Hope now rests on very thin ice

May 10, 2024

77% of IPCC climate lead scientists, as reported by the Guardian this week, see that we will, almost inevitably, be facing catastrophic global temperature rise within the foreseeable future. This news, together with the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s newly-published report “Too Hot To Handle”, underscores Adrian Glikson’s despairing preview of humanity’s seemingly inevitable demise in the Earth’s forecast sixth mass extinction.

Thirty years ago we had the information that we needed, as a species, to recognise, accept, and overcome this threat. Regretfully governments, with fossil fuel industry encouragement, opted instead to focus on other pressing issues that allowed them to generate deliverable short-term benefits. Democracy has proved ill-suited to the climate challenge.

We are now at a point from which our runaway climate can, theoretically, still be restrained sufficiently to maintain a sustainable environment, but such steps would require global co-operation. To obtain this will require a global acceptance of the existential threat, and an acceptance that living standards may necessarily be compromised for some time as we make an urgent, but still managed, transition to planetary sustainability.

Hope remains, but it now rests on very thin ice that, like the ice-caps, grows thinner every day.