Climate scientists are doing their part — policymakers, what’s your move?

Climate change is a complicated problem with many complex dimensions that defy straightforward solutions.

When the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released the first part of its Sixth Assessment Report earlier this month, it took nearly four thousand pages to describe the state and outlook of the Earth’s climate. This month’s tome was the “Physical Science Basis,” an authoritative compendium of all that we currently know about climate change on this singular planet of ours. More than 200 leading scientists from 66 countries helped author the report, drawing their findings and conclusions from thousands of peer-reviewed papers already published. Hundreds more scientists contributed by reviewing the report for accuracy and providing well-considered feedback to its many authors.

Through a thoughtful progression that began with the IPCC’s First Assessment Report more than three decades ago, the confidence with which we can attribute observed climate change to human activity and project the likely conditions for the future has grown substantially.

The most recent report presents the most informed view yet of the climate trajectory we are on, and it makes clear that absent a substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, we should expect the future climate to be at the warmer end of the range of previous projections. This is very concerning, as it forebodes major environmental challenges, yet it is not surprising. The science is clear.

But beyond the science, when you take a broader view of climate change, as an ethical and economic issue, the challenge of addressing climate change becomes extremely complicated, tangled into the very basic ways we live our lives, produce energy and advance prosperity. 

In light of the complexity and all that is at stake, it has long been time to take meaningful steps to ensure a future in which humanity — whose fate is intimately linked to the state of our environment — can not only avoid catastrophe, but thrive.

The research community has been hard at work. Our best scientific minds continue to do their part, tirelessly struggling to understand what lies ahead, the implications of various actions and the implications of inaction.

Our best technological minds do their part as well, creating opportunities to shift our energy production away from greenhouse-heavy sources and pursuing technological innovations that will reduce emissions. These communities have made enormous progress during the last several decades. 

The policy-making community, however, is lagging. If science and technology are not matched with policies and practices that slow the rate of change and blunt the worst effects, the world we will find ourselves in tomorrow will present us with far more environmental, societal and economic challenges and stresses than the world we live in today.

There are various reasons that people are driven away from effectively confronting the sober truth and making the hard choices to address climate change. While some are disingenuous or ill-informed, the most honest one is that the problem is a truly wicked one. Prosperity and society’s ability to grow and advance are closely tied to energy consumption, and shifting our ways of producing and consuming energy can come at significant near-term costs. Those costs raise very difficult questions about how they should be paid for and by whom, as the greatest benefits of doing so will likely not be realized by those making the greatest sacrifices. It is human nature to decouple individual or small-group interests from global interests, and acting for the global good at local expense, as is needed to address climate change, requires a kind of thinking and behavior that has yet to be demonstrated on scales necessary to meet the challenge.

Similarly, action on behalf of future generations at the expense of today’s is not something that our social, business and political systems are generally structured to prioritize. When the returns on an investment of any sort go to unknown or abstract parties with little or no direct connection to us, the incentive to make such investments is very small.

Success in the face of the ongoing — and likely accelerating — change requires broad thinking, coordinated action and widespread prioritization of the collective good. It requires decision-making and action framework that simultaneously recognizes both the existential imperative to address climate change as well as the value derived from practices that have historically generated greenhouse gas emissions (but need not necessarily do so in the future).

The two competing elements must be optimized. Doing so takes boldness on the part of leaders to honestly recognize the costs of inadequate action and build that recognition into sound solution-driven policies that involves hard choices. It also takes a commitment on the part of citizens to support such leaders and socialize the importance of behavioral changes.

Two of the most fundamental elements of overcoming any challenge are recognizing it and understanding it. The IPCC assessment is an explicit recognition of the climate challenge, and the science that underpins the report demonstrates a clear understanding. The environmental future we face and will leave for generations that follow depends on what we do with that knowledge. The science is speaking loudly and clearly. Will we listen? Will we act? The future is in our collective hands.

Waleed Abdalati is the director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a partnership of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and University of Colorado Boulder, where he is also professor in the Department of Geography.