Monday will go down in the history books one way or another. It will either be known as the day the world finally sprung into action, or the day we ignored at our own peril.
At a meeting of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a group of scientists convened by the UN essentially told us we’re screwed. If greenhouse-gas emissions continue at their current rate, the atmosphere will warm as much as 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2030.
They then went on to describe 2040 in words akin to dystopian literature, where we will face worsening food shortages and increased poverty. What is left will be subjected to increased wildfires and floods, not to mention coral reefs dying off en masse.
This means we have officially reached the time in history where most of the global population alive today will be alive to see the start of our species’ potential extinction.
Locally, if you’ve been feeling the heat already it’s not just in your head. Non-profit organisation Carbon Brief, using observed source data from Berkley Earth with future climate model projections, has created an online map that tracks how much warmer it has become due to climate change since the 1850s industrialisation, and how much hotter it might get by the end of the century.
According to their calculations, Cape Town has already warmed by 1°C so far and faces a projected 1.2°C-3.7°C of additional warmth by 2100, Durban has increased by 0.7°C with the potential to hit 3.9°C, and Johannesburg sits on an increase of 1.2°C and faces the biggest increase of 5.3°C in future.
Each degree increase has the potential to wreak devastation on our ability to thrive, as Cape Town’s Day Zero drought levels showed us over the last year. If we don’t change our habits, no amount of showering with buckets will save us.
You would think this sort of news would cause a scramble to adopt new policies, or at least prompt grand political statements? Not so much. Our favourite climate denier and Paris Accord quitter, the White House, has issued no public response to the UN report. “Not today,” said Bill Shine, White House communications director, “It’s a [Brett] Kavanaugh night.”
Yes, that’s right, the entire world has been given a climate-based eviction notice and the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide is focused on the president apologising to accused sexual predator and 114th Supreme Court justice “and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain [they] have been forced to endure”.
Impending famine
Locally, all eyes have been on Nhlanhla Nene’s resignation. Policy-wise, our National Climate Change Bill was published for public comment in July, but we may have to wait until 2019 for each provincial committee to have conducted a climate-change needs and response assessment.
It’s a pattern that has been repeating itself for decades. Warnings are issued but people keep focusing on what is directly in front of them. It’s hard to picture a world covered in dead fish and drowned islands if you can’t see it from your air-conditioned office. It’s hard to care about impending famine while trying to put out state-capture fires, or standing in a hall full of Florida voters who believe science is out to get their production lines. But make no mistake, voters will want answers when the crops fail and food prices soar.
However, some leaders are acting. Ireland passed a bill in July to divest from all its investments in coal, oil, gas and peat “as soon as is practicable”, becoming the world’s first country to flog off its holdings in fossil-fuel companies.
Other scientists and tech companies are making moves towards fuel cells and lithium-air batteries for cars, smart-city grids, tidal turbines and even solar panels in space, in an effort to break our dependence on fossil fuels
It is the first major step in the right direction, but we need more drastic ones. Though everyone should do their part, no matter how small, no amount of not eating beef and using small-scale solar panels to heat your geyser will be enough to cut our greenhouse emissions by 45% by 2030, let alone 100% by 2050. We need drastic technological and social innovation.
“The question was, ‘Can we do better than the conventional reactors that were commercialised 60 years ago?’” asks Simon Irish, CEO of Terrestrial Energy, a company that expects to have a molten-salt nuclear reactor online before 2030. “And the answer was, ‘Absolutely’.”
Nuclear reactors normally evoke images of radioactive waste, meltdowns, weapons proliferation and high costs at best, and Chernobyl at worst. But dozens of start-ups such as Terrestrial Energy are working hard on finding alternatives to the water-based cooling systems that caused 2011’s Fukushima disaster.
Other scientists and tech companies are making moves towards fuel cells and lithium-air batteries for cars, smart-city grids, tidal turbines and even solar panels in space, in an effort to break our dependence on fossil fuels. It may take a healthy combination of all this tech for us to have any hope of generating the mind-boggling amount of clean power to replace fossil fuels while also factoring in the future rising population’s demands.
“To supply a tenth of the clean energy we need by 2050 we have to add 30GW to the grid every year,” says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard. “I think we ought to be trying [but] I’m not optimistic,” Bunn said to Wired Magazine back in July before the latest numbers had surfaced. He also noted that the pace at which we’d need to build solar and wind generators to quit fossil fuels is just as daunting.
Radicalisation of infrastructure takes time — or in Eskom’s case, just maintaining it does. All innovation takes time, and right now it seems that’s something we don’t have enough of.
• McKeown is a gadget and tech trend writer.
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