Science – The climate legacy

What will be the cost to our children if we do nothing about climate change?
Firstly, over the next 100 years there will be four or five generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who will carry the burden of our reluctance to reduce the growing impacts of climate change. How should grandparents respond to this anxiety about their future? My advice to grandparents is to point out to the kids the exceptional opportunities for hi-tech jobs in the international renewables jobs market over the next 20 years. In this way, your grandkids can be a vital part of reversing the climate crisis.

If you feel anxious about climate change but are unsure how we know for certain that climate change is real, then I urge you to read the following link: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. Here you will find a clear explanation of climate warming, which caused the sharp rise in carbon dioxide since the start of industrial revolution about 1850. This increase in carbon dioxide is due to the combustion of fossil fuels over the last 170 years. Atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs incident infrared (heat) radiation very efficiently, which in turn warms the atmosphere and the oceans. Global warming is causing floods, storms, droughts and famine, which have been increasing over decades.

It is estimated there will over two million deaths and $4.3 trillion in economic losses attributable to climate warming by the end of 2023. That is the impact of a half-century of extreme weather events turbo-charged by man-made global warming, the World Meteorological Organisation said recently. A Canadian university study predicts that there will be one billion climate-caused deaths over the next century. On this basis, climate deaths are likely to be more than six times greater per annum than Covid 19 deaths. But deaths from climate warming, unlike Covid 19, will persist and increase for centuries. That is, unless we can reduce greenhouse gases soon.

Three technologies – solar, wind and electric vehicles – are largely behind the improved global warming estimates since 2015. The OECD now estimates that solar PV is projected to reduce emissions by around three Gt in 2030, roughly equivalent to the emissions from all the world’s cars on the road today. Solar is leading the field, followed by wind and then electric vehicles. The investment in solar is set to overtake investment in oil production for the first time.

Worldwide jobs in renewable energy reached 13.7 million in 2022 up from a total of 7.3 million in 2012. Global new investment in renewable energy has skyrocketed to US$358 billion in the first six months of 2023, a 22% rise compared to the start of last year and an all-time high for any six-month period. The private sector provides the lion’s share of global investments in renewable energy, committing around 75% of the total in the period 2013-2020. Renewable energy jobs have almost doubled in 10 years to 13.7 million jobs. China leads the world, with more than five million renewable energy jobs, and the US expects to invest $2.8 trillion in renewables by the end of 2023.

We have a choice: support the development of renewables, which will provide our young people with many hi-tech jobs for years to come, or support the expansion of fossil fuels, which will lead inevitably to an ongoing climate disaster.