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2023 showed how serious the climate change issue really is. Although efforts have been made to switch to green energies and reduce emissions, the crisis is far from being resolved.
2023, a year of extreme weather phenomena
It was predictable: 2023 was a year of negative climate records too; just like 2022; and like 2021 before it … and so on. It didn't surprise anyone when 2023 was declared the hottest year on record. It had been known since June, which was just becoming the hottest June on record. In fact, everywhere you turn, from atmospheric air to ocean water, everything has increased in temperature. Overall, the temperature of each month since 2023 has risen by almost one degree Celsius compared to its corresponding month in the 1990s. The ice at the poles reached its lowest levels this year. The fires were of unprecedented proportions in Canada. Droughts prolonged for years in Africa reached their peak in 2023. So did the floods, which this time in Libya made thousands of victims.
New records were also reported in terms of polluting emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels exceeded in 2023 by more than 1% the amount of the previous year. While Europe and the United States were somewhat flat in this regard, even slightly lower, China and India recorded a significant growth rate, with 4 and 8 percent more than 2022 respectively.
The impact on nature is visible. Currently, one million-animal species are threatened with extinction, soils are losing their fertility, and water sources are drying up. Added to this is pollution with plastic, which continues to reach, constantly and in huge quantities, the soil, air and water. In 2023, humanity produced more than two billion tons of municipal solid waste, almost half of which is uncontrolled.
Efforts to combat climate change are showing results, but haven’t produced massive changes so far
In this disheartening picture, however, some shades of optimism can be distinguished. Investments in the field of green energy reached a record level of 1.7 trillion US dollars in 2023. It wouldn't be big news, despite the mind-boggling astronomical numbers, if we didn't point out that, over the same period, fossil fuel energy investment was a trillion dollars and that, in fact, since 2016, investments in green energy consistently exceeded those in fossil fuel energy. An example: in 2015, the installed solar power generation capacity was 230 GW. In 2022, it was 1050 GW. Or: in 2014, only 12% of the energy produced with fossil fuels entered the carbon offset scheme, and the price of a ton was seven US dollars; today, almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions go into this scheme, and the price is $32 per ton.
This is one of the main reasons why the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization based in Paris, revised its estimates of carbon dioxide emissions this year. At the time of the famous Paris conference of 2015, where the UN framework for combating climate change was first adopted, the IEA declared that carbon emissions would continue to rise until 2040. Today it says that the peak of carbonization will be reached "within a few years", after which the curve will take a downward trend.
Another upward revision to the estimates originally released during the Paris conference. It was said at the time that if the current policies did not change, the average global temperature in the year 2100 would be by more than three degrees Celsius higher than in the pre-industrial era. In 2023, however, at the annual climate conference attended by thousands of leading delegates from around the world – COP 28, held in Dubai in December – the perspective was different. If current policies do not change, the global average temperature in 2100 will increase by 2.5, maximum 2.9 degrees Celsius. It's still a lot, and dangerous for billions of people, but it's also a remarkable improvement in the forecast, especially since the trend is for these policies to continue to be optimized to decarbonize the atmosphere.
Also this year, a report by several scientific organizations showed that the ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation is on track to recover in the next four decades. It is estimated that in Antarctica, the solar shield of the planet could reach the values from 1980 by 2066, and in the Arctic, by 2045. It is a clear example that a coordinated global action can lead to achieving reversible processes in the climate field: everything started with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which aimed to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals worldwide.
Relative success in restoring the ozone layer could not come without constant support from governments. If we take 2015 as a reference year, back than only one country set for itself the goal of no longer emitting any carbon dioxide within a certain number of years. Today there are one hundred and one such countries, and their number continues to increase, albeit under some civic pressure.
In February 2023, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution asking the International Court of Justice for an opinion on the legal obligation of governments to address climate change and the potential legal consequences of their "climate inaction". Experts say the Court's opinion, which is pending, will not be legally binding but will carry some moral weight. The resolution came as a growing number of people around the world went to court to force governments and companies to act on climate change. A UN study, published later in 2023, found that the number of climate-related lawsuits had doubled since 2017.
Under these conditions, could COP 28 be in the field of decarbonization what Montreal was in 1987 for the recovery of ozone in the atmosphere? At the December 2023 conference in Dubai, nearly two hundred countries pledged to phase out fossil fuel energy. Oil and especially coal will be used for a while, but the commitment is clear: not for long. The other two major targets of the conference were related to ways to reduce other dangerous emissions, especially methane, and to create a financial framework for decarbonization and the promotion of clean energy production. Even if the US president did not attend the Dubai conference (he had participated in the previous COPs, 27 and 26), more importantly, Joe Biden, together with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, gave the conference a spectacular momentum by signing an agreement by means of which the US and China committed to reducing methane emissions and tripling their green energy production capacity by 2030.
2023 made it clear that climate change is a global issue
Even if the 2023 trends are promising, they are nowhere near enough to stop the effects of climate change. These effects no longer belong to the future, but are present here and now. We are no longer just talking about avoiding them to a lesser or greater extent, but about adapting to the situation they have already created. They are preventive, but also reactive measures, to compensate for damage already done. In this sense, 2023 remains the year in which the European Union reached an agreement on the promotion of a nature protection law. The project sets as its main objectives the restoration of at least 20% of the EU's land and sea surfaces by 2030 and the restoration of all affected ecosystems by 2050. It is a major project, a world first in terms of the scale at which it is undertaken, a project that will also entail a rethinking of the national budgets of the member states.
Measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be applied anytime, but the issue of the gases already emitted remains. Even if we could stop all pollutant emissions overnight, the planet will continue to warm due to the emissions already produced for such a long time. What are we going to do about that? And this is where a whole debate starts, which has in the foreground the controversial technology of solar geoengineering. This basically involves the artificial capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, by injecting a special substance into the stratosphere. The thing is, there is nowhere near a consensus on the side effects of this action, including on the ozone layer.
But it is interesting that the big oil companies are also involved in the debate and in the search for the best solution to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - this strategy could help their business in the end, because if we know how to eliminate carbon, giving up fossil fuels will no longer be so pressing. The struggle for decarbonization is strewn with such paradoxes. It has been said that artificial intelligence has the potential to develop ways to change the whole landscape in the field of combating climate change; only that it also currently works by consuming "dirty" energy. Or, the transition to green energy depends heavily on lithium, but the extraction of this element is not "clean". So how do we get lithium without polluting? Again, a vicious circle for whose exit door we are still looking.
What seems obvious from the experience of 2023 is the accreditation of the global character of the climate concern. Climate change affects all of humanity, whether it's the Wyoming highlanders proud of their traditional isolationism, the Indians in the Calcutta slums, the Bucharesters in Pantelimon neighborhood or the London cosmopolitans in the City. Regardless of the political regime in which people live today, whether they are communist Chinese or capitalist French, anarchist Sudanese or nationalist Russians, they all feel on their skin that something is happening with the climate and that they should care. "We live in a global village," they have been saying for a long time. But this time the expression should be taken literally. The climatic torrent is affecting the entire village. It is perhaps for the first time in history that humanity is faced with a truly global issue in the sense that it is simultaneously common to all. And also for the first time, it has the role of acting as a truly dominant and responsible species for an entire planet. It is not at all certain that it will know how to play it.
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