The latest IPCC report has generated a lot of scary news. NY Mag gave its readership “permission to freak out”. We all know our situation is grim.

But we aren’t totally fucked just yet. Really. Don’t give up. Even if the climate was beyond repair, which it isn’t, we must still prepare ourselves and our communities for the chaos that will follow in the decades ahead. Even the worst case scenarios require that we plan and coordinate with each other. These aspects of the human condition won’t change no matter how hot it gets. As long as we have a network to maintain our work is not done.

And we haven’t yet condemned ourselves to these worst case scenarios. We are in the final moments during which real actions can be taken to avoid utter catastrophe. Hundreds of millions of human lives are at stake. If we’re going to do something it has to be now.

So what can we do? Let’s discuss our options in the decade ahead.

Actually, let’s first understand what’s going on. Then we’ll discuss options.

One point five degrees see

Historically, climate scientists have pointed to +2℃ average increase in global temperatures as a critical policy threshold. Beyond those temperatures will see catastrophic runaway processes, like disappearing ice caps, that will inevitably make the planet much, much warmer. Passing +2℃ in the next few decades could result in as much as +4℃ by the end of the century, and +6℃ or more in the centuries ahead. These temperatures represent a grave threat to humanity and the biosphere as we know it.

To be clear, some parts of the world are already experiencing greater than +2℃ compared to the historical average. The impact of climate change is distributed unevenly across the planet, and some of the places that will be most severely impacted are also least prepared to address the consequences. We’re witnessing these facts already. Nevertheless, the policy threshold urged by scientists is to keep the average global temperature from reaching those peaks, to prevent the worst consequences. So far we have not crossed these critical thresholds, but we’re very close.

The IPCC reports are notoriously conservative. Projections in AR4 (2007, above) seem to optimistically assume that world policy makers would eventually heed their advice. Climate models anticipated likely scenarios where temperatures reach +2℃ sometime after the end of the century in all but the worst cases. More recent projections in AR5 (2013, below) see +2℃ warming possibly as early as 2050. Scientists now believe that limiting warming below +2℃ is only possible in the most optimistic circumstances.

The most recent report looks at the consequences of changes at +1.5℃, below the historic critical +2℃ threshold. All models more or less agree that we’ll hit 1.5℃ sometime around 2040. The relevant question is whether we’ll continue to blast through to 2℃, or if we’ll manage to hold average temps at or below 1.5℃, indicated by the dark blue line in the graph above.

In other words, we can think of 2040 as a potential inflection point for different future temperature scenarios. After 2040 we’ll have settled on a trajectory towards the high or low end of the graph above. And if we’re not clearly inflected towards the low end by 2040, then we should be bracing for global catastrophes in the decades ahead.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can wait until 2040 to do something about this. The climate doesn’t turn on a dime. The IPCC report argues that maintaining targets of +1.5℃ beyond 2040 requires an immediate and dramatic restructuring of the worlds resources and economic infrastructure. Specifically, it says we need to achieve net zero carbon globally by 2030. To achieve these results, the report says that global investment in alternative energy would need to double, investment in fossil fuels would need to diminish by one quarter, and the entire framework of carbon pricing and regulation would need to be reworked the world over.

Furthermore, the report makes clear that the difference between 1.5 and 2℃ is very serious. Record heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather events, rising sea levels displacing major population centers, and the resulting strain on our political institutions means the difference in half a degree will have direct, immediate consequences for hundreds of millions of people around the planet over the next few decades.

Shanghai (population: 17 million) will be underwater by 2100 at +3.5 degrees. Source.

If these goals aren’t accomplished by 2030, the report suggest that we’ll lose this small window of control within which we can maintain temperatures below 1.5℃. Scenarios for avoiding disaster after 2040 are described as “overshoot”, where we briefly exceed 1.5℃ (or 2℃) before returning to cooler temperatures. Overshoot scenarios will likely require major geoengineering projects which are either extremely expensive or exceedingly risky, or both. None of these choices are pleasant, but they will look more tempting as our climate situation becomes more dire. If we mess up our chance(s) at overshoot, well, things will get significantly worse going into the next century, and the challenges future generations of humans face will become even more grim.

But the IPCC report makes clear that we’re not yet in a situation where we have to make choices like that. We’re not completely fucked just yet. In fact, we’re living through potentially the last, brief period of human history where our best choices involve things like “dismantling global capitalism” and “building new, stronger, cooperative geopolitical institutions”. Regardless of your political disposition, these options look really, really tempting compared to the kind of choices we will be faced with when this window closes a decade from now.

We’ve known most of this science for a while. What is new in the latest report is a clear timeline in our immediate purview. Until now the most dramatic warnings have looked forward to 2050 and beyond, comparatively a long time from now. Such time frames are psychologically difficult to plan for. This recent report tells us the critical period is directly before us in the decade ahead. If 2040 marks a critical inflection point in the temperature future, then the IPCC report identifies 2030 as a critical inflection for our political futures. 2030 has become the new critical threshold around which we must all become hyper-aware.

A decade isn’t that long. I’m in my late thirties. I’ll admit my retirement account isn’t great, but I think I can get my head around what it means to plan for things on the scale of a decade. I can see 2030 coming almost as clear as I can see next summer. We can do this. Scientists agree that our situation is dire, but they also agree that it remains within the realm of possibility that we do something about it. We can do this by 2030.

Seriously. I’ll say it again because it isn’t being said enough. Our best scientific research says there absolutely are things we can do, and that we know how to do, over the next decade to keep the most devastating consequences of climate change from happening. Science is telling us that it’s possible to act now and save hundreds of millions of lives and significant parts of the biosphere. Right now is our best shot at doing this with minimal suffering. We will never have these opportunities again.

So contrary to the media headlines, this IPCC report isn’t telling us we’re fucked. It’s saying just the opposite. It’s saying there’s still a chance.