There are many things that need to be done in order for the world to stop global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, and not allow it to get to two degrees. It is possible, but will be extremely hard due to political opinions and technological fixes. First of all, our dependency on coal needs to change immediately or we will not be able to keep the temperature from rising. Today, coal is one of the worlds main sources of powering electricity, in the last article it states, “use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40% today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent“(Davenport 2). Wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources as technological fixes would need to increase in order to make up for coal. This increase in renewable energy could help stop the increase in temperature. Also, some people do not believe that coal could be dismissed as an energy source, so a technological fix that would limit the emissions of carbon from coal burning. This would mean that governments would have to invest billions or even trillions of dollars into carbon capture research. Another socio-technological fix could be extremely high taxes on carbon emissions such as stated in the last article, “perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100”(Davenport 2). In order for these fixes to be employed in this small timeframe there needs to be a major reform in our government’s climate policies, as well as others. I saw a statement the other day regarding this topic that said, “If someone was driving you in a car towards a cliff, you would instinctively grab the wheel and try to take control”.
According to Michael Reidy’s article, John Tyndall even knew that any changes to the constitution of the atmosphere “would produce great effects on the terrestrial rays and produce corresponding changes to climate…”. Tyndall said this in the 1800s, almost 200 years ago; believing that climate science is still in its infancy could be and most likely is quite ignorant. The IPCC states that 6,000 scientific references were cited and reviewed by ninety-one authors and editors. I believe that to say climate studies cannot be reliable is false, and we should take them very seriously.