by David Spratt
We know where we are heading: towards a planet that will be unlivable for most people, as the human systems built up over centuries collapse. This is not news. Nor is the evidence that we have reached 1.5°C and that, with accelerating warming, the world will hit 2°C around 2040.
On present indications — with the fossil fuel giants and petrostates on the offensive — emissions will decline only slowly to 2050, as a number of reports on the "production gap" have indicated.
Yet by 2°C or more, and perhaps even before then, there is the prospect of a "Hothouse Earth" scenario, a threshold in which a cascade of system changes makes warming self-sustaining, leading to conditions hotter than any experienced over the last few hundred thousand years by modern humans.
So cooling the system is must now be a key task, and that is the focus of coming online conference: The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's The Plan? organised by the The Healthy Planet Action Coalition.
