Bill Gates is still wrong about climate change

A popular metaphor for climate change is the boiling frog, the idea being that we’re getting cooked so slowly that we don’t realise it until it’s too late. In reality, if humans are the frogs, they’re not just being cooked alive and already feeling it, they’re reaching out of the pot to crank up the burner, according to the Tribune News Service.

The United Nations Environment Programme released a report this month throwing in the towel on humanity’s half-hearted efforts to limit planetary heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial averages. That low-end goal of the 2015 Paris climate accords got stretchier and stretchier as we kept blithely producing carbon emissions. Now it’s finally snapping.

Warming’s long-term average is already at 1.3C, and it has accelerated in the past decade. We may be about to get a short-term taste of the Paris agreement’s high-end limit of 2C, thanks to what’s shaping up to be the strongest El Niño in modern history.

The world is currently on a path of 1.8C of heating at the very best, the UN report estimates, and is likely to hit 2.6C in the longer run. To avoid the worst impacts of a hotter planet, we’ll now have to suck a lot of that carbon back out of the air somehow, the report warns.

After all, that 1.5C goal wasn’t just picked by a random-number generator. That’s the lower bound at which the planet’s most sensitive climate tipping points start to risk triggering, including coral reef die-offs, the collapses of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and boreal-permafrost thawing.

When these tip, they create feedback loops that affect other global systems, heating the Earth faster and warping the environment in ways that hurt humans directly. Coral reefs create $3.4 billion in annual economic value in the U.S. alone and support 1 billion people worldwide, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates. Melting permafrost releases methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more powerful than CO2. Melting ice is speeding sea-level rise.

These changes would persist even if we could somehow cover the world in giant machines to suck carbon out of the air, technology we aren’t close to mastering. As temperatures rise, they threaten still more critical systems.

But even before crossing the 1.5C threshold, we’re already feeling the real-time impacts of merely approaching it. Just this summer, the U.S. and Europe have suffered through deadly heat wave after deadly heat wave. Wildfires have consumed millions of acres from Canada to the UK to Myanmar. Melting ice in the Himalayas unleashed a devastating flood that killed more than 1,000 people, with thousands more still missing.

Evidence is emerging that climate change is making El Niños more powerful, including the current supersize one. The droughts, floods, wildfires and other extreme weather that El Niños tend to produce will become even more extreme as a result.

Despite these climate-change effects punching us in the face repeatedly, we still refuse to defend ourselves. In fact, we keep sticking our chins out and asking for more.

This is undeniably a golden age for clean energy, with tumbling costs making solar, wind and batteries economically superior to fossil alternatives. But almost at the moment that happened, the powers that be collectively decided it was a civilizational imperative to build energy-hogging data centers on every spare acre.

So rather than letting us reap the benefit of finally ditching the dirty fuels that have driven most of the planet’s warming, renewables are just added to an energy supply that can’t be installed quickly enough to meet demand.

Of the 85 gigawatts of new US power capacity expected to launch in the next year, 90% will be clean, according to the Energy Information Agency.