Climate change: The day I left home to see the future

Climate change chronic from Nicolau Ferreira in @publico.pt

The messages in the latest IPCC report are remarkably simple, in the next 20 years, global warming will reach 1.5 degrees no matter what we do. But scientists believe it will be possible to avoid the worst-case scenarios of this climate change phenomenon.

Nicolau begins his chronicle starting from a 2018 scientific study that advanced the hypothesis that the Earth could become a hot greenhouse in the near future. Even if all factories in the world stopped working immediately. That’s because a series of effects in the Earth system’s chain that, once started would have no turning back.

According to the author, the factories have not stopped working and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to rise at an unshakable pace. As a global society, we are witnessing terrible fires, incessant hurricanes, heat waves, sea level rise, end of glaciers, various floods, victims.

Nicolau also points out that we are still living a pandemic that, with all its horror, showed us for brief moments that the air of big cities can be breathed.

Extreme temperature phenomena, which between 1850 and 1900 happened once every ten years, today, with one degree Celsius higher, they will be 2.8 times more frequent, when it rises to 1.5 degrees, it may be 4.1 times more frequent, and with two degrees, it may be 5.6 times more frequent and if it rises four degrees, it may be 9.4 times more frequent – ​​in other words, , will happen practically every year.

This type of logic will be useful for other phenomena associated with climate change, such as the average rise in sea level or extreme rain. Which means that the more we cut the emission of greenhouse gases the less catastrophic will be the climate changes we will experience and vice versa.

Therefore, we believe that it will continue to be essential for us to jump into a world that runs on renewable energies – IPS – and reduce as much as possible the emissions of greenhouse gases, but we will no longer avoid the worst consequences of this phenomenon.

Finally, the author cites the writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) and emphasizes that, although countries are at different levels of commitment to effective actions to deal with the problem of climate change due to political factors, for example, it is us , indigenous peoples, articulate people, inside and outside cities, who are looking for an alternative and are not afraid that this alternative will penetrate their desires, their language, their habits and actions: the dream and reality to transform the world.

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