|
It’s already too late to prevent some tipping points from happening, since there is evidence that at least nine have already been breached, she said. The risk of those cascading into an irreversible global tipping point with tremendous impacts on human civilization warrants a declaration of a planetary climate emergency.
Minimizing the risk requires keeping global warming as close to 1.5 degrees C as possible by reducing carbon emissions to zero. It will take at least 30 years to achieve carbon neutrality, Richardson says. “That’s our most optimistic time estimate.”
“I don’t think people realize how little time we have left,” said Owen Gaffney, a global sustainability analyst at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University. “We’ll reach 1.5 C in one or two decades, and with three decades to decarbonize it’s clearly an emergency situation,” says Gaffney, another co-author of the commentary.
“Without emergency action our children are likely to inherit a dangerously destabilized planet,” he said in an interview.
Economies prevailing
Meanwhile, a recent UN report revealed that the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada, Australia and other countries plan to produce 120 percent more fossil fuels by 2030. Those same governments agreed to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees C under the Paris climate agreement, but appear to be more worried about their economic growth.
No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us now that we face an existential threat to civilization, Gaffney and coauthors write. Governments depend heavily on the advice of economists, but with few exceptions the profession has done humanity a huge disservice by ignoring climate change in their research and scholarship, Gaffney says. Only a fraction of articles and papers in economics journals discuss climate change, he says.
The risks posed by climate tipping points are not part of any economic analysis of climate policies, acknowledges Geoffrey Heal, an economist at the Columbia Business School in New York City. “If they were included it would make a huge difference… suggest[ing] that we strengthen our climate policies massively,” Heal said in an email.
“Passing tipping points … entails a huge risk to financial assets, economic stability and life as we know it today,” says Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), an investor group that manages over $30 trillion in assets. It is significantly cheaper to prevent additional global warming than it is to face its impacts, Pfeifer says in an email.
“We need far greater and more urgent action to deal with climate change,” she says.
There is a bright side
Global decarbonization has accelerated since 2010 and may be on course to keep global warming to 2 degrees C, says a new report to be published in Environmental Research Letters on Dec 2. While overall carbon emissions have increased, the decarbonization has kept the increase low and is ready to push emissions into a decline.
Large decarbonization gains from energy efficiency and modern renewable heat, along with solar and wind, are making it possible to reach the Paris climate goals “if we take aggressive actions across all sectors of the economy,” says study co-author Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley in a release.
There are also social tipping points, says Gaffney, including an economic tipping point where the price of renewable energy is dropping below fossil fuels in market after market. “The prices for renewables keep falling and performance is improving. This is an unbeatable combination.”
More and more countries such as the United Kingdom have reached a political tipping point and adopted 2050 net zero carbon targets. “There is now confidence it is achievable and affordable,” he said.
And in the United States, candidates for the 2020 presidential elections are putting out ambitious climate action plans.
Over the last 12 months a broad societal awareness tipping point appears to have been reached—the Greta Thunberg effect—with millions of young student strikers and many others demanding urgent climate action, he says. At the same time, more and more finance companies, businesses, and cities are adopting tough climate targets.
“These tipping points are converging that could make the 2020s the fastest economic transition in history,” Gaffney says.
| 
