Since the Paris Climate Accord was concluded, no government has followed through with any serious action. The U.S. pullout is hardly the only problem; India is effectively ignoring the agreement, and France āmisses its goals of greenhouse-gas reduction every year,ā admits Nicolas Hulot, the French environmental activist and former minister for President Emmanuel Macron. The accord is unenforceable and carries no sanctionsāa condition insisted upon by many governments that wouldnāt have signed on otherwise. We continue to live in a contradictory reality: on the one hand, we hear that nothing threatens humanity as much as rising atmospheric carbon dioxide; on the other hand, nothing much happens practically to address this allegedly dire threat. Most economists suggest that the only effective incentive to reduce greenhouse-gas levels would be to impose a global carbon tax. No government seems willing to accept such a levy.
Is there an apocalyptic warming crisis, or not? āWeāre always being told that we are reaching a point of no returnāthat, for instance, the melting of the Arctic ice pack is the beginning of the apocalypse,ā Curry says. āBut this melting, which started decades ago, is not leading to catastrophe.ā Polar bears themselves adapt and move elsewhere and have never been more numerous; theyāre less threatened by the melting, she says, than by urbanization and economic development in the polar region. Over the last year or so, moreover, the planet has started cooling, though āno one knows whether it will last or not, or whether it will put all the global-warming hypotheses in question.ā According to Curry, the truly dramatic rupture of the ice pack would come not from global-warming-induced melting but from āvolcanic eruptions in the Antarctic region that would break up the ice, and these cannot be predicted.ā Climatologists donāt talk about such eruptions because their theoretical models canāt account for the unpredictable.