This is a short extract from an essay by Jo Chandler in 'The Griffith Review'.
Jo Chandler is one of Australia's top journalists.
5 June 2019 ... Atmospheric carbon dioxide: 411.53 ppm
...
..., I’d listened to US journalist David Wallace-Wells talk about his blockbuster book, The Uninhabitable Earth. ‘It is worse, much worse, than you think,’ ... Explaining ..., he was shocked to discover the raw science was far scarier than mainstream reporting. ... ‘If you are terrified of these facts, you should be ... Because the science is really clear, and it is inescapable.’
... So it is that I understand climate change is real, human-caused, urgent and fucking terrifying, and that the media has failed catastrophically to tell that story. ...
... atmospheric carbon spikes over 415 parts per million for the first time in three million years,[ix] galloping north at a rate unseen in sixty-five million years of geological record. ...
Which brings me to Gore’s Climate Reality leadership program, in search of new strategies. And to a position emboldened by the former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s argument that journalists covering the climate emergency ‘have a duty not to be impartial’. ...
When the session breaks I spot David Karoly, one of Australia’s most eminent climate experts and explainers. ...
‘Oh that?’ he says, nodding to the latest iteration of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth slideshow. That ain’t the half of it, he says. The stuff that’s ‘really interesting’ – as in, really worrying – didn’t get a mention. ...
... dropping into my lockdown in 2020, ...
On the Paris global emissions ambitions, ‘it’s completely silly to talk about a 1.5 degree target – we have way overshot that’. Two degrees, perhaps, ‘but I would argue it is virtually impossible,’ he says, ... The best estimate with current commitments is 3 to 4 degrees.
‘The world supposedly was seeking to reduce emissions,’ Karoly says. Since Paris, ‘they’ve grown every year except in 2020’, when a virus put a spanner in the works.
That leaves us ‘locked in most of the way to a “hothouse Earth”, even with dramatic emission reductions’, he says. ‘Hothouse Earth’ is an epoch described by some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists as an ‘uncontrollable and dangerous’ planet of cascading tipping points – melting permafrost, rising seas, burning forests – presenting ‘serious challenges for the viability of human societies’ (emphasis added).[x] At a 4 degree rise – and it doesn’t stop there – experts theorise the global sustainable population will collapse to about one billion. ‘In other words,’ Karoly elaborates, ‘90 per cent of the population is lost.’
...
[ix]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-levels-just-hit-another-record-heres-why-it-matters/
[x]
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252
PDF (added)
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252.full.pdf
Appendix (added)
https://www.pnas.org/highwire/filestream/821317/field_highwire_adjunct_files/0/pnas.1810141115.sapp.pdf