IPCC Report Warns Of Dire Climate Catastrophe Without Action

Learn how you can make a difference at the Birmingham Public Library. Photo by Parker Evans.

It's somewhat deceptive that, at least in the reports I read, imminent increases in average global temperature are measured in degrees Celsius. At a glance, 1.5 degrees Celsius seems like a small number to those of us who are used to increments of Fahrenheit. For anyone like me, who conveniently forgets no matter how much we look it up, that's 34.7 degrees Fahrenheit. 

So, what is the significance of 1.5 degrees Celsius?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established in 1988, completed its sixth assessment cycle this year and published its latest report earlier this month. 1.5 degrees Celsius is a prominent benchmark in its report. It measures the increase in average temperature from pre-industrial times to a point in the future at which many effects of climate change will be irreversible. 

According to The Guardian's summary of the report, the chance to prevent our crossing of this dire threshold is slim but real.

"Though the report found it was now 'almost inevitable' that temperatures would rise about 1.5C—that level above which many of the effects of climate breakdown will become irreversible—the IPCC said it could be possible to bring them back down below the critical level by the end of this century."

However, 1.5C is just one notch on the climate change measuring stick. 

The problems it points to are not simply a matter of the world getting warmer. As we study climate change, we learn more about the whole interconnected ecosystem of our planet, whose complexity can be modeled but is ultimately virtually incalculable. 

For example, the warming of the earth contributes to the melting of the ice caps, whose freshwater desalinates the oceans, which slows ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, which changes weather patterns on the continents, which makes food production and habitability unstable...and so on.

The consensus is that dramatic change is necessary if we want to continue living on a habitable planet, let alone halt or reverse the effects of climate change. However, recognizing that our entire global organization of production, consumption, and resource extraction must change is about as overwhelming as anything can be. It is a particularly challenging fact in the face of international failure to cooperatively end a global pandemic—a level of cooperation required to mitigate climate change. 

But we must choose daily to start somewhere. For me, that has meant taking a bite-sized approach to learning about pieces of our global ecosystem: reading about Alabama flora and fauna, or insects and their ecological role, or new discoveries about what fungi are capable of. 

So many of our daily lives are alienated from the greater natural world, particularly regarding the environmental and human cost of that alienation. Why not begin the task of confronting the climate crisis by (re)familiarizing ourselves with the world that it threatens? 

And what better place to start than the public library?

The book you pick up doesn't necessarily have to be about climate change, per se—it could be about the vast temperature forest that once spread from the Atlantic to Oklahoma (The Southern Forest: A Chronicle by Laurence C. Walker). Or it could be about the proliferation of invasive species in the last few hundred years (Nature Out of Place: Biological Invasions of the Global Age by Jason and Roy Van Driesche). You could watch a documentary on why local food matters (Eating Alabama) or the acclaimed, visually breathtaking exploration of our earth, Planet Earth. 

If you want a sobering, robust read on the role of colonialism in eroding ecosystems and foodways, Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is a masterful and accessible piece of scholarship. If you want to confront the frontier of climate change and its existential implications head-on, there is Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption and Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything.

Any place you start will lead you to a richer understanding of our world. After all, everything is connected. 

By Parker Evans | Library Assistant Ⅲ, Business, Science, & Technology, Central Library