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Bill McKibben: As temperatures soar, the fossil fuel industry is backsliding on pledges to change [1]

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Date: 2023-06-16  

Activist and author Bill McKibben has been writing about the harmful environmental effects humans are imposing on the planet since 1989. His warnings on our impact on the climate haven’t moderated over the years, they’ve become ever more alarming.

At his substack, “The Crucial Years,” McKibben wrote Thursday: The Mercury is Off the Charts. And the Fossil Fuel Industry is Off its Meds:

We’ve reached the scariest moment yet in the climate saga: I noted in mid-April that there were all kinds of signs that a rapid increase in global warming was underway, and every day since has borne out that warning. We now have truly remarkable data about sea surface temperature—across the world’s oceans, and especially in the north Atlantic, we’re seeing numbers that aren’t just off the charts, they’re off the wall the chart is tacked to. It seems increasingly likely that 2023 will turn out to be the hottest year yet, even though a true El Niño won’t be fully underway till late summer or autumn. All of this is terrifying—but far far worse is the fact that the world isn’t reacting rationally to it. The fossil fuel industry and its financial backers are, if anything, backsliding: tearing up their modest promises to make some kind of actual change. The rapid warming over the next couple of years is likely to be our last opportunity to really act coherently as a civilization to reduce the magnitude of this crisis, and so far we are blowing it. This is fast becoming one of the most iconic images in the history of the climate fight—it shows the insanely anomalous rise in sea surface temperatures so far this spring.

As I wrote in this week’s Earth Matters:

The bad news on the climate front these days tends to overshadow the good, which is no surprise given how bad the situation really is. The Arctic is melting. The Antarctic is melting. And all the places in between are going through greater or lesser disruptive changes of their own. As scientists now see it, we’re headed for 2.7° C (4.9° F) of global warming before the 22nd century rolls around. That is, unless far stricter measures are undertaken to accelerate our reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to zero and eventually remove at least some of what has accumulated in the atmosphere during the industrial age and is now causing what we’re beginning to see happen. That level of warming scientists say we are on a trajectory for without stricter policies would be a very nasty world for a whole lot of species, including ours. As anyone paying even cursory attention knows, the gloomy litany of potentially deadly climate impacts is long. Premature attrition would be higher than any in human experience. Some of the impacts are already baked in. What we can still do to mitigate or prevent the worst impacts can be a divisive question. So far, climatologists in the aggregate have only made one significant wrong estimate about climate change—the speed with which the negative impacts will occur. The acceleration of change is now visible in much of the data. Some impacts around the Antarctic that scientists had calculated would take centuries to unfold now appear to be a possibility in decades. And what happens in the Antarctic won’t stay in the Antarctic. Eventually, the acceleration of impacts from greenhouse gas emissions will reach the point of no return, the tipping point, the place where human-caused climate damage becomes irreversible in terms of human life spans. Or until interstellar saviors gift us with an atmospheric healing potion that has no harmful side-effects. A few scientists say they think we’re already past the tipping point—or points. That has the effect of many non-scientists asserting “we’re fucked.” We certainly could be. But whether Earthlings have the political and sociological capability to alter that lethal global warming trajectory remains an unanswered question. The historical record is inauspicious in this regard. Time will tell. And since time is short, the answer will be apparent before long. What we do have is the economic and technological capability to stop well short of that disastrous 4.9° F. [...]

Tick, tick, tick.

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