Excerpt from Updated FLVCS Climate Change Report:

Urgent indeed – we are past the point of being out of time –

As of the spring of 2019, it’s come down to this: We are already suffering the ravages of climate change, and we only have a decade (until 2030) to dramatically change the way we live and draw down the resident greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere, or face almost certain extinction of life as we know it. The evidence is overwhelming. Consider three recent reports.

1.      UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1]

This report ― authored by 91 researchers and editors from 40 countries citing more than 6,000 scientific references details how difficult it will be to keep the planet from warming beyond the 1.5-degree target, considered the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris climate accord. Scientists say that allowing warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would spur dramatic consequences. Sea levels will continue to rise. Flooding, drought and extreme weather events will wreak havoc on communities around the globe. Many species will continue to be driven toward extinction and marine ecosystems could face “irreversible loss.”[2]

Absent radical changes in energy policy and human behavior, we should expect severe economic and humanitarian crises by as early as 2030.

2.      US Fourth Climate Assessment [3]

The fourth National Climate Assessment is the culmination of years of research and analysis by hundreds of top climate scientists in the USA – in government agencies and beyond. The massive report details the many ways in which global climate change is already affecting American communities, from hurricanes to wildfires to floods to drought.  The new report, mandated by Congress and published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is the latest and most detailed confirmation that humans are driving climate change and that Americans are already adapting to and suffering from its effects. Climate change is “an immediate threat, not a far-off possibility,” it says.[4]

In direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American trade, exports and supply chains will be disrupted, agricultural yields will fall and fire season could spread to the Southeast. We can expect draughts, flooding and extreme weather. [5]

The Fourth Climate Assessment estimates that more than 90 percent of the current warming is caused by humans. And therein lies the solution- radical and immediate changes in energy policy and human behavior. [6]

3.      The Sixth Global Environment Outlook [7]

The sixth Global Environment Outlook, released in March 2019 painted a dire picture of a planet where environmental problems interact with each other to make things even more dangerous for people. It uses the word “risk” 561 times in a 740-page report.

The GEO 6 report concludes “unsustainable human activities globally have degraded the Earth’s ecosystems, endangering the ecological foundations of society.” “Time is running out to prevent the irreversible and dangerous impacts of climate change,” the report says, noting that unless something changes, global temperatures will exceed the threshold of warming that international agreements call dangerous. The report also details climate change impacts on human health, air, water, land and biodiversity. Almost all coastal cities and small island nations are increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rising seas and extreme weather. What needs to change, to avoid the crisis, is the way the world eats, buys things, gets its energy and handles its waste.[8]

The reports tell us that no matter what we do, earth will warm to the 1.5 degree C threshold established for life as we know it. Humanity must act now so as to not allow warming beyond that.  Futurist David Houle describes our situation as one of immediate and present danger:

At this juncture, in 2019, we face two futures. We dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels and resource consumption by 2030… or we do not. If we do, we will still spend decades on a warming planet and live in a less than optimal reality; one less pleasant than what we are used to. If we don’t, civilization as we know it will no longer exist by 2100, maybe earlier.[9]

For our now global society to survive it must foresee and forestall dangers to it.  It must also be willing to abandon those of its values that no longer serve.  In both, it has been far too slow and ineffective, thereby creating the current URGENT need for change. 

Clearly, we must act. But how? In the next section we will deal with solutions. They involve radical and immediate changes in energy policy and human behavior. To avoid the worst of the crisis we must change the way we eat and buy things, how we get our energy and how we handle our waste. It will require new ways of thinking and new sets of values.

Click here to read the full report – learn what actions you can take to help avoid this crisis.