreme events they cause, happening on every continent, plus those soon to come — but they are not. Instead, all politicians, the media and most people still just don’t get that we are right now in dangerous, ‘uncharted waters’ (the latest climate cliché no-one listens to) — without a paddle.
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