E3G

Climate change: time to get real

By Tom Burke

The science is clear, the technology is available. To meet the challenge of “the most serious threat to humanity since the invention of nuclear weapons,” climate-change campaigners now need to win the political argument, says E3G Founding Director Tom Burke, in an article published today by Open Democracy.

The public argument on climate change has been transformed by a series of recent interventions by scientists. First, James E Hansen, the global doyen of climate scientists, announced that the world has only ten years in which to take decisive action on the climate. “I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most,” he told the Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento, California.

Second, John P Holdren, the incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in his inaugural address that the world is already experiencing dangerous climate change.

Third, Britain’s national academy of science, the Royal Society, sent a letter to the oil company ExxonMobil asking it to stop supporting organisations that were deliberately distorting the science of climate change.

We are much more accustomed to scientists entering the public debate about risk to say that our fears are exaggerated. There is no precedent for the kind of interventions we are now witnessing. They are a mark of the growing panic within the scientific community at the deepening abyss between what they know about the climate and what governments are doing. Two things are now becoming clear. The climate is changing faster, and the impacts of this change are going to be nastier, than we first thought.