Why climate scientists are losing hope—and why they're wrong

A week ago, I was feeling incredibly depressed and pessimistic about climate change. I'd just read a piece in the Guardian in which top climate scientists shared their views about the future, and they were almost uniformly bleak. Nearly all agreed that there was no chance now of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and most thought that realistically, there never had been. Many thought warming would exceed 3 degrees, and one said even that number was "hopeful and conservative." They predicted a "semi-dystopian" future in which large swaths of the globe would become uninhabitable and billions of people would die or be displaced.

For many of these scientists, the most frustrating thing was knowing that this didn't have to happen. They talked about how they'd been sounding the alarm for decades at this point, and still world leaders were dragging their feet. One expressed incredulity that the world was willing to spend trillions to deal with COVID but couldn't muster several billion to address a far more existential threat. One said it was "almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken"; another was "relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds." A third confessed that she considered giving up her climate work, which seemed to be having no impact at all, and becoming a nightclub singer.

All this had me questioning whether there was even any point in trying to deal with this problem anymore. And then a member of my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter posted a link to an episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" that offered a completely different perspective. In it, Klein interviews another climate scientist, Hannah Ritchie, who has recently published a book called Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Their discussion brought out several highly convenient truths that don't often get mentioned in the climate discussion:

• First, it's simply not true that nothing has been done about climate change. She pointed out that before the 2015 Paris Agreement, scientists were predicting "completely catastrophic" levels of global warming—between 4 and 5 degrees Celsius. Today, those estimates have fallen to between 2.5 and 3 degrees. She acknowledges that this is still very, very bad, but it's no longer in world-ending territory. Even though most nations have fallen short of their Paris goals, we've still "chopped off a degree" or more from the worst-case scenario we were looking at less than a decade ago.
• While it's almost guaranteed that we will breach the 1.5-degree threshold, that doesn't mean it's too late to avert disaster. That's because the impact of global warming —how much rising temperatures affect precipitation, storm strength, and other problems—isn't linear. Going from 1.5 to 2 degrees is much worse than going from 1 to 1.5 degrees. So not only are we not too late, what we do now matters more than ever. Every tenth of a degree that we can shave off our temperature trajectory means a much bigger difference to our future than it did before.
• One of the biggest problems—switching to clean energy—is already more or less cracked. Not only do we have wind and solar and electric cars, these technologies are now better and cheaper than fuel-burning alternatives—something that wasn't true just five years ago. So it's not true that we've had these solutions for years and haven't deployed them; we've only just now reached the point where we have cost-effective alternatives that can replace fossil fuels without holding back human progress. Now all we have to do is build them.
• Some people object that we can't simply rely on the clean energy sources we have now, because we don't have enough of the critical minerals required. This too is false, says Ritchie. In the first place, we keep finding new deposits of the minerals we need and new ways to extract them. In the second place, the amount of material needed for each new battery or solar panel keeps dropping as the technology improves. And finally, unlike fossil fuels, these minerals don't get used up. When a solar panel reaches the end of its usable life, we can extract the contents and use them again.
• Another common objection is that we don't have the space for all the solar farms and wind farms we'd need to power our whole country. But while solar and wind farms do take up more space than fossil fuel plants, the footprint of a fossil fuel plant isn't limited to the plant itself; you also have to consider all the land used for extracting the fuel. Right now, says Ritchie, we're using lots more land for other energy sources than we would need to produce all our power from solar and wind. One mind-blowing statistic: if you took all the land currently being devoted to producing not-that-efficient biofuels and covered it in solar panels, it could power the U.S. three times over.

Ritchie admits that we don't have all the answers yet. We know how to produce low-carbon electricity, but we don't know yet how to produce low-carbon cement, steel, jet fuel, or meat. (She also acknowledges that simply getting everyone to go vegan, as she has done, is a nonstarter. People don't care much about what powers their cars or heats their homes, but they do care a lot about what they eat.) But she stresses that this shouldn't stop us from rolling out the clean technologies we do have as fast as we can. There's no reason we can't can tackle the problems we know how to solve and look for new solutions to other problems at the same time.

Klein's conversation with Ritchie covers a lot more than this, from air pollution to nuclear energy to some knotty issues related to meat consumption. (For instance, is it worse to eat beef, which has a much higher carbon footprint, or chicken, which requires killing a lot more animals?) It's worth listening to the whole thing, or reading the transcript if you aren't into podcasts. 

But the main takeaway for me is that we haven't lost the climate battle yet. Yes, things are already bad, and yes, they are going to get worse. But what we do in the next ten years will make a huge difference, for good or bad. And to a large extent, we have our work cut out for us.