‘2°C rise will be catastrophic’

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has warned that a 2°C increase in the global average temperature will effectively be a “death sentence for many”. He has further cautioned that global warming would trigger severe hunger worldwide.

As the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP) entered its final days on Thursday, the secretary general spoke with members of the press.

When asked by a reporter about whether he considered this COP to be a failure, his replied that it was “too soon to talk about failure”. The conference is set to conclude tomorrow (November 22), with the next COP confirmed to be held in Turkey.

For the Global South, he stated that “the cost for developing countries needs to reduce”, emphasizing the importance of “debt guarantees” to that end.

Before heading to the G20 meeting in South Africa, he emphasized that countries that are negotiating deals must do so “in good faith”.

The secretary general’s statement that provokes some confusion is that we ought to “‘keep 1.5 alive”. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the global average increase in temperature since pre industrial time was approximately 1.55 degrees Celsius, for the year 2024. 

Therefore, the only possible way to keep 1.5 alive is through carbon capture technologies. Although this technology exists, there is scepticism with respect to its scalability.

Global average temperature increases since “pre industrial times” are measured starting from the 1850s. However, the large-scale emissions of carbon dioxide had already begun in the 1750s and late 1700s. Actual increase in global average temperatures is likely to be higher than 1.5 if measured from the period of the Industrial Revolution.

As the 30th COP comes close to an end, it appears that to a great extent the language around the climate crisis has not moved past euphemisms.

In a peer reviewed paper by renowned scientists and experts called the “Future of the Human Niche”, it was argued that up to a billion to 3 billion people could be displaced from their current areas of habitat, by the year 2070 due to the effects of the climate crisis.

Such an extreme uprooting of the social fabric would be unprecedented in human history. The movement of over a billion people is likely to trigger ethnic hostilities and indirect conflict related to this mass migration within the lifetime of young people today.

However, a non-euphemistic explanation of the crisis is non-existent at the conference.

There is an under representation and at times an absence of frontline communities impacted by the climate crisis, such as the 100s of thousands of displaced people from Sindh, or those who are unable to farm any longer.

When the secretary general refers to “hunger”, he is likely not referring to the colloquial use of the term when one skips lunch on a Monday, but he is likely referring to what is known as “starvation”.