All about climate change

Our planet is in the grip of a fever. The abrupt rise in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is dramatically raising the average temperature of our globe, with dire consequences. It’s not so much that our climate is changing that’s a problem – change, after all, is inevitable, and not always bad. It is the speed of change that’s problematic for us puny humans. When the climate changes too quickly, we can’t adapt our systems of agriculture, our fisheries, our forests. Diseases move around faster than we can prepare for them. We run out of food. Our homes are ill-equipped for the weather, or wind up underwater.

I have been reporting on climate change for decades now, during which time I have seen a huge change in public perceptions of the problem – although this varies dramatically from place to place. It can be hard to remember what things were like in the “before times” before climate change was a pressing problem, or have a grip on where we are, where we’re going, and what things will be like when we get there. It’s valuable, sometimes, to take a look at the big picture. This is an attempt to do so, in 1500 words.

I was born in the 1970s. The 60s and 70s enjoyed something of an environmentalist heyday, before the greed and consumerism of the 80s and 90s set in. People were worried about pesticides, acid rain, oil spills, accidents at nuclear power plants, whaling. Earth Day, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act were all born in 1970; Greenpeace was born shortly thereafter in my hometown. But climate change wasn’t yet on the agenda.

The concept of global warming wasn’t foreign to scientists. As far back as 1890 researchers had known that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warmed a planet, and that rising levels might warm it further. But in the 60s and 70s researchers were only just starting to track the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, and the ‘Keeling curve’ was just starting to show a rise. In 1979, the First World Climate Conference warned that continued fossil fuel use could significantly alter global climate.

The 80s and 90s saw the science grow around greenhouse gases and planetary warming, but it was shrouded in political contention and debate. The fossil fuel industry was powerful and sowed doubt that humans could have a big impact on the weather. In 1988, James Hansen testified before the US Senate that global warming had begun, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to keep tabs on the science. But so much was uncertain. Was the planet warming? If so, were humans to blame?

In 1995, the best the IPCC could say was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” As the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, journalists reported “he said / she said” debates between people who thought it was real and a serious concern, and those who didn’t.

The 2000s arguably saw a turning point in public attitudes as climate change became harder to dispute or ignore. An Inconvenient Truth starring Al Gore brought climate change to mass audiences. The debate shifted from “is it happening” to “does it really matter?”

I remember interviewing scientists who literally said “Sure, polar bears might die, but what do I care about that?”. I was working at Nature by then, and it was a big deal when UK economist Nicholas Stern reported in 2006 that the financial cost of not tackling climate change would, actually, be far worse than the financial cost of tackling it. Climate change became less of something that overly-sensitive environmentalists whinged about, and more something that politicians should take seriously. By 2007, the IPCC strengthened its statement to say that climate change was “very likely” due to human emissions; in 2013 that became “extremely likely”.

During the early 2000s, living in London, I remember actively choosing to take holidays by train rather than flying because of the guilt of carbon emissions. I even bought my brother, who was living in the US at the time, ‘carbon credits’ for Christmas. He was confused. The idea of feeling guilty about CO2 was definitely not mainstream in the United States. The conferences of parties (COPs) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talked about greenhouse gases but avoided talking about “fossil fuels”; there was a lot of talk, instead, about getting credit for forests and planting trees.

A landmark came in 2015 with the Paris Treaty, the famous document that promised to try to keep global warming below 2C above pre-industrial times, or better yet 1.5C. The Kyoto Protocol had failed with top-down prescriptions for carbon cuts; Paris did better by asking participants to come up with their own goals from the bottom up. But progress remains scant.

It was only in 2021 that the IPCC’s 6^th assessment report finally, finally declared it “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”, and the COP finally, finally talked about phasing down fossil fuels.

Yet the world is still warming. In 2024, parts of the planet passed that 1.5C warming target. Scientists project we will pass it globally, in long-term average, very soon. Our efforts to lower emissions have not been particularly successful: emissions are still rising, although more slowly than before. In the good news department, some countries (including much of Europe) are seeing their emissions decline. And solar and wind – electricity generating technologies that don’t spew out greenhouse gases -- are now so cheap that they are destined to grow and grow and displace more fossil fuels.

I still hear friends and colleagues say things like “I don’t know, is it really so bad? I mean, I don’t care if it gets one or two degrees warmer. Sounds nice.” Or: “I feel like we’re just making a lot more stuff when we make electric cars and solar panels, surely that’s bad for the planet.” Or: “plants like carbon dioxide, won’t they soak it up?”

The truth is complicated. Yes, mining is bad for the planet and “making stuff” involves energy, which sometimes generates more emissions. But yes, a few degrees is a big deal (ice ages are about 5 degrees cooler than ‘normal’, for context). And, again, the problem is the rate of change of temperature and rainfall and flooding, which might wipe out corals or kill crops or swallow up coastlines where millions of people live. Sure, plants like carbon dioxide, but they don’t like droughts or heatwaves. Life on Earth is a balancing act, and when it gets out of whack it’s hard to see which balls will fall first or what the knock-on effects will be. But balls will fall.

None of this literally keeps me up at night. I’m an optimist at heart. I have hope that the big global machinery of diplomacy will get somewhere, eventually. We have had success before, with the ozone hole for example (which was spotted in 1985, tackled with a treaty in ’87, and is now healing). I have hope, too, that my journalism makes a small difference (I was once told that a piece I edited helped to get funding to save the corals in Belize, for example; they are small steps, but they are steps). And our everyday actions may also help the planet (and us) a little. My husband made us buy an electric car, and we have a sailboat for our vacations. I try to cook less beef, and more local veggies. The kids walk to school.

And yet I feel a sadness akin to grief when I think about how things are changing close to home. When heatwaves wipe out local shellfish, or when another year passes without much winter snow in our mountain town, without the lake freezing. I mourn the passing of the times that used to be, the way we all mourn the passing of our childhoods. And I know that my family and I are so very, very lucky; that there are millions on this planet who will be displaced, face hunger, and mourn much more than a winter without snow. For them, we keep hoping, and acting, and working.

I live in a country that has huge potential to host people in a changing and changed world: Canada is one of only a handful of nations that will see more arable land, and more seafood, thanks to its northern climes and largely empty landscape. I hope we welcome climate refugees, and plan for this, wisely.

What will the world be like when my kids are grown, and theirs? Who knows. It will be so radically different in so many ways, thanks to technology, to AI, to climate change, to so much more. The kids I know are smart and concerned for the planet. Hopefully their future will hold less to mourn, and more to embrace.