Climate Spotlight: Our house is on fire

Barbara Cervone, Ashland.News June 14 2022

Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides. The latest came from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we’d imagined. It’s hard to envision a louder alarm, and yet we seem able to sleep through it.

The original goal set in the historic Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, is quickly fading into the rearview mirror. The emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane must peak as soon as possible, in 2025 at the latest, hundreds of the world’s scientists warn, then plummet to half their current levels by 2030, and drop to zero by 2050.