From The Guardian (George Monbiot):

Now it’s a straight fight for survival. The Glasgow Climate Pact, for all its restrained and diplomatic language, looks like a suicide pact. After so many squandered years of denial, distraction and delay, it’s too late for incremental change. A fair chance of preventing more than 1.5C of heating means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 7% every year: faster than they fell in 2020, at the height of the pandemic.

What we needed at the Cop26 climate conference was a decision to burn no more fossil fuels after 2030. Instead, powerful governments sought a compromise between our prospects of survival and the interests of the fossil fuel industry. But there was no room for compromise. Without massive and immediate change, we face the possibility of cascading environmental collapse, as Earth systems pass critical thresholds and flip into new and hostile states.

So does this mean we might as well give up? It does not. For just as the complex natural systems on which our lives depend can flip suddenly from one state to another, so can the systems that humans have created. Our social and economic structures share characteristics with the Earth systems on which we depend. They have self-reinforcing properties – that stabilise them within a particular range of stress, but destabilise them when external pressure becomes too great. Like natural systems, if they are driven past their tipping points, they can flip with astonishing speed. Our last, best hope is to use those dynamics to our advantage, triggering what scientists call “cascading regime shifts”.

A fascinating paper published in January in the journal Climate Policy showed how we could harness the power of “domino dynamics”: non-linear change, proliferating from one part of the system to another. It points out that “cause and effect need not be proportionate”, a small disturbance, in the right place, can trigger a massive response from a system and flip it into a new state. This is how the global financial crisis of 2008-09 happened: a relatively minor shock (mortgage defaults in the US) was transmitted and amplified through the entire system, almost bringing it down. We could use this property to detonate positive change.

Sudden shifts in energy systems have happened before. The paper points out that the transition in the US from horse-drawn carriages to cars running on fossil fuels took just over a decade. The diffusion of new technologies tends to be self-accelerating, as greater efficiencies, economies of scale and industrial synergies reinforce each other. The authors’ hope is that, when the penetration of clean machines approaches a critical threshold, and the infrastructure required to deploy them becomes dominant, positive feedbacks will rapidly drive fossil fuels to extinction.

For example, as the performance of batteries, power components and charging points improves and their costs fall, the price of electric cars drops and their desirability soars. At this point (in other words, right now), small interventions by government could trigger cascading change. This has already happened in Norway, where a change in taxes made electric vehicles cheaper than fossil-fuel cars. This flipped the system almost overnight: now more than 50% of the nation’s new car sales are electric, and petrol models are heading for extinction.

As electric cars become more popular, and more polluting vehicles become socially unacceptable, it becomes less risky for governments to impose the policies that will complete the transition. This then helps to scale the new technologies, causing their price to fall further, until they outcompete petrol cars without the need for tax or subsidy, locking in the transition. Driven by this new economic reality, the shift then cascades from one nation to another.

The battery technologies pioneered in the transport sector can also spread into other energy systems, helping to catalyse regime shifts in, for example, the electricity grid. The plummeting prices of solar electricity and offshore wind – already cheaper than hydrocarbons in many countries – are making fossil fuel plants look like a filthy extravagance. This reduces the political costs of accelerating their closure through tax or other measures. Once the plants are demolished, the transition is locked in.

Of course, we should never underestimate the power of incumbency, and the lobbying efforts that an antiquated industry will use to keep itself in business. The global infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, processing and sales is worth somewhere between $25tn (£19tn) and $0, depending on which way the political wind is blowing. The fossil fuel companies will do everything in their power to preserve their investments. They have tied President Joe Biden’s climate plans in knots. It would be no surprise if they were talking urgently with Donald Trump’s team about how to help lever him back into office. And if they can thwart action for long enough, the eventual victory of low-carbon technologies might scarcely be relevant, as Earth’s systems could already have been pushed past their critical thresholds, beyond which much of the planet could become uninhabitable.

But let’s assume for a moment that we can shove the dead weight of these legacy industries aside, and consign fossil fuels to history. Will that really have solved our existential crisis? One aspect of it, perhaps. Yet I’m dismayed by the narrowness of the focus on carbon, in the Glasgow pact and elsewhere, to the exclusion of our other assaults on the living world.

Electric cars are a classic example of the problem. It’s true that within a few years, as the advocates argue, the entire stinking infrastructure of petrol and diesel could be overthrown. But what is locally clean is globally filthy. The mining of the materials required for this massive deployment of batteries and electronics is already destroying communities, ripping down forests, polluting rivers, trashing fragile deserts and, in some cases, forcing people into near-slavery. Our “clean, green” transport revolution is being built with the help of blood cobalt, blood lithium and blood copper. Though the emissions of both carbon dioxide and local pollutants will undoubtedly fall, we are still left with a stupid, dysfunctional transport system that clogs the streets with one-tonne metal boxes in which single people travel. New roads will still carve up rainforests and other threatened places, catalysing new waves of destruction.

A genuinely green transport system would involve system change of a different kind. It would start by reducing the need to travel – as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is doing with her 15-minute city policy, which seeks to ensure that people’s needs can be met within a 15-minute walk from homes.

It would encourage walking and cycling by all who are able to do so, helping to address our health crisis as well as our environmental crisis. For longer journeys, it would prioritise public transport. Private electric vehicles would be used to address only the residue of the problem: providing transport for those who could not travel by other means. But simply flipping the system from fossil to electric cars preserves everything that’s wrong with the way we now travel, except the power source.

Then there’s the question of where the money goes. The fruits of the new, “clean” economy will, as before, be concentrated in the hands of a few: those who control the production of cars and the charging infrastructure; and the construction companies still building the great web of roads required to accommodate them. The beneficiaries will want to spend this money, as they do today, on private jets, yachts, extra homes and other planet-trashing extravagances.

It is not hard to envisage a low-carbon economy in which everything else falls apart. The end of fossil fuels will not, by itself, prevent the extinction crisis, the deforestation crisis, the soils crisis, the freshwater crisis, the consumption crisis, the waste crisis; the crisis of smashing and grabbing, accumulating and discarding that will destroy our prospects and much of the rest of life on Earth. So we also need to use the properties of complex systems to trigger another shift: political change.

There’s an aspect of human nature that is simultaneously terrible and hopeful: most people side with the status quo, whatever it may be. A critical threshold is reached when a certain proportion of the population change their views. Other people sense that the wind has changed, and tack around to catch it. There are plenty of tipping points in recent history: the remarkably swift reduction in smoking; the rapid shift, in nations such as the UK and Ireland, away from homophobia; the #MeToo movement, which, in a matter of weeks, greatly reduced the social tolerance of sexual abuse and everyday sexism.

But where does the tipping point lie? Researchers whose work was published in Science in 2018 discovered that a critical threshold was passed when the size of a committed minority reached roughly 25% of the population. At this point, social conventions suddenly flip. Between 72% and 100% of the people in the experiments swung round, destroying apparently stable social norms. As the paper notes, a large body of work suggests that “the power of small groups comes not from their authority or wealth, but from their commitment to the cause”.

Another paper explored the possibility that the Fridays for Future climate protests could trigger this kind of domino dynamics. It showed how, in 2019, Greta Thunberg’s school strike snowballed into a movement that led to unprecedented electoral results for Green parties in several European nations. Survey data revealed a sharp change of attitudes, as people began to prioritise the environmental crisis.

Fridays for Future came close, the researchers suggest, to pushing the European political system into a “critical state”. It was interrupted by the pandemic, and the tipping has not yet happened. But witnessing the power, the organisation and the fury of the movements gathered in Glasgow, I suspect the momentum is building again.

Social convention, which has for so long worked against us, can if flipped become our greatest source of power, normalising what now seems radical and weird. If we can simultaneously trigger a cascading regime shift in both technology and politics, we might stand a chance. It sounds like a wild hope. But we have no choice. Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system. We do not consent to the destruction of life on Earth.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist.

From The Nature Conservancy (Tom Jennings and Ciaran Clayton):

After numerous last-minute delays and attempted derailments, the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 finally concluded this afternoon in Glasgow, UK. As COP President Alok Sharma’s gavel fell on the closing session, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of International Climate Policy, John Verdieck, commented:

“Six years ago, the world came together in Paris to declare a shared intent to keep global warming below +2°C, and – if possible – to restrict temperature rise to +1.5°C. The plaudits for this historic agreement were justified at the time – but building that framework was just the start. Despite the various pledges and initiatives revealed in Glasgow, it’s still unclear whether the +1.5°C goal is now within reach.

“At heart, the COP process is a goal-setting mechanism – and in this respect, there’s reason to remain optimistic. Major announcements from multinational coalitions delivered significant promises of methane reduction; actions to reduce or eliminate deforestation; provide critical financial support for the most vulnerable countries; and, perhaps most surprisingly, increased collaboration between the world’s two leading emitters, China and the United States.

“Analysis of these latest commitments by the respected Climate Action Tracker (CAT) and International Energy Agency (IEA) project that the fresh pledges made over the past fortnight have the potential to reduce global warming by 0.5°C – a significant stride toward the +1.5°C target.

“The Glasgow Climate Pact represents the first time the world has formally agreed that tackling fossil fuel subsidies is a goal worth pursuing, and that the +1.5°C goal should be a Northstar for the global community moving forward. These philosophical shifts also represent is a major step towards driving the decarbonization of global economies and accelerating the clean energy transition.

“Perhaps the best news out of Glasgow was the focus and attention paid to the role that nature – and the rights of Indigenous communities whose lands play host to so much of the world’s remaining wildlife habitat – can play in addressing the interconnected climate and biodiversity emergencies. Nature was on the agenda at COP26 like never before. Unlocking the potential of forests, farms, and wetlands to deliver up to a third of the emissions reductions needed by 2030 must be prioritized.

“So, despite suggestions to the contrary, I believe we can leave COP26 with some hope still intact. Major economies like China, the E.U, and the U.S. are beginning to show serious climate ambition and – crucially – the finance to back it up. But still too few have turned ambitious rhetoric into tangible actions. It is imperative, as we look towards COP27 in Egypt and the threats facing its African neighbors, that on-the-ground implementation of proven climate strategies accelerates this year. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it, we have now reached “code red for humanity.” There is no more time to waste.

“For all the celebrations at the time, in policy circles we understood that the Paris Agreement only ever provided a scaffolding of sorts – a frame around which to build a safer, more prosperous and lower-carbon planet for our children and our grandchildren. Progress on laying the foundations for the future has been made. Now, the hard work toward accelerating commitments into real-world action must begin.”

From ARS Techinca (Howard Lee):

The climate “hockey stick” refers to a reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1,000 years. The data shows flattish temperatures over the last millennium, like the handle of a Hockey stick, ending in a “blade” of rapidly rising temperatures since the industrial revolution. The idea first appeared in a paper by Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona. The work became famous after appearing in a UN climate report, after which it was the focus of climate denial, hacking, defamation, and disinformation, all of which was dramatized in a recent BBC TV drama called “The Trick.”

Today, in a paper published by Nature, scientists show that the “handle” of the “hockey stick” extends back 9,500 years, while its “blade” is taller—the last decade was 1.5° C hotter than the average temperature over the last 11,700 years. “Human-caused global temperature change during the last century was likely faster than any changes during the last 24,000 years,” said lead author Dr. Matt Osman of the University of Arizona.

Taking the temperature of times before thermometers

To measure temperatures at times long before the invention of thermometers, scientists must use indirect proxies. For the new study, scientists carefully vetted over 500 proxy records from oceans around the world; the data shows the fossilized remains of plankton and microbes in sediments where the age is known from radiocarbon dating.

Researchers then used statistical methods to calculate sea surface temperatures from the chemical properties of those remains. “We spent seven years developing the models for the different kinds of marine temperature proxies, incorporating knowledge from biology and geochemistry and using the best statistical practice,” explained coauthor Dr. Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona and leader of the lab in which this research was conducted.

The researchers combined the proxy temperatures with climate model simulations to account for the incomplete geographic distribution of data, and they cross-checked their results with independent records such as ice drilled from polar regions and stalagmites in caves.

Resolving a conundrum

The researchers’ work allowed them to produce maps and graphs of global temperatures as Earth emerged from the last ice age, providing 200-year time slices going back 24,000 years.

The authors find that the ice age was 7° C colder than the preindustrial era, about a degree colder than an earlier estimate had shown. Warming began 16,900 years ago, and by 11,000 years ago, Earth was enjoying a relatively warm “interglacial” climate. These findings refine the details but match the broad outline revealed in earlier work.

But unlike earlier studies, the new work shows that, prior to our current warming, there was a slow, long-term warming of 0.5° C that started 9,500 years ago. It also shows that the “handle” of the climate “hockey stick” is straight, whereas in prior studies, the “handle” was warped, with early warming followed by cooling into preindustrial times.

The new results resolve a disagreement between climate models (which simulated warming) and proxy studies (which showed cooling). The problem was known as the “Holocene Temperature Conundrum.”

Dr. Samantha Bova of San Diego State University, who published a reconstruction of temperatures for the same time period earlier this year, agreed, saying, “Both reconstructions show no evidence for an early Holocene warm period.” She pointed out that her paper used a completely different method, so the fact that her research came to the same conclusion as the Tierney team “leaves little room for doubt that the Holocene was a period of long-term warming,” she said.

So what changed?

Osman and colleagues concluded that most of the conundrum’s resolution is due to the sophisticated handling of geographic unevenness in their data compared to prior work. “Older reconstructions are just binned latitudinal averages,” said Tierney. “[That] method has a downside in that it doesn’t account for temperature changes in regions that are unsampled.”

Tierney’s team also found the conundrum could not be explained by seasonal growth of the plankton and algae used to reconstruct temperatures. “Even after accounting for seasonal bias, we still could not reconcile the [results] with reconstructions based on proxies alone,” said Tierney. “This led us to conclude that spatial representation was the most important factor.”

Dr. Shaun Marcott of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led a proxy reconstruction of Holocene climate in 2013, told Ars that the new work is a significant step forward. “The full field surface temperature reanalysis… is well beyond prior papers and has taken this team of scientists close to a decade to build,” he said, adding, “It is a triumph, and what this group has been doing is spectacular!”

For Mann, who had to go all the way to the US Supreme Court to defend his work and reputation, this work represents yet another vindication. “It’s become clear that the hockey stick ‘handle’ is much longer, and the ‘blade’ is sharper as we’ve warmed substantially since 1998 when we first published the ‘Hockey Stick,’” he told Ars.

Nature, 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03984-4

Howard Lee is a freelance science writer focusing on geology and climate change in deep time. He holds a B.Sc. in Geology and M.Sc. in Remote Sensing, both from the University of London, UK. When not writing, he’s probably gardening, hiking, or kayaking near his home in rural Massachusetts.

Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor.

US Drought Monitor map November 9, 2021.

High Plains Drought Monitor map November 9, 2021.

West Drought Monitor map November 9, 2021.

Colorado Drought Monitor map November 9, 2021.

Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:

This Week’s Drought Summary

Over the last week, multiple storm systems moved into the Pacific Coast, resulting in mostly beneficial precipitation in western portions of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. Some of these areas saw improvements to ongoing drought conditions as a result of these precipitation events. A few other spots in the West, primarily north and east of the Great Basin, saw some precipitation, but conditions in other parts of the West were largely dry. Outside of the Pacific Coast states, only a few changes were made to the Drought Monitor this week in the West. For more detail on these changes, please see the West region paragraph below. Elsewhere in the contiguous United States, widespread rain, amounting to between half an inch and 2 inches, fell in the Southern Great Plains, primarily along and to the east of Interstate 35. As a result, some areas along the Texas/Oklahoma border and parts of south Texas saw improvements to drought conditions. Farther east, heavy rainfall struck parts of Florida and the southeast U.S. coastline, resulting in some improvements to dryness in Florida, Georgia, and southern South Carolina. In drier parts of North Carolina and adjacent South Carolina, drought conditions remained the same or worsened. While not enough to improve ongoing dryness and drought in the Michigan UP, lake effect snow staved off any worsening of drought. Along the Pacific Coast, temperatures were generally within a few degrees of normal this week. Farther east, roughly northwest of a line from the Great Lakes to El Paso, temperatures were well above normal. Parts of the Dakotas saw temperatures 6 to 10 degrees warmer than normal. Southeast of that line, temperatures were mostly cooler than normal, with parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas falling 6 to 10 degrees below normal…

High Plains

Primarily dry weather occurred in the High Plains region this week. In western South Dakota, precipitation amounts up to an inch fell, and more minor precipitation amounts occurred in south-central Kansas. A couple minor improvements to conditions occurred in western Kansas. Well above normal temperatures returned this week in the Dakotas, where temperatures from 6 to 10 degrees above normal occurred. In the Dakotas, where long-term drought is still ongoing, livestock water quality and fawn production were both reported to be suffering as a result of the drought…

West

Along the Pacific Coast, near or slightly below normal temperatures combined with heavy precipitation (which exceeded 5 inches in some areas) to improve drought conditions in parts of northern California, southwest Oregon, and Washington. In central Utah, groundwater conditions and long-term precipitation deficits had improved enough for some of the exceptional drought to improve to extreme drought. In Montana, much of the eastern part of the state remained dry, leading to some expansion in exceptional drought, where multiple short- and long-term datasets indicate worsening conditions. In western Montana, a small part of exceptional drought improved to extreme drought where short- and long-term precipitation deficits had improved. In small parts of western Colorado and south-central Wyoming, streamflow and precipitation deficits had decreased enough to lead to improving drought conditions. Farther east in Colorado, recent warm temperatures combined with dry weather to lead to worsening drought conditions in a few areas. Finally, moderate drought expanded in eastern New Mexico, where short-term dry weather combined with depleted soil moisture to lead to worsening conditions. In Oregon and California, long-term drought conditions have adversely affected salmon populations and migratory birds. Due to widespread recent precipitation, much of the West region is now experiencing long-term drought, rather than both short- and long-term drought…

South

In eastern Texas and Oklahoma, and in far northwest Louisiana and western Arkansas, widespread rain over a half inch fell this week. As a result, many areas from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and eastward along the Red River saw improvements to ongoing drought and dryness. Improvements also occurred in south Texas. In parts of southwest Texas that did not see rain, some worsening of drought conditions occurred, due to increasing precipitation deficits and lessening soil moisture. Conditions also worsened in parts of northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas where short-term precipitation deficits increased. Most of the region saw cooler than normal temperatures this week, with widespread readings between 6 and 10 degrees below normal in east Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The western reaches of the South region saw near- or above-normal temperatures…

Looking Ahead

The Weather Prediction Center’s forecast (valid November 10 – 16) calls for multiple rounds of precipitation in the Pacific Northwest. These events are expected to bring heavy rain with local areas of flash flooding. Snow is expected over the high elevations of the Pacific Northwest to the Upper Midwest. A cold front sweeping across the eastern half of the country will bring showers and thunderstorms to the South and rain and rain to much of the East. As the front moves through, temperatures will drop 2 – 5 degrees below normal in the central part of the country and 4 – 9 degrees cooler than normal across the Lower Midwest and Southeast. Temperatures will be 5 – 11 degrees warmer than normal across the West.

The Climate Prediction Center’s 6 – 10-day outlook (valid November 16– 19) favors an active storm track across the northern tier of the Lower 48. This pattern would bring above-normal rainfall to the Pacific Northwest eastward to the Upper Midwest. Below-normal precipitation is likely across the southern tier of the Lower 48, with the greatest odds (more than 50%) over parts of the Southwest, the Southeast, and Alaska. The highest odds for above-normal temperatures occur in the Southwest (greater than 70%). Odds of above-normal temperatures decrease moving northward. The highest odds for below-normal temperatures occur in the Southeast (greater than 60%). Odds of below-normal temperatures decrease across the South and Midwest.

From The High Country News [November 4, 2021] (Sarah Sax):

Bulging gray rain clouds threatened to open up on a crowd of protesters last Friday [October 29, 2021] morning in Seattle. A few hundred people, mostly high schoolers and university students, held banners and hand-painted signs that read “Youth demand climate justice,” “Stop the money pipeline” and “It’s our turn to lead.”

They marched six blocks, from Pier 62 on Seattle’s waterfront to the corner of Second and Union, where they unfurled a long banner and staged a die-in — lying on the ground to dramatize the deadly stakes of the climate fight. In many ways, the actions and rhetoric mirrored previous youth climate protests, but this one differed in one notable regard: Instead of standing in front of City Hall and appealing to elected officials, the protesters were lying in front of the Pacific Northwest headquarters of the JPMorgan Chase bank.

The “Fossil Free Future” campaign aims to engage a growing number of young people to boycott banks, insurers and other companies that fund fossil fuel projects, not just by withholding their money but also their future labor.

“Why not just go to the source, if we know that corporate actors are the issue?” asked Sof Petros, a 24-year-old climate activist who helped organize Seattle’s protest on Friday. “We have power as current and future customers, employees and the public to push these banks to move towards better positions and be held accountable for past, current, and future financing of fossil fuel projects.”

Seattle’s protest — one of dozens in cities and towns across the U.S. — comes in the wake of national struggles to pass policies that experts say are needed to keep the U.S. on track to meet its climate targets. It also coincided with the start of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, an international gathering of governments around the world that many have said will be “the whitest and most privileged” assembly yet. Over the last two decades, these conferences have largely failed to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions needed to keep the world from reaching dangerous levels of warming. It’s this growing disillusionment with government action that has motivated youth to follow the money instead, said Petros.

The International Energy Agency and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change both released alarming reports this year showing that if the world is going to stay below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of global warming, no new fossil fuel projects can be built. Yet major banks and insurance companies continue to underwrite and insure new coal and oil and gas extraction and infrastructure. A report released in March found that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the world’s 60 biggest banks have funded almost $4 trillion worth of new fossil fuel projects. The new youth campaign includes pledges not to bank, or work for financial institutions that finance fossil fuel projects, like Chase does.

“You’re more likely to divorce than you are to switch your bank,” Petros said. “Banks know that, and they are courting youth as lifelong customers. And we represent decades of a future customer base.”

The high school and university students join a growing number of climate campaigns, from shareholder activism to university divestment campaigns, that are calling for institutions to stop financing fossil fuel projects. But the power that they hold over companies goes beyond just their money. As baby boomers retire, the U.S. faces a growing recruitment crisis. According to a survey by ManpowerGroup, one of the world’s largest staffing firms, the number of employers struggling to fill positions has tripled from 14% in 2010 to 69% today. COVID-19 sparked a wave of resignations and made the ongoing labor shortage worse. Financial services and the insurance sector in particular are in the midst of what some have called a “crisis” to recruit new talent.

“Skilled workers are in control, and companies need to understand people’s priorities to compete,” Becky Frankiewicz, president of ManpowerGroup North America told Forbes this year.

The priorities of the younger generations are obvious. Polls regularly show that climate change is one of the top concerns for Gen Z. And almost three-quarters of millennials would take a pay cut to work with a company that is environmentally responsible.

Aedan McCall, who spoke outside of Liberty Mutual during last Friday’s march, is one example. The student at the University of Washington is studying computer science and grappling with how to enter a workforce and industry that directly and indirectly contributes to climate change, not just through emissions, but also by supporting the extraction of fossil fuels through their products, such as helping develop algorithms to find new oil reserves. McCall says that when they enter the labor market in the next few years, evidence that a company is taking climate change seriously and shares key values will influence everything from where they decide to work to where they bank and what kind of life or property insurance they choose.

Outside of Chase, demonstrators constructed an altar to showcase objects that they expect to see disappear in their lifetime. Someone had scrawled “Every summer I watch another place I love burn down. We can never return” on top of a Lake Tahoe road map in front of pictures of penguins and sea stars. “Now, more than ever,” said McCall, “is a key moment to act because we’re running out of time.”

Sarah Sax is the climate justice fellow at High Country News currently living in rural Washington. We welcome reader letters. Email her at sarah.sax@hcn.org.

Sonja Klinsky, Arizona State University

Climate change has hit home around the world in 2021 with record heat waves, droughts, wildfires and extreme storms. Often, the people suffering most from the effects of climate change are those who have done the least to cause it.

To reduce climate change and protect those who are most vulnerable, it’s important to understand where emissions come from, who climate change is harming and how both of these patterns intersect with other forms of injustice.

I study the justice dilemmas presented by climate change and climate policies, and have been involved in international climate negotiations as an observer since 2009. Here are six charts that help explain the challenges.

Where emissions come from

One common way to think about a country’s responsibility for climate change is to look at its greenhouse gas emissions per capita, or per person.

For example, China is currently the single largest greenhouse gas emitter by country. However, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the U.S., Australia and Canada all have more than twice the per capita emissions of China. And they each have more than 100 times the per capita emissions of several countries in Africa.

These differences are very important from a justice perspective.

The majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels to power industries, stores, homes and schools and produce goods and services, including food, transportation and infrastructure, to name just a few.

As a country’s emissions get higher, they are less tied to essentials for human well-being. Measures of human well-being increase very rapidly with relatively small increases in emissions, but then level off. That means high-emitting countries could reduce their emissions significantly without reducing the well-being of their populations, while lower-income, lower-emitting countries cannot.

Low-income countries have been arguing for years that, in a context in which global emissions must be dramatically reduced in the next half-century, it would be unjust to require them to cut essential investments in areas that richer countries already have invested in, such as access to electricity, education and basic health care, while those in richer countries continue to enjoy lifestyles with high consumption of energy and consumer goods.

Responsibility for decades of emissions

Looking at current emissions alone misses another important aspect of climate injustice: Greenhouse gas emissions accumulate over time.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and this accumulation drives climate change. Carbon dioxide traps heat, warming the planet. Some countries and regions bear vastly more responsibility for cumulative emissions than others.

For instance, the United States has emitted over a quarter of all greenhouse gases since the 1750s, while the entire continent of Africa has emitted only about 3%.

People today continue to benefit from wealth and infrastructure that was generated with energy linked to these emissions decades ago.

Emissions differences within countries

The benefits of fossil fuels have been uneven within countries, as well.

From this perspective, thinking about climate justice requires attention to patterns of wealth. A study by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam found that 5% of the world’s population was responsible for 36% of the greenhouse gases from 1990-2015. The poorest half of the population was responsible for less than 6%.

These patterns are directly connected to the lack of access to energy by the poorest half of the world’s population and the high consumption of the wealthiest through things like luxury air travel, second homes and personal transportation. They also show how actions by a few high emitters could reduce a region’s climate impact.

Similarly, over one-third of global carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the past half-century can be directly traced to 20 companies, primarily producers of oil and gas. This draws attention to the need to develop policies capable of holding large corporations accountable for their role in climate change.

Who will be harmed by climate change?

Understanding where emissions come from is only part of the climate justice dilemma. Poor countries and regions often also face greater risks from climate change.

Some small island countries, such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, face threats to their very survival as sea levels rise. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Arctic and mountain regions face much more rapid climate change than other parts of the world. In parts of Africa, changes in temperature and precipitation are contributing to food security concerns.

Many of these countries and communities bear little responsibility for the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. At the same time, they have the fewest resources available to protect themselves.

Climate impacts – such as droughts, floods or storms – affect people differently depending on their wealth and access to resources and on their involvement in decision making. Processes that marginalize people, such as racial injustice and colonialism, mean that some people in a country or community are more likely than others to be able to protect themselves from climate harms.

Strategies for a just climate agreement

All of these justice issues are central to negotiations at the United Nations’ Glasgow climate conference and beyond.

Many discussions will focus on who should reduce emissions and how poor countries’ reductions should be supported. Investing in renewable energy, for example, can avoid future emissions, but low-income countries need financial help.

Wealthy countries have been slow to meet their commitment to provide US$100 billion a year to help developing countries adapt to the changing climate, and the costs of adaptation continue to rise.

Some leaders are also asking hard questions about what to do in the face of losses that cannot be undone. How should the global community support people losing their homelands and ways of life?

Some of the most important issues from a justice perspective must be dealt with locally and within countries. Systemic racism cannot be dealt with at the international level. Creating local and national plans for protecting the most vulnerable people, and laws and other tools to hold corporations accountable, will also need to happen within countries.

These discussions will continue long after the Glasgow conference ends.

This story is part of The Conversation’s coverage of COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.

Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. Read more of our U.S. and global coverage.

Sonja Klinsky, Associate Professor and Senior Global Futures Scientist, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.