The Next Decade: Global Warming Becomes the Dominant Topic

Australia is on fire. 

Firefighters battle a flare-up on a containment line at the Three Mile Fire on the Central Coast of Australia on on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019

Global warming has had a material impact for some time now, but not enough to get the required attention to reverse the denial.  Australia is the first of many major events that will get that attention.  There are going to be more.  Here is what we shall expect over the next decade:

1: Denial Dies
The 2020s will see the effective end of denial. 

2: Exploration Ends
Reserves will become stranded assets and, just like the wild cats endangered by habitat destruction, wildcatters will face extinction.

3: Insurance Influences
The cost of insurance will change both corporate and individual decisions in the 2020s.

4: Capital Chooses
By the end of the 2020s, today‘s emerging technologies will be commercially viable and today’s existing technologies will be scaling at the speed of solar. And we all will be richer for it.

5: Hope Happens
[W]e’ll end the 2020s ready and very well equipped to rapidly re-craft a future that is compelling.

Australia on fire will be only the first of many significant global warming events in this decade.  There is another event going on right now in Jakarta not getting very much attention. 

There is evidence for a very serious event that might occur this summer that could mean a large loss of life. 

The glaciers in the Himalaya's are the third holder of water on the planet after the Greenland and the Antarctic.  They are a major source of water for millions of people on the Indian subcontinent.  Global warming has seriously depleted their glaciers.  The consequence will be a serious failure of sufficient water for that population.  This summer, the summer of 2020, may be marked by the a global emergency to supply them with water before people start dying. 

Khawa Karpo lies at the world’s “third pole”. This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – the Chinese glaciers alone account for an estimated 14.5% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970. This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region’s remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century. It is expected a third of the ice will be lost in that time even if the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is adhered to.

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One reason for the rapid ice loss is that the Tibetan plateau, like the other two poles, is warming at a rate up to three times as fast as the global average, by 0.3C per decade. In the case of the third pole, this is because of its elevation, which means it absorbs energy from rising, warm, moisture-laden air. Even if average global temperatures stay below 1.5C, the region will experience more than 2C of warming; if emissions are not reduced, the rise will be 5C, according to a report released earlier this year by more than 200 scientists for the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). Winter snowfall is already decreasing and there are, on average, four fewer cold nights and seven more warm nights per year than 40 years ago. Models also indicate a strengthening of the south-east monsoon, with heavy and unpredictable downpours. “This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” said ICIMOD’s chief scientist, Philippus Wester.

The Tibetan Plateau is critical for hundreds of millions of people.  The melting of the land ice on Greenland and the Antarctic will have serious consequences for coast lines that will be inundated by rising sea levels, but the lack of water for the vast populations on the Indian Subcontinent is a much more serious problem, and this summer we may find out how critical.

Ultimately the future of this vast region, its people, ice sheets and arteries depends – just as Khawa Karpo’s devotees believe – on us: on reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. As Mukherji says, many of the glaciers that haven’t yet melted have effectively “disappeared because in the dense air pollution, you can no longer see them”.