Climate Change: With Determination, We can Make a Difference

The world is shirking it’s responsibility of helping to reverse or at least stop climate change. Climate change threatens to create hotter average temperatures and its consequences of extreme weather, rising seas, and shifting wildlife habitats.

Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said that “the world is still far from meeting its climate goals. This year’s devastating forest fires, floods and droughts and other unfolding extreme weather events serve as powerful reminders for why we must succeed in tackling the climate crisis.”

In 2015, world leaders agreed to a climate change agreement called the ‘Paris Pact’. Countries agreed to try to cut emissions that are causing climate warming. Scientists say that a failure to meet those goals could cause the world’s temperatures to rise 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Many feel though that the Paris agreement is just lip service and that countries will not be able to meet their emission goals and many are not even trying. And even if we do meet those goals, it may not be enough.

Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist and policy expert at Princeton University, said that “based on whether we have any prospect of meeting a 2°C target, from that point of view, it’s probably a D or an F.”

But many also feel that the Paris Pact is better than doing nothing at all. James Temple, senior editor at MIT Technology Review, in an article for MIT Technology Review, compares the failed Paris and Kyoto agreements to the Montreal Protocol agreement made in 1987. The Montreal agreement attempted to minimize the production of pollutants called chlorofluorocarbons which were found to damage the ozone layer. While ultimately the results of the global effort did not meet the stated and hoped for levels of pollutant reduction, Temple argues that the deliberate changes that countries did make were very beneficial and the world is much better off because of it. With determination, Temple says that we can again confront the problem directly.

Temple wrote that “the world shouldn’t wait around for innovations that will make it cheaper and easier to address climate change. Countries need to implement rules that increasingly ratchet down emissions, forcing industries to figure out cleaner ways of generating energy, growing food, producing products, and moving things and people around the world.”