Conferring in Bali, Part II

Laurie is a science and environmental journalist and author. She wrote the Sally Ride Science book Our Changing Climate: The Oceans.

Over the next months and years, our world leaders will be considering proposals and grinding out an international response to climate change. As I was reading up on that and the Bali conference, one number jumped out at me right away: 2050.

That’s the year proposed by the European Union as a target for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent of 1990 levels. It’s generally regarded as an ambitious commitment. Given where we stand now, I’m sure it is.

Mention of that year just popped out at me when I read today’s news. Because in my research for the Sally Ride Science book I wrote, 2050 came up all the time. It’s all over the place, as scientists anticipate where the current trends they are seeing in their respective fields will lead us by midcentury.

Comparing this “bold” target with scientists’ most informed predictions and extrapolations just illustrates how the timelines between science and politics are seriously out of whack. The debate has begun as to whether 2050 is just too darn early to pin governments down to such severe greenhouse gas emission restrictions. So, this seems like a good time to gather up just a few examples of what various scientists have said about how the world will look in 2050 if global warming and rising CO2 levels continue on their current trajectory.

• By 2050, if ocean temperatures have increased by just 1.5°C, 95 percent of the corals on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef will be lost.
• The Arctic Ocean could be completely ice free during the summer, by 2050. Unless, of course, it happens earlier...
• By 2050, ocean surface waters will be so acidic from CO2 that it will be impossible for corals and many other important marine species to grow their calcium carbonate shells or exoskeletons. Entire food webs that depend on many of these organisms could collapse.
• Due to climate change related causes, possibly as much as one fourth of the world’s plant and invertebrate species may be extinct by 2050.
• By 2050, as many as 150 million of the world’s inhabitants could be “environmental refugees”, driven from their homes by rising sea levels or drought, the result of global warming.

These dire predictions notwithstanding, I have to confess that the year 2050 often seems pretty abstract and almost comfortably distant to me--until I consider exactly what it means in the arc of my own family’s life.

Obviously, by 2050, if I’m around at all, I’ll be wicked old—I don’t even want to think about just how decrepit I’ll be. But my daughter and son: well, they’ll be just a little bit older than I am now. And as a mother, I know that particular passage of time is going to seem like no more than the blink of an eye.

It’s self-centered and quite unscientific, but that helps put this all into context for me: these big ideas and unwieldy debates are relating to mighty nasty things that will be happening right smack in the middle of our children and students’ lives—if not sooner…