12 reasons for climate optimism this holiday season

It’s easy to feel down about climate change.  The annual pace of emissions of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere reached an all-time high in 2014. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere spent more than a month above 400 parts per million for the first time in 800,000 years. And global temperature will likely be the hottest in recorded history.  Research published in May shows a slow but unstoppable melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Business as usual puts the planet on a path to warm by  4 °C (7.6 °F) by the end of the century, with consequences that are awful for the rich and catastrophic for the poor.

Furthermore our global response to climate change remains woefully inadequate.  All signs from last week’s United Nations climate conference in Lima indicate that international climate actions fall far short of what’s needed to avoid a dangerous temperature rise of 2 °C (3.8 °F). An already weak international process of “pledge and review” (in which countries’ pledges of climate actions would be formally reviewed by other countries) was watered down even further to effectively just “pledge.”  And the $10B committed by rich countries to the Green Climate Fund so far amounts to less than what rich countries spend on fossil fuel exploration in just six weeks.

So why, in spite of everything, have events in 2014 made me more optimistic than ever about the prospects for a safe and stable climate?  With apologies to the popular Christmas song Twelve Days of Christmas, let me count the ways…

Twelve states-a-pricing

Eleven years of slowing

Ten years-a-waiting

Nine-in-ten agreeing

Eight religious leaders proclaiming

Seven pay-for-performance agreements

Six reference levels

Five-cent solar

Four satellites flying

Three hundred thousand marching

Two titans handshaking

One shared sky

 

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