Our best shot at cooling the planet might be right under our feet

 Cracked soil by a village in Iran abandoned by
farmers because water reserves ran dry
due to overuse. 

It’s getting hot out there. Every one of the past 14 months has broken the global temperature record. Ice cover in the Arctic sea just hit a new low, at 525,000 square miles less than normal. And apparently we’re not doing much to stop it: according to Professor Kevin Anderson, one of Britain’s leading climate scientists, we’ve already blown our chances of keeping global warming below the “safe” threshold of 1.5 degrees.

If we want to stay below the upper ceiling of 2 degrees, though, we still have a shot. But it’s going to take a monumental effort. Anderson and his colleagues estimate that in order to keep within this threshold, we need to start reducing emissions by a sobering 8%–10% per year, from now until we reach “net zero” in 2050. If that doesn’t sound difficult enough, here’s the clincher: efficiency improvements and clean energy technologies will only win us reductions of about 4% per year at most.

Read Jason Hickel’s story on The Guardian - “Our best shot at cooling the planet might be right under our feet.”

'We are about to choose to fail' - Kevin Anderson

“We are somewhere between denial and delusion,” according to climate scientist Kevin Anderson.

Professor Kevin Anderson.

The professor of Climate and Energy at the University of Manchester talks here in a Beyond One Degree interview with Martin Helberg about the widespread illusion that we can mitigate climate change within business as usual, small steps and some future technology. 

He concludes that we have the scientific knowledge and technical solutions to move to renewable energy, but we lack the political, economical and cultural will to implement the systems at scale.

He is endorses the research of so called ”negative emissions” and geo engineering, but does not want us become dependent upon them.

He works on climate questions because we still have a possibility to avoid catastrophe, but he thinks we are about to choose to fail. 

”Let’s not pretend it is not a choice,”he says.

The conversation that took place in Stockholm, February 20, this year can be heard here.

Figueres has done 'excellent' job, but steps down in July

Christina Figueres - she has headed UN
 climate negotiations for six years, but
she will be stepping down from the role in July.

Critics say the emissions deal Christiana Figueres helped reach in December was "watered down." Figueres, a diplomat from Costa Rica who has headed UN climate negotiations for six years, will leave her position in July.

"Christiana Figueres had a very unenviable position, and she's done an excellent job in holding the whole edifice together," Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, told DW following the senior diplomat's decision last week not to seek a new term.

Figueres, a diplomat from Costa Rica who heads the Bonn-based UN secretariat for the Framework Convention on Climate, will leave her position in July after six years.

("It's very unlikely that her replacement will really grapple with the scale of the increasing void between the rhetoric we hear on climate change and the scale of action that we now need," according to the deputy director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, Kevin Anderson.)

 

Read the DW story - “UN climate boss had 'unenviable job' sealing Paris deal.”

Plan to use markets to resolve climate change 'doomed'

M

arkets are about profit, nothing else, and any idea that they might help the world stay below its two degree “guardrail” is simply fantasy.

 Professor of energy and climate
change at the University
of Manchester, Kevin Anderson,
has no confidence in markets
resolving the climate change
challenge.

A leading scientist has dismissed the United Nations’ call for governments to use the world’s financial markets as the central weapon against climate change as being “doomed to failure and a dangerous distraction”.

Rajenda Pachauri, the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the markets were humanity’s only hope to combat global warming as he unveiled the panel’s latest landmark report on Friday.

The Independent reports: “However, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, criticised Dr Pachauri, saying his emphasis on the markets would be counter-productive, diverting attention away from more effective methods of tackling the problem.”

Read the story - “Plan to use financial markets to halt climate change is ‘doomed’”.

Paying lip service to dangerous mantras

Prof Corinne Le Quere.

The idea that “every little bit helps” is a dangerous mantra when it comes to climate change abatement.

Those “every little bit” comments are, according to a story published in The Guardian, really just paying lip service to avoiding catastrophic climate change.

A major two-day London conference at the Royal Society headquarters this week it became clear that “every little bit helps” is a dangerously misleading mantra when it comes to mitigating climate change.

The organizers, Professors Kevin Anderson and Corinne Le Quere of the Tyndall Centre – posed contributors a brutally simple question: what would need to happen if we were to do more than simply pay lip service to the idea of avoiding dangerous climate change?

The Guardian in its story headed: “’Every little helps’ is a dangerous mantra for climate change” said the answers to the question about avoiding dangerous climate change were radical, but none mentioned re-using plastic bags.

The clear message from the conference, it was reported, was unrestrained capitalism was incompatible with decarbonisation: the sums simply don’t add up.