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If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General..
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David Wallace-Wells |
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think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow--especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: "If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble," he writes. "The decisions we..
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David Wallace-Wells |
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fd598a6
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think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow--especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: "If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble," he writes. "The decisions we..
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David Wallace-Wells |
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Early naturalists talked often about "deep time"--the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called "dreamtime," or "everywhen": the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an o..
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David Wallace-Wells |
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Fourteen of the world's twenty biggest cities are currently experiencing water scarcity or drought. Four billion people, it is estimated, already live in regions facing water shortages at least one month each year--that's about two-thirds of the planet's population. Half a billion are in places where the shortages never end. Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just a..
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David Wallace-Wells |