We're writing the future now for generations of Canadians to come and it's indelible.
A new study concludes that every five years we delay strong action on climate change will add an extra 8 inches of sea level rise by this century's end.
“One important point was to reveal that sea level [rise] is not in the far future, it’s now, and because the system is so slow, we just can’t see it at the moment,” said Matthias Mengel of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the lead author of the study, which was published in Nature Communications. “But we cause it now.”
The goal is to limit warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which requires that the world essentially cease adding any more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050 or so.
This, in turn, means that global greenhouse gas emissions must reach a peak by either 2020, 2025 or 2030 (or possibly 2035) and then begin to decline rapidly. The longer the wait, the faster the necessary decline after the peak. If we delay longer still, it simply becomes too difficult to bring emissions down fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming.
“The more cumulative emissions, the more warming, the more sea level,” Mengel explained.
And that’s just the central estimate in the study. At the extreme end of what’s relatively unlikely but still certainly possible, the research found that each five-year delay could mean as much as an additional meter, or over three feet, of sea level rise. That is because of the ever-growing chance of major destabilization of the Antarctic ice sheet. In some small number of scenarios, even with the sharp emissions reductions contemplated by the Paris agreement, the Antarctic ice sheet still gives up meters worth of sea level rise.
It's becoming inarguable that Justin Trudeau isn't taking this seriously. Instead he's gambling with the future, our grandkids' future. Even Liberals should find that reprehensible.