A U.S. atmospheric chemist whose work formed the basis for the 1989 Montreal ozone treaty is urging her climate scientist colleagues not to give up when they’re just on the cusp of success.
“The past calendar year has been a surprise—hotter than anyone expected it could or should be,” Dr. Susan Solomon, professor of environmental studies and chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The (UK) Observer. There’s a lot of work going on to try to figure it out. So, yeah, that is certainly scary, but I don’t share the pessimism.”
On the contrary, “I worry, frankly, about climate scientists being encouraged to take a particular stance,” she added. “You see it go in both directions, but in this case there has long been a group of people out there who believe we should tell the worst stories we possibly can, because then the public will get it and wake up and that will enable change. That practice has not really worked.”
And meanwhile, “you can’t look at the [plummeting] price of solar energy and batteries and not see big change coming,” Solomon said. While some scientists are convinced average global warming is on its way past a devastating threshold of 3°C, that future “is very hard for me to see, because it’s pretty clear that the Paris agreement has already put us on a trajectory that won’t exceed that. Can we stay within 2°C, given how the prices of clean energy have come down? Personally, I think we can.”
In recent years, as severe impacts have become clear at lower levels of warming, many climate analysts and advocates have come to see 1.5°C, not 2°, as the guardrail that will hold off the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Between 1.5 and 2.0°, many have argued that every 0.1°C difference can be measured in lives saved or lost.
But in her book Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again, Solomon argues that humanity won when it came time to protect the ozone layer, and we’re close to winning again.
“Industry will continue to fight, just because they have an awful lot to protect. They have massive investments in fossil fuel infrastructure,” she said. “But it’s interesting that the concept of stranded assets has become part of the vocabulary, and people are beginning to realize how much power they actually have, in terms of the way we make our investments—in your retirement fund, or your choice of bank. And so social choice is becoming part of the way people are thinking about bringing pressure on industries that are part of those assets.”
And that’s one reason to be optimistic, she added. “For goodness sake, let’s not give up now, we’re right on the cusp of success.”
Read Susan Solomon’s full interview with The (UK) Observer here.
