The Daily - A ‘Code Red for Humanity’

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

This episode contains strong language.  A major new United Nations scientific report has concluded that countries and corporations have delayed curbing fossil-fuel emissions for so long that we can no longer stop the impact of climate change from intensifying over the coming decades. In short, the climate crisis has arrived, and it’s going to get worse before it can get better.In this episode, we explore the main takeaways from the report — including what needs to happen in the narrowing window of climate opportunity to avoid the most devastating outcomes.Guest: Henry Fountain, a reporter covering climate for The New York TimesSign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Here are the key takeaways from the report, including how we know human influence has “unequivocally” warmed the planet.For the next 30 years or longer, there will be more, hotter heat waves, longer and more intense droughts, and more episodes of heavy downpours that result in flooding.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The Secretary General of the United Nations called it a, quote, code red for humanity. Today, I spoke with my colleague, Henry Fountain, about what we're learning from a major new report on climate change. It's Friday, August 13th. So, Henry, a few days ago, a report on climate change was released. A report on climate change was released. And before we talk through it, I want to give voice to what I think may be the feeling of deja vu that those words inspire.

A climate report has been released because it seems like every few months, a report is released that says basically things are bad when it comes to the climate, they're going to get worse, and time is running out to fix it. So what is different and important about this climate report? Well, first of all, this is a report by this UN body, right, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And that's the definitive group that's doing this kind of work. It's a couple hundred scientists. They reviewed something like 14,000 scientific papers. So it's got a lot of heft behind it. It really is the be-all and end-all of these kinds of reports. The other thing that just makes it really compelling, I think, is when it's being released. It was released on Monday. And as everybody knows,

we're in the middle of this extreme summer of bad wildfires, really awful drought, incredible heat waves, flooding in Germany that nobody expected to see in 100 years. So it comes at a time when people are really attuned to what's going on. Right. So to summarize, this is the Bible of climate reports emerging in a summer of astonishing climate extremes. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So given that, what does this report say? What does it tell us? Well, there's three takeaways to this report. And the first one is it's incredibly clear, compelling, and forceful about what's going on, much more so than previous reports. It leaves no doubt at all what's going on, which is that the climate is changing,

and the reason why is what humans have done by pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So much more than previous reports, it really just disposes of any kind of arguments that there's some kind of debate about this or whatever. It's just, it's refreshingly clear. And the thing you have to keep in mind is that it's not just 200 scientists coming up with this conclusion. These UN reports, you know, being the UN, had to be approved line by line by 195 national governments. So that means that this really clear, compelling language that basically says unequivocally the planet is warming and humans are responsible, that was approved by

basically every government on the face of the earth. So previous reports would say it is likely or there's medium confidence that such and such is happening. There's not that kind of language. It's basically, it's an established fact that the planet is warming, and it's an established fact that humans are the cause. So they just take a lot of the mushy language that previous reports featured. Right. Established fact doesn't leave a lot of room for hedging. Absolutely. So why the change? What gives the authors of this report the confidence to not use those familiar hedges anymore? There's a couple of things going on. One is

that our understanding of the science of climate change has really improved over time. We have more data, we have more buoys and weather stations, and we have better satellites that do all sorts of pretty incredible stuff from hundreds of miles in space. So we have just a lot more data about what's going on, current climate conditions. We have really good research into what the past climate was like by examining things like ice cores and tree rings and things like that. And then we also have much better climate models than we used to have. A climate model is simply a simulation of the world on a computer that looks at what the world will be like in 10 years or 20 years or a thousand years or whatever. Essentially, we have much better computers now. We have much faster computers, so you can run these models over and over and over and over and really get them to be

much more accurate and have much more confidence in them. But what's an example of how this data and data gathering that you're describing can so clearly link climate change to human-created conditions and emissions? How does that work? Well, so that's the other new thing about this report. It's what scientists call attribution studies. It didn't exist 20 years ago, and it's really a major underpinning of this new report. So an attribution study is you take a model, you take two models, actually. One of the world as it exists now, where humans have pumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide

in the atmosphere over a century and a half. And you have another model of world where that didn't happen, like a make-believe world. So for instance, the Pacific Northwest heat wave that occurred late June, which was an extraordinary heat wave. So there's a group of scientists from all over the world. They get together and they take two models of the world, this one that is the real world and this one that's this fantasy world of no warming. By comparing the results of the two models, they're able to determine how much more likely

climate change made that heat wave to happen. And they've done that for dozens and dozens of events. So it's a crucial body of research because it makes the link. It makes the direct connection. Okay, got it. So what is the second major takeaway of this report? The second takeaway is this. No matter what we do

in terms of trying to cut emissions at this point, even if we started tomorrow, cut all emissions, cut all CO2 emissions, we're still going to be warming for the next three decades, so the middle of the 21st century. Yeah. So warming is what they like to say, it's kind of baked in based on all the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere to this point. And even if we really aggressively take action right away, there's still going to be warming and the extreme weather is going to

get worse for the next 30 years. It's a kind of a depressing thought, right? That even if every government had a just total change of notion in terms of what they needed to do, we still are not out of this mess for 30 years. are not out of this mess for 30 years. Well, how can that be? I mean, how can this report state as more or less fact that three decades worth of fallout from a warming climate is baked in and cannot really be altered or reversed? Well, it's physics. That's it. It's basically physics. It has to do with what the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now, which is much higher than it was before the rise of industry. So that CO2 is up there. It takes a long time for that CO2 to break down and become harmless. It takes decades and decades and decades. So we've pumped it up there. It's not going anywhere. So even if we

didn't pump any more in, we're still going to have it trapping heat and warming the atmosphere, you know, and then warming the surface of the earth and warming the oceans as well. Right. I'm thinking of a metaphor that might explain this, and it feels like a ship, a giant ship moving so fast that no amount of braking, no amount of twisting the wheel is really going to slow it down for three decades. Is that the right way to think about it? I think that's a great way to look at it. And in fact, scientists use that too. It's not going to stop on a dime and it's not going to stop in a mile. It's going to

stop way down the road. And for things to change, it's slow. Mm-hmm. It feels like the definition of hopelessness to write off 30 years of time and say that we are consigned to a pretty awful climate reality during that very long period. Yeah, it's pretty grim. I agree. It is what it is. I mean, you know, the scientists, it's the unvarnished truth, right? I mean, you know, the scientists, it's the unvarnished truth, right? Well, if the next 30 years are locked in and we're stuck with them, what are they going to look like in terms of weather?

Well, they're going to look like now only more, more now. Worse now. Worse now. They're going to look like now only worse than now. For instance, each of the last four decades has been hotter than the one before, and they've all been hotter than any time in the last several, I think it's 100,000 years, maybe 125,000 years. It's almost a guarantee that the next decade, this decade we're in, the 20s, is going to be hotter than the one before or this one. And the one after that will be hotter.

And that causes all sorts of other problems. It's the largest, most menacing source of rising sea levels all over the world. It means more of the world's ice is going to melt. In fact, in the Arctic, we're warming at two to three times the pace of the rest of the globe. Those glaciers that are shrinking all around the world are going to shrink even more. In some cases, they're going to disappear. There is nothing to stop its accelerating retreat. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are going to keep melting.

Within a few decades, we might have an ice-free Arctic, which is a really horrifying thought. And both that and glacier melt and just the rise of temperatures is going to keep the sea levels rising more and more. Maybe five inches, six inches, seven inches, whatever. We could get five to ten feet before the end of the century. But that's enough to make a kind of nuisance flood that might happen on a full moon, maybe once a year. Or have a major flooding like I've never seen since I've been here in town. It might happen like four or five times a year. This is the most absurd flooding I've ever seen in my entire life.

There'll be more intense rainfall. Weather forecasters say it is the heaviest downpour in 1,000 years. We're seeing that already with climate change. We're seeing downpours have increased. This is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. So we're going to have more flooding from that. This is worse than anything that we've been through droughts like the drought that we are currently experiencing in the in the western half of the united states the worst drought ever which

is really a severe drought and widespread this is the worst drought ever droughts like that will become more more common this reservoir which supplied the dam and 25 million people, is now at an all-time low. And it just goes to show how severe the drought is. That if climate change continues unabated, there's at least an 80% chance of a mega drought. We're going to see more heat waves. A prolonged, dangerous, and historic heat wave. We're going to see hotter heat waves because we'll be at a higher baseline temperature. Temperatures today are going to be danger heat waves because we'll be at a higher baseline temperature.

So heat waves in a particular region might have happened once every 50 years, a really severe heat wave. Might happen once every 10 years. More people are going to suffer through heat stroke. It's just unbearable. It's impossible to be out. Become either gravely ill or die during heat arrest. Has already caused dozens of deaths. Hospitals are treating heat-related injuries. When around 3,000 people died in one night. Never during the Second World War did so many people die in one night, even during the bombings. So, you know, it's the bad stuff that we have now made worse. Right.

And in a way that will be even more impossible to ignore or escape, no matter where you live on the planet. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the takeaways from this summer, right? Is that it really doesn't matter where you are. I mean, you know, you could be in an affluent country or a poorer country. Nobody really can escape the impact of climate change. And that'll become, you know, with greater frequency of events, that'll just become even more true. We'll be right back. Okay, Henry, I'm not eager for this, but I'm going to ask for the third takeaway. Given what you have previously told us, it doesn't seem very likely it's going to be very positive. Well, I've got a surprise for you. It's actually, you know, it offers a glimmer of hope, I would say.

The third takeaway is that the world has a window of opportunity, a pretty narrow window and a window that gets more narrow with every passing day. But we have an opportunity to avoid things from getting even worse. And essentially, it requires the world to immediately start cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Deep, deep cuts, widespread. The whole world has to do this, and it has to happen quickly, and it has to happen rapidly. So that's the window that the report offers us. Well, help me understand that, because from everything you just said, we are locked in for

30 years of essentially climate awfulness. So what would we be altering exactly? Would it be after those 30 years? It would be after those 30 years. First of all, you got to understand where we're at now. We've warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit since we started pumping all this CO2 into the atmosphere like 150 years ago. What's going to happen over the next 30 years is we're going to get to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which might not sound like a lot, but that's what's going to cause all this increasing consequences. What the report points out is that if we were to really drastically cut emissions right now, do it rapidly over the next 10, 20 that if we were to really drastically cut emissions right now,

do it rapidly over the next 10, 20 years, we wouldn't get above 1.5 after 2050. We might get slightly, but only very slightly. Whereas if we don't do anything or if we only make sort of half-hearted cuts in emissions, we'll get way past 1.5. And if we think 1.5 is bad, two degrees of warming or three degrees of warming is much, much worse, and we don't want to get there. So that's the glimmer of hope. We take really rapid action to confront this thing. We get to 1.5, unfortunately, over the next 30 years, but we stay there. So return to our ship metaphor. While we can't change the fact that it will take three decades to slow the ship down, we do have a window of time right now, this report says, to make the necessary changes so that three decades from now,

we will have kept the ship from crashing into the shore and kept global temperatures from going beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius that we all fear. That's exactly what they're saying. Make the sharp cuts right now, make them rapid, get everybody on board, and then by 2050, yeah, things have gotten bad. But past 2050, things are stable. Right. Stable, i.e. less bad. So what exactly does this report say is required of all of us to achieve this most aggressive approach that will stop us from exceeding 1.5 by 2050?

What kind of examples does it lay out? Well, you have to understand, so this report is about the scientific basis of climate change. And they explicitly say, we're not in the business of what government policies should be. But reading between the lines, what they're saying is, we've got to get to basically, so we're not putting any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And to do that, that means total transformation of the way energy is produced in the world and the way transportation is done in the world, which currently is done primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil, gas, things like that, and has to shift to methods that don't

pump CO2 into the atmosphere. That means more things like wind power, solar power. There have to be other changes too. The way we do agriculture produces a lot of greenhouse gas. But fundamentally, the big one is the energy, the energy transformation. But just to be clear, no country is prepared to stop putting any carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, correct? Yeah. I mean, some countries are making better

progress than others. A couple of European countries have really made progress. But most everybody else, including the United States, we've proposed a lot of things. We haven't done much to cut emissions. And even the proposed cuts are really not enough to fill this window of opportunity to get us to a stable climate by 2050. So we're pretty far behind. We're talking about transforming the world's energy system is a huge, huge undertaking. It's going to cost a lot of money, and it's just going to require a lot of will. There's a lot of vested interests that don't want to see certain things happen.

So for all of our talk and all the Biden administration's talk about confronting climate change, they have to do more. Every country has to do more. We could do this starting tomorrow. It wouldn't be easy. It would be really costly, and it might take a little bit longer than we thought, but we could do it starting tomorrow if there was the will.

But I think a report like this, it's not like these reports, all of a sudden some world leader sees the light and says, you know, this report, particularly this one, current one, it's so clear and it's so obvious and so direct and irrefutable that I'm going to transition my country overnight. I'm going to order the closing of all the coal-burning power plants or whatever. That just doesn't happen. That's not how the world works. But what it does is it gives all the sort of advocates and activists, people that pressure governments, environmental groups, other kinds of non-governmental organizations, more ammunition to pressure these governments, particularly this

report, because one of the things we didn't really talk about, but it has all this information about regional impacts, really kind of local impacts of climate change. So in a given country, some group can go to the government and say, listen, these 200 scientists looking at 14,000 studies say that your country's going to, our country's going to have five times as many heat waves in the next 30 years as it does now. Like you got to do something about that. So, so I think that's where the impact is going to be. It's not going to be, you know, any national leader in any country really saying, oh yeah, let's just do this. You know, it's going to be more and more pressure on them to do stuff. And of course the problem is that takes time, right? And we don't have much time. We're kind of out of time, really. I'm struck, Henry, by the fact that

when we step back and think about all of the report's big takeaways, that we have 30 years of warming baked in, and there's not that much to do about it, and that in order to turn everything around, even after 30 years, is politically unlikely, that this all reminds us that at the heart of the climate change fight is congenerational sacrifice, right? It is asking people to make changes that will only really be felt, in many

cases, after we are gone. And that is not an easy thing to ask of human beings. It's not an easy thing to ask of governments. It requires collective action that you don't really see the benefit of in your own lifetime, perhaps. And that's why people tend to throw up their hands. I guess so. But if you think about it, what we've been doing, the boomer generation, which I'm a member of, we've been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere willy-nilly for decades. And now we're saying the future is going to be bad. So in terms of sort of sacrificing the kind of lifestyle that we've all enjoyed for decades. We're asking our kids and our grandkids to accept a lesser future because of what we did.

So that's really, I mean, that bothers me a lot. I mean, and you can say, you know, we did it because we didn't know. You know, we didn't know about climate change in the 1950s and the 1960s, but we certainly known about climate change for the last couple of decades. So we've continued to do it, right. Not even, even knowing that what we're doing is bad. We're continuing to do it now. Even we have this report that says, you know, in certain terms, we're responsible for this. So, so it's kind of the inverse, right? We're not sacrificing, and we're asking our children and grandchildren to sacrifice, to not enjoy the life we've had because of what we've done. Does that make sense? Right. So you're saying to us, the next generations,

spare yourself that guilt. Don't do the same thing. Totally. I mean, in fact, I say this to my son all the time, you know, we've made a all the time. We've made a big mess. My generation's made a big mess. You know now what a mess we're in. And you can help us get out of it. You can pressure your world leaders and make the changes that need to happen or force the changes that need to happen. And I hope you can do it.

And I'm sorry that we made such a mess and left it for you to deal with. I have to know, what does your son say in response to that? Thanks, dad. He usually tells me to go to hell. Yeah. But no, I mean, you know, he thinks I'm being mushy. Maybe it is too mushy. I don't know. Is this the type of thing you hear on the daily often? I don't know. No, that's why we love it. Okay. No, that's why we love it. Okay.

I mean, you know, it's true fundamentally that in the United States and in affluent countries, the boomer generation has just done whatever the goddamn what we want to do. And, you know, we're leaving a mess for future generations. It kind of makes me sad, right, that we've done this. And so I put a lot of pressure and faith on the coming generations. Well, Henry, thank you very much. We appreciate it. I enjoyed being here. Thanks. World leaders will gather to discuss the UN climate report and forge agreements to slow global warming this November in Scotland. Last year's talks were cancelled because of the pandemic. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Taliban is nearing a complete takeover of Afghanistan.

On Thursday, two more major cities, including Kandahar, were on the verge of falling to Taliban militants as the U.S. finishes its withdrawal. militants as the U.S. finishes its withdrawal. That has prompted the Biden administration to begin planning for the possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, which could itself fall to the Taliban within 30 days. And the nation's largest teachers' union now says it supports requiring all teachers either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to regular testing. The decision by the National Education Association is the latest sign that vaccine mandates may become a widespread condition of employment as the Delta variant of the virus ravages the United States. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson and Diana Nguyen

with help from Chelsea Daniel. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Rachel Quester and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.