Inevitable Planetary Doom Has Been Exaggerated

A piece from The Atlantic noting that although climate change is a real threat to us all, feeling helpless or overwhelmed isn’t going to solve it. Hope for the future is a reasonable and a necessary prerequisite for action-

• "But environmentalists are so good at emphasizing worst-case scenarios that when we look to the future, apocalypse often feels inevitable. After all, aren’t we in the “sixth mass extinction”? Haven’t populations of wild animals already crashed by 60 percent? Don’t we have just “10 years left” to avert climate meltdown? Do we really dare to hope?"

• "Jesse Jenkins, an energy-systems expert at Princeton, also rejects the idea that if we fail to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the key target in an influential United Nations report, all is lost. “Any time you see a round number like 2.0 or 1.5 or 20 percent by 2020, that is a political number,” he said. “The reality is that every 10th of a degree matters.” There is no threshold after which it is not worth fighting."

• "There will be more crises, more setbacks. But there is no “too late.” In the longer term, we know what we need to do to stop climate change, save species, and make sure everyone breathes clean air and drinks clean water. Not everything can be saved. But 2021 can be better than 2020, and 2031 can be much, much better than 2021, if we demand it."

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/other-side-catastrophe/617865/