As the UN climate negotiations kick off in Doha, Qatar, people all over the world are watching as floods wash away their lives, fires consume their houses and droughts decimate food crops. Just this morning, UNEP released a report warning that melting permafrost could release massive amounts of methane–a powerful greenhouse gas–into the atmosphere, bringing the planet ever closer to runaway climate change. Here’s a letter from three powerful advocates for a safe climate to the leaders and negotiators in Doha:
An open letter to governments and their negotiators
As the UN climate negotiations kick off in Doha, Qatar, people all over the world are watching as floods wash away their lives, fires consume their houses and droughts decimate food crops. Just this morning, UNEP released a report warning that melting permafrost could release massive amounts of methane--a powerful greenhouse gas--into the atmosphere, bringing the planet ever closer to runaway climate change. Here's a letter from three powerful advocates for a safe climate to the leaders and negotiators in Doha: To really address climate change UNFCCC-COP18 should decide to leave under the soil more than 2/3 of the fossil reserves by Bill McKibben, Nnimmo Bassey & Pablo Solon 2012 saw the shocking melt of the Arctic, leading our greatest climatologist to declare a 'planetary emergency,' and it saw weather patterns wreck harvests around the world, raising food prices by 40% and causing family emergencies in poor households throughout the world. That's what happens with 0.8ºC of global warming. If we are going to stop this situation from getting worse, an array of institutions have explained this year precisely what we need to do: leave most of the carbon we know about in the ground and stop looking for more. If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched. That's not "environmentalist math" or some radical interpretation--that's from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that--without dramatic global action to change our path--the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt--absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters. Negotiators should cease their face-saving, their endless bracketing and last minute cooking of texts and concentrate entirely on figuring out how to live within the carbon budget scientists set. We can't emit more than 565 more gigatons of carbon before 2050, but at the current pace we'll blow past that level in 15 years. If we want to have a chance to stick to this budget by 2020 we can’t send to the atmosphere more than 200 gigatons.