The $48 Trillion Climate Fix May Not Work

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James Hansen, one of the grandfathers of climate change science and a former NASA researcher, told the FT that the climate crisis has reached a terrible tipping point. It will hit the 1.5 degrees C barrier this year. Climate analysts at Copernicus said the world reached the 1.47 degrees C level last year. It was the warmest year on record. There have been several calculations of the cost of keeping under the tipping point barrier. Among these is the One Earth estimate of $48 trillion spent over 20 years ending in 2040. That investment may have become useless in keeping global temperatures below the widely accepted level.

Another measure: World’s Population Hits Record 8 Billion As Planet Boils.

The One Earth figure is based on their model of other models, and One Earth’s experts believe that these models are inadequate because they rely on the effect of reliance on fossil fuels alone. “These models miss out on huge savings from the elimination of mining, processing, and transporting of fossil fuels, and they also bake in expensive (and largely unproven) Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies.” One Earth does not offer its own adjusted number.

The global temperature estimates that it is too late to reach the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees C goal in 2015 do not mean that huge investments in slowing global warming are useless. It does mean that violent swings in weather will become more violent and more powerful. Brian Hoskins, chair of the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, told CNN “The year of record heat, which saw deadly extreme weather events, including wildfires in Canada, Hawaii and southern Europe, ‘has given us a taste of the climate extremes that occur near the Paris targets’ “

The fact that the $48 trillion is not enough means that the rise in deaths from global warming will continue. It also means that parts of the world now inhabited by humans will not be habitable at all. It means that forecasts of rising seas that will eat away at coastlines cannot be slowed or stopped and that drought will affect tens of millions of people yearly.

It is hard to imagine that an investment in slowing climate change more than three times the US GDP is part of a plan that has already failed to reach an essential goal.