HUCE Visiting Fellow and climate science writer Justin Gillis recently penned a guest essay for The New York Times searching for answers to the question, "Will Glasgow be the climate breakthrough we need?"
By Justin Gillis for The New York Times
The jawboning has been going on for nearly a third of a century.
It started back in 1992. Delegates from around the world — including a hesitant American president, George H.W. Bush — met in Rio de Janeiro for an “Earth Summit,” earnestly promising to stop wrecking the planet. A new global treaty was hastily drawn up and plastered with a grand title: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
It was bold, promising to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous global warming. And it was vague, requiring countries to do close to nothing, except to keep meeting and jawboning. The United States Senate ratified it that same year without much hesitation.
What has happened to emissions since the nations of the world promised to stabilize them? They have gone up, by more than 60 percent. After a dip in 2020 caused by the pandemic, they have resumed their inexorable rise. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have already reached alarming levels, and in that sense, the treaty has failed. Global temperatures are rising, too, as basic scientific theory predicted they would.
Catastrophic climate change is upon us — savage heat waves, destructive fires, epic rainstorms — and the situation is going to get much worse. So you would not have to be too much of a cynic to cast a wary eye upon the meeting that began Sunday in Scotland.
You can read the rest of the article on The New York Times website.