The Cautious Case For Climate Optimism
And three degrees is much better than four, at which point six natural disasters could strike a single community simultaneously; the number of climate refugees, already in the millions, could grow tenfold, or 20-fold, or more; and, globally, damages from warming could reach $600 trillion — about double all the wealth that exists in the world today. In October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world has only a dozen years to halve its carbon emissions to safely avoid two degrees of warming and all those “catastrophic” impacts. But there are already, today, many places with existing carbon pricing — South Korea, Japan, the E.U. None of their emissions are declining fast enough to meet a goal of two degrees, according to the carbon-watchdog site Climate Action Tracker.
Source: nymag.com