Munich Spanish farmers are burning their harvest, in Germany communities are declaring a drinking water emergency, parts of the Rhine are degenerating into a trickle, and the elderly and chronically ill in particular are collapsing. This is what it looks like, the summer of 2022.
Temperatures on Earth today are warmer than during the entire history of human civilization – and the expertise of many hundreds of scientists indicates that it does not stop there. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the earth has already warmed by 1.1 degrees compared to the late 19th century.
The anthology “3 degrees more” published by the former head of the Metro department store group reads like a wake-up call. In addition to Klaus Wiegandt, 18 other authors, including the sociologist Jutta Allmendinger and the climate scientists Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Stefan Rahmstorf, describe what such a “hot period” would look like and what can be done about it.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
“Without immediate, decisive climate protection measures, my children, who are currently attending high school, could already experience a world three degrees warmer,” writes Rahmstorf, who heads the Earth System Analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
The contribution of the qualified physicist, who is one of the world leaders in his field, is not for the faint of heart. Since temperatures on land warm up twice as fast, in Germany alone the thermometer would climb by six degrees if the global mean were three degrees higher, Berlin would be hotter than Madrid.
Klaus Wiegandt: 3 degrees more
Oekom Verlag
Munich 2022
352 pages
25 euros
The summer of the century in 2003 claimed 70,000 heat-related deaths in Europe. Hard to imagine what temperatures above 45 degrees would mean for the human organism. The cooling limit temperature is decisive. The body can only give off enough heat to the environment through sweating if the cooling limit temperature is well below the skin temperature.
This is ideally around 33 degrees. “Even for healthy people, a cool limit temperature of 35 degrees at an air temperature of 40 degrees can be deadly after a few hours,” writes Rahmstorf.
Depending on the region, three degrees more means more droughts and extreme precipitation, since in a warmer climate more water evaporates from the air, soil and seas and can be discharged in torrential downpours. The Mediterranean, the US Midwest, South Africa and Australia would increasingly dry out. If the harvest fails in the great granaries of the earth due to drought, there is also a risk of famine.
A breeding ground for violence. Last but not least, the Arab Spring was also sparked by higher bread prices, writes Rahmstorf. With his children in mind, he torments himself through his dystopian text: monster storms, burning forests, acidified oceans, deadly heat waves, seas swallowing shorelines. Failed states and masses of people fleeing.
What a way out might look like
In the anthology, the authors describe nature-based solutions such as rewetting peatlands to store CO2, an immediate end to rainforest deforestation and reforestation. In addition, a “mobilized civil society”. But can it generate the necessary momentum quickly enough and overcome conflicts of interest with farmers, for example?
The right incentives are needed for this, is the common therapy suggestion from economics. The economist Achim Wambach specifies the route with the title of his book “Climate must be worthwhile”.
And that is to be expected far removed from appeals, bans and well-intentioned attempts to reduce the individual CO2 footprint. Many climate protection measures may sound sensible, but they do little for the climate.
Pollution must be expensive for everyone, otherwise the problem will only be shifted. Like the water in a waterbed where only one side is loaded. For Wambach, it is the unrecognized “water bed effects” that make various climate measures ineffective. On around 160 pages, Wambach examines the climate policy of municipalities, the federal government, the EU and within international relations for such effects.
Wambach’s core statement: If markets such as European trading in certificates (for emissions from power generation, energy-intensive industry and intra-European air traffic) or German CO2 emissions trading (for buildings and transport) were active “in the background”, additional CO2 savings would result locally or individual level no climate benefit.
For example, installing a photovoltaic system on the roof. Because those who buy green electricity also use less fossil-based electricity. Conventional energy producers would then need fewer CO2 certificates in European emissions trading, which would then be available to other emitters. A zero sum game.
Achim Wambach: The climate must be worthwhile
Herder publishing house
Friborg 2022
160 pages
16 euros
The number of certificates has already been matched to the European savings targets. However, if a small solar system is financially worthwhile due to high electricity prices, the economist still recommends installing it. Even without a climate benefit.
Another surprising finding is that doing without intra-European air travel does not save any additional CO2. Because flights in Europe are already included in European emissions trading.
From Wambach’s point of view, emissions trading is the most effective instrument against climate change. As an example, he cites Great Britain, which managed to phase out coal solely because of high CO2 prices. That sounds right. However, the sole focus on changing emissions also has weaknesses, at least according to environmental economist Felix Matthes,
Research coordinator for energy and climate policy at the Ökoinstitut. According to this, emissions trading prevents pollution via its price mechanism, but it does not stimulate the necessary investments in renewable energies quickly enough.
Wambach’s perspective overlooks “market entry barriers” and that the construction of new energy infrastructure requires political design and subsidies. For example, Great Britain was only able to break away from coal at the expense of a heavy dependence on gas in the electricity sector. The Kingdom of Germany is lagging behind when it comes to renewables.
Susanne Götze, Annika Joeres: Climate out of control
Piper publisher
Munich 2022
336 pages
20 Euros
Nevertheless, it is a valuable insight that the regulatory and actor levels must be consistent with each other for real climate benefit. Just like the “Climate Club” in response to rising global emissions. Relevant world regions would submit to a uniform CO2 price – and demand climate tariffs from non-members.
Wambach is right when he warns against relying solely on Germany or the EU when it comes to CO2 emissions. That will not be enough to save the 1.5 degree target. That global waterbed says hello and punishes ineffective actionism.
In any case, municipalities have enough to do with climate adaptation and disaster prevention. “Three thousand houses were flooded by the Ahr during the 2021 flood disaster, their basements filled with mud, their gardens covered with toxic silt, and some of their residents drowned.”
A few days after the flood disaster, caravans, gas tanks, trees and scrap piled up meters high on a bridge over the Ahr in Altenahr-Kreuzberg.
(Photo: dpa)
Nevertheless, the journalists Susanne Götze and Annika Joeres state in their meticulous book research “Climate out of control”, which could also be called “Authorities out of control”, that decision-makers negligently neglect to take the necessary measures to protect the population.
Despite all the signs, “Germany has not prepared for the climate crisis,” the authors write. In the Ahr Valley, for the sake of tourism, buildings are being erected just as close to the river as they were before the flood, there are no emergency plans for weeks of heat, and there are no concrete protective measures for power shortages in critical infrastructures such as hospitals.
More on the subject:
And that despite the fact that patients had to be evacuated from hospitals during the Ahr Valley floods because of an unstable power supply. The list of failures could be extended.
But the authors are not satisfied with naming grievances and causes (ignorance, small-stateism instead of a Germany-wide adjustment plan, bureaucracy, belief in technology, lack of investment).
They provide concrete proposals for adaptation measures. To do this, they spoke to countless experts and researchers. They let city planners show them how heat islands develop in concrete inner cities, roamed through forests with biologists, followed geologists to the ice melt on the Zugspitze or waded through the Wadden Sea with landscape ecologists.
We can anticipate this much: in many cases, the authors’ solution, and this is likely to provoke defensive reflexes, is “rescue through orderly retreat”. In other words, to give back to nature a part of the landscapes that have been taken over by straightening, deforestation, drainage or road construction.
Ecological flood protection or the conversion of landscapes and cities takes time, so “we should tackle it now,” write Götze and Joeres. Then, and this is good news, climate adaptation could even improve well-being and health
More: All my shares are green, green, green: What to look out for when investing sustainably