It will come as no surprise to those who are aware of the impact of climate change to discover that in the first eight months of 2024, heat records have been broken right across the world.
In Costa Rica, Belize, Cambodia and Laos the temperature reached over 40°C. In Mali, Chad, Ghana and Togo it reached over 44°C and in Egypt and Mexico it reached over 50°C.
Of course, these countries are a long, long way away so we don’t need to worry, do we?
Sorry, but Mexico is at the same latitude north as we are south. It’s all right, we don’t expect to reach those temperatures this summer. Not this year, anyway.
But we will reach them if we don’t do more to control the emissions that are causing these dangerously high temperatures to happen across the world.
Last year, Canada’s record number of wildfires produced two billion tonnes of CO2. In former, "normal" years, Canada’s fires produced a tenth of that. Those emissions have raised the global temperature, so this season’s fires are likely to generate even higher emissions and therefore generate an even higher temperature.
But Canada is a long way away, too. No need to panic, is there?
Anyway, the climate-change deniers tell us, there’s nothing new in this. Winston Peters reassures us that the climate has always been changing.
But Columbia University climate scientist Jason Smerdon puts it this way: "If the pace of temperature change coming out of an ice age is like a pedestrian walking on the street, then the pace of change for us getting to 3°C warming by 2100 would be like a car passing by at least 250kmh.".
How much time do we have? The carbon budget is the total amount of carbon we can release into the atmosphere from now on without exceeding the Paris target of a temperature increase to 1.5°C. At present rates of emissions, we will use up that budget in 2029, that is, in five years’ time, according to Climate Change Tracker.
This is the context in which our current government has abandoned its emission control targets for 2030. In other words, your government and mine has given up on keeping global temperature increases to the Paris target.
It is because of governmental responses like ours (isn’t this embarrassing?) that climate scientists across the world are now predicting the global temperature will rise to 3°C, and that it will happen before the end of this century.
At some point before then according to New Zealand climate scientist James Renwick, Melbourne and Sydney will experience 50°C temperatures and not a few Melburnians and Sydneysiders can be expected to migrate to New Zealand.
Sensibly they will relocate to the more inhabitable parts of our country such as Otago and Southland. At some point before then we shall discover (again, according to Renwick) that dairying is virtually impossible north of Oamaru.
None of this is inevitable. We can act to control and reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions such as methane. And if we want our children to live in an inhabitable world, we need to act.
But the answer to this looming crisis is not to build more roads so that internal-combustion vehicles can drive further and faster and put out more emissions.
What is needed is for our government to recognise that we face the biggest crisis the human race has ever faced, recognise that dealing with it is our responsibility now, and to rise to the occasion.
- John Drummond is an emeritus professor of the University of Otago.
