Recently, I came across this picture on the history of climate change action:
Its interpretation is straightforward in policy terms: despite international climate change mitigation efforts, global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (CO2) have followed an exponential growing path.
This is the most auto-explicative (and disappointing) image on the insufficient international efforts to fight climate change I have ever found. Maybe the curve would have had a more prominent slope without them. However, the plot clearly shows that with the current efforts we are quickly approaching the feared 1.5 degrees scenario, which leave us to an uncertain world, irreversibly passing the threshold of many tipping points (see https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ for more details).
If you want more perspective, the next figure shows CO2 concentrations over the last 800,000 years. So previous figure represents just the orange line in the figure below.
Policy-makers and international leaders should think on this seriously. If they really believe in climate action, there is something wrong here…
So, the issue is really challenging. Climate action does not only need to deal with negationist international leaders, but also with previous ways of confronting climate change. Not sure if the paradigm of fighting for marginally getting more ambitious deals is correct. Maybe we need to completely rethink how we structure and articulate different efforts, and how we convince all actors that this is a key and even strategic issue for them too, trying new approaches.
See you around,
Jaume