No tipping point or point of no return for climate change

For years now people have been talking about there being a ‘tipping point’ or ‘point of no return’ for global warming and climate change. It makes it sound like we’re trying to catch a 3.50 pm bus out of a catastrophic fire zone and if we don’t get that bus we might as well just go home and burn. The 3.50 bus I’m referring is the idea that 350 parts per million, or maybe 400 parts per million of CO2 equivalent (which for those who don’t know is the amount of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere) is what we can live with. Of course getting the bus early is much better, perhaps the 3.15 pm, but you know, focusing on the exact time of the bus as a ‘last bus’ concept ignores the current crisis state of the world.

We may have already gone past the ‘point of now return’, our best, realistic, option might even be the 4.00 pm bus, it could be the 4.05 pm one. I don’t want to labour the bus analogy too much further, but as I sit in the thick smoke of one of hundreds of fires up and down the east coast of Australia, I suggest, don’t worry about the bus timetable, let’s all get in our cars (let’s make them electric or hydrogen powered) and get the heck out of this situation as quickly as possible.

The fires here in Australia, with the 40 degree plus days, no rain, and more and more and more fires, and longer dry spells expected to come, show us we’re in hell now. The horror of climate change is here. Now it’s just about doing something about it at sonic speed.

There’s no freakin waiting around for buses anymore, it’s just time to get the hell out of this mess as best we can, as imperfectly as we can. Because seeing your country burning, seeing the thick smoke that looks like an apocalypse, seeing the dry hot countryside, the people dying, the homes destroyed, the grass disappearing, the koalas dying, the kangaroos fleeing, the black burnt out, smouldering trees, the red sun that my son says look like the sun in Star Wars’ dusty and desolate planet of Tatooine. Seeing that hell tells me we can argue about a particular ‘safe’ figure as much as we like, but the consequences of climate change are already here and it will be here whether we do something about it before the ‘tipping point’ arrives or not, to the point where our planet will become inhabitable. Something like Mars, with not a drop of water on its surface.

We need constant and unrelentingly pressure on politicians, governments, private businesses, airlines, the car industry, power generators, ourselves, our families, the finance industry, everyone contributing to this mess, to get the hell on with things before the hell we are already in gets much much worse.

For there is no ‘point of no return’ no ‘tipping point’, there is just a steady spiral descent into the bowels of destruction of this planet.

There is only doing something about it, and not doing something about it. Waiting for some special figure that makes us feel safe is some sort of fantasy (although I acknowledge it is at least some sort of guide). Well I can tell you as I look out the window and see the sky look like some science fiction planet, even though we are not even in an immediate fire zone, the time for action is now. The coal fire power plants need to start decommissioning now. The coal exports need to start stopping now. The planes we fly in need to start converting to fuels which don’t add to this hell of global warming now.  Hydrogen is possibly our best option, as it will with the cars that we drive. Solar and wind are already proven technologies delivering clean, reliable, cheap and safe energy. Finance companies have the ability to refuse loans to fossil fuel production now. We have the ability to reach global agreements on fossil fuel use now. We have the power to invest in hydrogen fuel technologies now. We have all the tools at our disposal now, let’s use them now.

We need a united, concerted global effort because we will have to continue to live in this world well after any ‘tipping point’ is reached.