The Climate Change Emperor Has No Clothes

Earlier this month Professor Kevin Anderson, Chair in Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, gave a presentation at the Cabot Institute at the University of  Bristol. He expressed his basic thesis as follows:

The [climate change] emperor is streaking in front of us naked.I think actually if you stand up and say that the Climate Change Emperor is naked most people will shut you down. They do not want to hear that, however obvious it may be.

Kevin explains his analogy as follows:

Many scientists and policy-makers continue to claim it is possible, albeit challenging, to contain the global increase in mean surface temperature at or below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels.  However, despite the increasingly vociferous rhetoric around ‘transitioning to a low carbon economy’, current emissions growth is much more aligned with temperature rises of 4°C or higher, and possibly within just a few decades. Disturbingly, against the backdrop of unprecedented emissions growth, even a 4°C future now demands significant levels of mitigation.

We face a profound paradigm shift, triggered ostensibly by climate change, but with repercussions across all facets of contemporary society. Such a fundamental transition leaves society with three clear choices. To continue the delusion that climate change can be addressed adequately through rhetoric, financial fine-tuning and piecemeal incrementalism; to interpret such conclusions as a message of despair and futility; or to acknowledge that “at every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different”, and that through immediate harnessing of human will and ingenuity we can yet deliver relatively low-carbon and climate-resilient communities.

Here's an hour long video showing Kevin's entire presentation:

Do you have any conception of how things could be different, or is lack of clarity and imagination still a huge obstacle to making progress along the long road to salvation, both personal and mutual? Are you willing and able to harness your human will and ingenuity to help solve the conundrum originally posed by R. Buckminster Fuller:

How do we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time?

Time is getting ever shorter.