Op-Ed: Never give up! Every ton of carbon we can cut still matters

Dan Farber, LEGAL PLANET

It’s easy to be disheartened when we miss climate targets. But climate change isn’t a yes/no thing. It’s a matter of degree.

It’s easy to lose heart about our prospects for limiting climate change. The US has pulled out of international climate negotiations. Most of the countries that joined the Paris Agreement have missed targets , targets that weren’t aggressive enough in the first place. The 1.5° target is already basically out of reach. Is it time to give up on slowing climate change and focus on adapting to it? The answer is no. Here’s why we need to continue the fight to reduce carbon emissions, even in the face of setbacks.

Climate change is a matter of degrees. That sounds like a truism or a pun, but it’s true in a deeper sense. There is no point past which further warming becomes irrelevant. The harm from 3.0°of warming is worse than 2.5°. which is worse than 2.2°, which is worse than 2.0°. And so forth. So even if we were to blow past every temperature target we’ve ever set, every ton of additional carbon dioxide would raise the temperature some fraction of a degree, and every fraction of a degree makes things worse.