Local experts react to latest UN report on climate change

Undated photo — California’s blistering heat wave and power plant equipment failures are straining the state power grid. Energy officials are calling on consumers to conserve., released on Monday, urged immediate and bold action to limit global emissions to prevent climate change. The report’s hard facts and figures show a world on track to push past the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and looking at 2 or 3 degrees of warming by the end of the century.

I think this report does a good job of showing what could happen if everything were to line up. And I think the report, because everything is not lining up perfectly, is a big dose of realism about how much we'd really still have to do. I think this report largely confirms what we knew, which is that you have to work across the entire economy. Crucially, you have to redirect investment, and there's been quite a lot of progress on that front. So capital — massive amounts of capital — and you'll start flowing into low-carbon technologies, especially in the electric-power sector.

This particular IPCC report finally acknowledges the seriousness of the climate change we are facing and we are going to face soon. And the second thing is that it spells out the sort of drastic actions we need to prevent the warming to go into a rapidly runaway stage. If I can comment on what's the big deal about a degree and a half, you see the planet warmed by across the one degree warming threshold by 2014, and that's when the whole experience with climate change and extreme weather started manifesting worldwide.

And then third — and this is kind of fits into our local work in San Diego and makes me optimistic — is that they said cities and local action is instrumental. Like that's where we can really model what zero carbon future looks like and that's where you can really innovate and experiment and really prove what's possible.

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