On Wednesday, former US Vice President Al Gore spoke in one of the plenary rooms. Apparently he does this every year, and he didn’t present particularly novel information, but it was still very neat to see him up close.
Also fun was to be able to seat in the delegate seats. I ended up at the Kingdom of Lesotho. There was a bit of confusion around my seat halfway through the talk – delegates from Lesotho came to sit there, were surprised to find other people, and were told by a security guard before I fully understood what was going on that seating had been opened to all. Luckily, there was room for the delegates to sit down next to me and we had a friendly, whispered conversation about the famous Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth. They also shared the below flyer with me.
Back to Gore’s presentation, here are some extremely sobering and occasionally encouraging facts that he shared:
Above: The energy trapped by man-made global warming pollution is now “…equivalent to exploding 500,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year.” James Hansen, Former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Above: Graphic showing increased deviation (between 2005-2015) from the mean of the frequency of unusual temperature occurrences. Baseline is from (but I’m unsure because it’s blurry) 1951-1990. Graph shows in particular increased warmer than average days as compared to baseline.
Above: One June 26-27, 2018, Quriyat, Oman set a world record for the hottest overnight low temperature ever recorded: 42.6C (108.7F). The town remained above 41.6C for 51 hours.
Above: The jet stream is becoming “wavier”. Steeper troughs and higher ridges mean weather systems progress more slowly, raising the chances for long-duration extreme events, like droughts, floods, and heat waves.
Above: A recent national survey shows that 69% of Polish citizens favor a phaseout of coal by 2030.
Above: Enough solar energy reaches Earth every hour to fill all the world’s energy needs for a full year.
Planetary Boundaries
Speaking of famous white dudes, I also had a chance to see a brief presentation by Johan Rockstrom, a very well-known climate scientist who leads research on the ‘planetary boundaries’.
Rockstrom said that there are three key climate facts:
- We are living in a new geological era, the Anthropocene.
- The Holocene is the only period that we know for certain can support sustainable societies (i.e., meet the SDGs), so we need to get the Earth back to those characteristics.
- However, ecosystems can be shifted irreversibly by breaching tipping points – and so we might not be able to get back to the Holocene.
The time to act must be now, he says – and the SDGs are the framework to use to get there. Finally, he advocates for people (researchers, policymakers, etc.) to not pick and choose SDGs to focus on, but instead to see them all as an inseparable package.