The Guardian view on the IPCC warning: a last chance to save the planet

The world is only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. On current trends, we will shoot past the target within a decade. That’s the warning from the world’s leading scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In their last report while it is still feasible to stay within 1.5C, they warn that what governments do in the next few years to limit greenhouse gas emissions will determine whether temperatures keep rising dangerously or fall back to safe levels.

Billions of poor people who bear the least responsibility for the climate emergency are already being hit hard. Extreme weather events such as the flash floods in Turkey or Cyclone Freddy over southern Africa, which took hundreds of lives, are becoming more common occurrences. It is unequivocal, say the scientists, that human activity has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. It is also human activity that can bring temperatures down. Cutting carbon pollution and fossil fuel use by nearly two-thirds by 2035 would give humanity a decent shot at the target. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, spelled out what this means: an end to new fossil fuel exploration and rich countries exiting coal, oil and gas by 2040. The UK, which is opening coalmines and approving North Sea oil and gas licences, should take note.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide hit a record high last year despite green tech growth. It’s the required decline in CO₂ that gives climate scientists nightmares. The 2015 Paris agreement suggested the answer lay in negative emissions – where new technology would reduce the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere and buy society time. There are two ways to remove carbon dioxide. One is with land-management methods such as reforestation. The other is capturing and storing carbon underground or in the oceans. The IPCC thinks there is enough potential CO₂ storage to limit global warming to 1.5C from now to 2100. However, such novel methods currently account for just 0.1% of all negative emission use. That might explain why many climate scientists have dismissed the idea as “magical thinking”.

The rich world has the money and the technological prowess to stop the planet from burning up. Yet climate financing has fallen far short of tackling the climate emergency. The IPCC estimates that investment in climate mitigation and adaptation is three to six times lower than where it needs to be to reach the goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C. One reason is that the world is relying on finance houses to stump up the cash. We cannot leave it to the private sector to solve global heating. Trillions of dollars of multi-year investments are needed to save humanity but companies won’t risk spending when the payback may take years, or never arise. That is why the state needs to be involved in a much bigger way – but without socialising risks and allowing banks to privatise the profit.

Some suggest the world should face up to the fact the 1.5C target will be missed. But changing it to a higher number would allow climate sceptics to argue that “wolf” had been cried. Peter Thorne, a researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland, and one of the IPCC report’s authors, warned that governments, communities and individuals “have made climate change somebody else’s problem”. Yet the deleterious effects are affecting everyone. Technology that works can solve a problem if it gets deployed. This depends on getting the right policies in place and crucially securing the funding to make it happen. None of this will materialise if politicians – and the public – see the climate emergency as somebody else’s problem.