While climate-change activists view 2030 as the tipping point for saving the planet, the left-wing thought leader ThinkProgress warns there’s a “political reality” that must be faced.
Essentially, the planet is doomed if President Trump is re-elected in November 2020.
That means “the richest country in the world and the biggest cumulative source of heat-trapping emissions over the past century,” the United States, has just 14 months to act, not 12 years.
The 12-year reference comes from the 2018 U.N. “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC,” released in October 2018, which essentially concludes 2030 is the point of no return if nations remain on the current path.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., alluded to the U.N. report in January when she said “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
ThinkProgress writer Joe Romm said that with “eight years of a pro-science president, Barack Obama, the nation made steady progress on reducing emissions and committing to future reductions, enabling a global climate deal in Paris in 2015.”
“But with just two and a half years of an anti-science administration, national and global progress have both stalled under President Donald Trump, who has begun to abandon the Paris Accord and undermine action here and abroad,” he wrote.
Nov. 3, 2020, therefore, “is the deadline for Americans who do not want to destroy the health and well-being of current generations, their children, and future generations.”
“If Trump is reelected, the prospects for the necessary national and global cuts in carbon pollution by 2030 will be gone,” he said.
Britain’s Prince Charles, the BBC reported this week, gives the planet 18 months.
“I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” he said in a speech at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently.
Romm, noting Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed for her 12-year warning, said ThinkProgress “contacted leading experts on exactly what the science says.”
“They confirmed that, yes, as Ocasio-Cortez said, the world must act fast if we are to maintain any plausible hope of avoiding the catastrophic impacts that come with warming of 2 degrees Celsius or more above pre-industrial temperatures.”
Not the first ‘deadline’
It turns out that Prince Charles’ warning of doom was not his first. In 2009, he declared the “tipping point” would come in 100 months, a little more than eight years. He then extended the deadline in 2015, noted Climate Depot.
Climate Depot founder Marc Morano pointed out the British royal’s 2009 warning was of “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
But in 2015, Charles warned in an interview with the U.K.’s Western Morning News that the world has 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.
Morano observed that climate “tipping points” have been a staple of the global warming movement for decades.
The United Nations issued such warnings in 1982, and it declared a “10-year tipping point” in 1989.
“It’s difficult to keep up whether it is hours, days, months or 1000 years,” Morano wrote, citing other predictions.
Elizabeth May of the Canadian Green Party said in 2009, “We have hours” to prevent disaster.
And then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed that year there were only 50 days left to “save the world.”
Also in 2009, NASA climate scientist James Hansen declared President Obama only “has four years to save Earth.”
In 1982, U.N. official Mostafa Tolba gave the world “a couple decades.”
Britian’s Independent newspaper famously published a story in March 2000 featuring a researcher at one of the world’s preeminent climate-change research institutions predicting that within a few years, snowfall in Britain would become “a very rare and exciting event.”
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” said David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia.
‘Deadlines matter in the face of irreversible catastrophe’
Scientists who promote the theory of anthropogenic climate change contend a rise in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity is causing catastrophic warming.
But a new scientific study found that the current CO2 levels of 410 parts per million were last seen on Earth 3 million years ago. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded that temperatures at that time were up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer globally and sea levels were 65 feet higher.
Further, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted in its 2013 report that over the previous 15 years, recorded world temperatures had increased at only a quarter of the rate the IPCC claimed when it published its 2007 assessment.
Nevertheless, ThinkProgress’ Romm concluded: “If the world is to have any plausible chance of saving the climate, we need the strongest possible action by 2030, and that means we need to elect a president in 2020 who understands the urgency, and who understands that deadlines matter in the face of irreversible catastrophe.”