This climate report is simple to understand, we need drastic change in our society if we are to avoid a catastrophe caused by global warming. The IPCC states if we don’t want to reach the threshold of 1.5C temperature change it would “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems”(IPCC Report, p2). CO2 emissions need to be eliminated completely and totally, it’s as simple as that. The only way to do away with burning fossil fuels is to use all the technology we’ve developed in the renewable energy field. Just outside Bozeman is a beautiful solar panel field. The main problem with achieving this goal of cutting CO2 emissions is not implementing our technologies, it’s changing our world politics. We need some kind of a political revolution to occur, to change the way we think about governments and climate change.
According to historian Michael Reidy’s article the first time CO2 was scientifically proven to be a greenhouse gas was all the way back in 1861 in London. John Tyndall had established scientifically that CO2 gases were extremely efficient at trapping heat, and that the possible effects of this could affect the entire planet if the atmosphere was altered enough. A lot of people like to say climate science is too new to be trusted, but I do not agree with this. There is a lot of technology that runs our entire world today that isn’t as old as the knowledge of CO2 gases ability to hold heat.