Average global surface temperatures have surpassed 1.1º Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In this episode of the “Great Unraveling?” series, Michael Mann joins Laurie Laybourn-Langton to explore the current status of the climate crisis and the unprecedented minefield we are entering as we near and likely pass the internationally agreed upon target limit of 1.5º Celsius.
Dr. Michael E. Mann is a world renowned expert on global climate change. He is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC).
Transcript
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Recognition of the severity of the climate crisis has markedly increased in recent years. While some progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions across certain sectors and communities, global emissions hit record highs prior to the recent drop caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Emissions must now be reduced by over 7% each year over this decade to get the world on track to limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Centigrade, a point underscored by a new wave of climate activists over the past couple of years. In turn, fears are growing increasingly unmanageable, climate change is becoming unavoidable.
In this episode, we explore the status of the climate crisis. And to do so I’m joined by Dr. Michael Mann, a globally renowned climate expert who is currently Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, Director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, and he was recently elected to the USA National Academy of Sciences. Mike, welcome
Michael Mann
Thanks, it’s great to be with you.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Let’s start off with the current situation. Global temperatures have risen by over 1.1 degrees Centigrade above the pre-Industrial average, or thereabouts. Has anything about the climate systems journey to this point surprised scientists? Or is this temperature rise largely what the models predicted we’d reach at this level of cumulative emissions?
Michael Mann
Yeah, we’re about where the models predicted we would be at this point. You might argue we’re a little closer to 1.2 degrees. And it depends on, you know, some technical questions about how you define the pre-industrial baseline. And we published some work on that ourselves. So we might be as high as 1.2 degrees Celsius at this point. And obviously, if we’re trying to avoid crossing the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room there. There isn’t much of a margin for error. And so as you already alluded to, we need to bring carbon emissions down dramatically — more than 7% a year for the next decade.
So the warming of the surface of the planet is proceeding more or less as we expect. On the other hand, there are other aspects of climate change, which in fact, are happening faster and where the magnitudes are greater than we expected at this point. That is true for the melting of ice and the collapse of the major ice sheets. And of course, as the ice sheets collapse into the oceans, that adds to global sea level rise, and global sea level rise now is beginning to exceed some of our earlier projections. Some of the work that my colleagues and I have done in recent years looks at the connection between climate change and extreme weather events, the sorts of devastating extreme floods and droughts and heat waves and wildfires that we’ve seen breakout around the planet In recent years, to some extent, that goes beyond what we expected to see at this point.
And, in each of these cases, what that comes down to is that our models are imperfect. There are processes relevant to ice melt, or to how climate change influences the behavior of the jetstream, that aren’t perfectly represented in the models. And as the models become more realistic, as we get more of these processes into the models, we’re finding that in fact, in many cases, the changes can happen faster, that the system’s more dynamic, than we originally envisioned. And so the bottom line here is that uncertainty is not our friend. if anything, it’s actually cutting us cutting against us.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
And when we look then at 1.5, there has been this narrative that grew up in large part by the media’s framing of the IPCC 1.5 report that was released toward the end of 2018. That we have this with 12 years to save the world, and that sort of alludes to this cliff edge type situation, as we head to and beyond 1.5 degrees. Now, that’s not the case. 1.5 is something that we’ve provided as almost an artificial line that we’re trying to reach, an aspirational target. Can you talk us through a bit more? What kind of things we could anticipate to occur as we head to and potentially in the direction we’re going to move beyond that 1.5 degree threshold?
Michael Mann
Yeah, and as you say, it’s a somewhat arbitrary threshold. And this isn’t a cliff that we go off at one and a half degrees Celsius. I think of it as more like a minefield that we’re walking out onto, and the farther we go out onto that minefield, the more danger we encounter. And so if you like, you can think of it as a highway, we’re going down the carbon highway and we have to get off at the soonest exit that we possibly can. And we may miss the 1.5 degrees Celsius exit. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to get off at the 1.6 exit because it isn’t a cliff. It’s continuous. The more we warm the planet, the more carbon pollution we put into the atmosphere, the worse it gets. And the converse is true as well. Every tonne of carbon that we don’t put into the atmosphere makes things a little better. And so the the goal here is to decarbonize our economy as quickly as possible.
But we’re already encountering dangerous climate change. If you’re asking, you know, where do we begin to encounter dangerous impacts? Well, if you’re California or Australia, that have experienced unprecedented wildfires, or Europe and North America, the extreme heat that we’re seeing again this summer… Unprecedented floods, super storms — devastating superstorms like Maria, that struck Puerto Rico, a devastating event a few years ago… The worst flooding events on record in the US associated with Hurricane Harvey, making landfall near Houston A few years ago. Hurricane Florence making landfall in the Carolinas. And so by any measure, we are seeing dangerous impacts of climate change.
The rule of thumb that I like to use is that if we continue to go down the road of what we might call business as usual, where you know, that we don’t successfully implement global agreements to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and we blow past 1.5. And then we blow past two degrees Celsius. By the middle of this century, we’re looking at a planet where the sorts of events that we think of as almost unprecedented and extreme become commonplace. What we might think of today, as you know, an extreme summer heat wave, we will just call a summer day by the middle of this century, if we go down this road. And of course, we will see more inundation, we’ll see retreat from our coastlines and Florida along the east coast of the US, the low countries of Europe, low lying island nations coastlines around the world. If we don’t act, by the middle of this century, the impacts that we start to see, you know, reasonably resemble some of our sort of worst predictions. If you will, even some of the dystopian futures that have been presented by Hollywood. You know, that’s one possible future, but it doesn’t have to be our future.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Right. So taking the current moment, then, as we are this much further up the carbon highway before we start to get to those possible futures. We’ve had a lot of campaigners, businesses, governments, politicians, others calling for the need for change. As a result of the current moment of the disruption — the pandemics, borders and great costs, particularly human costs — the pandemic is going to give us some kind of lowering of emissions this year, to whatever extent, partly dependent upon the rebound of the economy is going to take over the year. How do you think this moment of enormous opportunity could, should, and may well play out?
Michael Mann
Yeah, well, it’s interesting, I have a book coming out in January on the new climate war, and it’s about the challenges we face now as we get away from outright climate change denial, but we’re encountering other efforts to sort of slow down this transition by fossil fuel interests. And indeed, by the end of this year, we will see a drop in carbon emissions by between four to 7%. But that alone isn’t going to get us where we need to be. That lock down… As the economy, the global economy, the transportation sector in particular ramps back up, we’re going to lose that temporary reduction that we had achieved. And let’s remember that we’ve got to achieve those reductions year after year for the next 10 years without a pandemic, without the fundamental behavioral changes that we’ve seen in response to the pandemic. And that means that individual behavioral change alone isn’t going to get us there. We need fundamental systemic change, and governmental policies that will get us where we need to go.
And what I was alluding to before, the thesis of the new climate war is very much what you just spoke to here. We do — despite some of the challenges we have today, and you know, the President of the United States, who’s a climate change denier and has done everything possible to sort of interfere with international efforts to reduce carbon emissions, basically doing the bidding of the fossil fuel interests that put him in power. But in a few months, we’ve got an election here in the United States, and there’s reason to believe that we are going to move in a new direction and that climate is going to be at the top of the agenda.
We just saw a Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, yesterday put forward a very bold vision for climate action in his prospective administration. The House Democrats have put forward a very bold climate plan. And it’s possible that we will have a political environment here in the United States where that plan can actually move through and become law. And if it does happen, it’s because of the things you spoke to — this remarkable coalescence of, this renewed global advocacy and activism on climate led by the children led by Greta Thunberg and other youth climate activists who have really, really centered this conversation where it needs to be on issues of intergenerational ethics.
And we’ve seen devastating extreme weather events that have made it very clear to the person on the street that climate change is here. And this is the face of climate change. We’re already seeing the devastating impacts, that has created a new realization, a new recognition of the fundamental nature of the challenge that we face. And we do see this shift in our politics.
And then finally, a pandemic, which is we just said… the lockdown response, and the social distancing, and the reduction in transportation that came with the pandemic alone isn’t going to get us where we need to go. But it is creating, along with these other developments, an opportunity to have a larger conversation about what sort of world do we want. I think the pandemic has allowed us to reflect a little bit on both how our vulnerability on a planet with, you know, 7.8 billion and growing people, with diminishing food and water and livable space. And the challenge that that poses to a sustainable future. I think the pandemic has actually opened a conversation that will naturally evolve to this larger conversation now about what sort of planet we want to leave behind for our children and grandchildren.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Right, and the positive some policies that exists out there for all of us on that planet to make sure that we can do that.
Michael Mann
Absolutely. As I like to say, we now see that there is great urgency, but there is also agency. We can all be part of this solution, we can make a better future.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
And, as a last question on that, then… you mentioned earlier how, as we start to move beyond, at least in some quarters, the narratives of denial, you’ve often pointed to other deeds that could stymie action on climate. So you’ve talked about delay, you’ve talked about deflection. And I think more recently, you’ve talked about doomism. And when it comes to that, how do we make sure that we keep this balance between, on the one side recognizing the high stakes, as you said, the carbon pathway, which at some point into the future leads us to the Hollywood star situation? How do we on one hand, make sure that people are aware of the threat while on the other ensuring that no matter where we get on that carbon highway, no matter where we find ourselves and how terrible that may be, we can still be pushing to get us off that highway?
Michael Mann
Yeah, thanks. That’s critical. And that’s why again, I always pair you know, the urgency with the agency. Let’s recognize that climate change, you know, is an existential threat to human civilization. That we do have to act dramatically and boldly now. But the fact is that there is still time. It would be very depressing if there weren’t and, as a scientist, I would find it difficult to be out there talking about the challenge and what we need to do to meet it. If, If I felt like I was not being earnest in, you know, where we are, and what opportunities are still available to us. But I spend much of my time crunching the numbers, looking at the model output, doing the math. And as a result of that I, and other climate scientists, know that there is still time to avert the worst. We can, in fact, still avoid one and a half degrees Celsius warming of the planet. And even if we missed that target, certainly two degrees Celsius. And that’s a whole, you know, that’s a much better world than a four degree world or a five degree world.
So it’s… As I like to say… Some of my more dour colleagues have been known to say, you know, to at times to break down and say “we’re f***ed, we’re F-worded.” And my response to that is “No, it’s a matter of how f***ed we want to be. It’s a matter of, at this point, of how bad we’re willing to let it get.” But we are not yet at a point where we are committed to civilization-ending climate change. And to me, that’s empowering. And I tried to communicate that, again, to communicate the urgency of acting now with the agency that’s still available to us.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Right. I think on that note, it’s a perfect place to finish and thank you so much. for joining us today and talking with us.
Michael Mann
Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you.