{"id":1775,"date":"2025-11-20T15:54:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T14:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/?p=1775"},"modified":"2025-11-20T16:05:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:05:05","slug":"what-suffering-will-humanity-prevent-during-cop30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/en\/2025\/11\/20\/what-suffering-will-humanity-prevent-during-cop30\/","title":{"rendered":"What suffering will humanity prevent during COP30?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is republished<\/a> from the site Covering Climate Now.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSuffering increases with each tenth of a degree of warming.\u201d So says renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, speaking yesterday in an\u00a0expert panel<\/a>\u00a0that CCNow and Sammy Roth of the new newsletter\u00a0Climate-Colored Goggles<\/a>\u00a0convened in response to a widely circulated and much-discussed memo by Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft founder\u00a0seemed to downplay<\/a>\u00a0the severity and urgency of the climate crisis.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his memo, Gates posited that climate change \u201cwill not lead to humanity\u2019s demise.\u201d That\u2019s true, Hayhoe says, but it\u2019s also an unhelpful \u201cstraw man\u201d argument, because scientists sounding the alarm on climate change have never argued it will lead to humanity\u2019s extinction. Humanity\u2019s fate amid the climate crisis is not a binary, she explains, but a question of scale: How much will humanity suffer due to climate change? And how much suffering can we prevent?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are the questions that will fundamentally underlie proceedings at COP30, the UN climate summit that kicks off this coming Monday in Bel\u00e9m, Brazil. Just last week, UN Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres told The Guardian and the Amazon-based outlet Suma\u00fama that humanity has failed to limit<\/a> warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal that world leaders agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Global average temperatures haven\u2019t risen that far yet \u2014 today, we\u2019re at about 1.3 degrees C of warming \u2014 but Guterres said an overshoot of the 1.5-degree-C threshold has become virtually inevitable, due to countries\u2019 routinely insufficient efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The consequences, he added, will be \u201cdevastating,\u201d especially for the world\u2019s most vulnerable communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poverty?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Yet Gates, in his memo, argued that scientists\u2019 and advocates\u2019 focus on climate change is overstated, saying poverty and disease pose far greater threats to humanity\u2019s quality of life. Here, Hayhoe and other panelists last night had another bone to pick with Gates. Separating these problems from climate change creates a false dichotomy, they said. In fact, climate change exacerbates challenges like poverty and hunger, and increasingly the world won\u2019t be able to solve poverty and hunger without addressing climate change. As global heating continues unabated, \u201cWe\u2019re talking about massive suffering,\u201d Hayhoe says, \u201cincluding loss of life, as well as livelihoods, homes, and more. And that suffering increases degree by degree.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what will leaders do in Bel\u00e9m to arrest temperature rise and, in turn, mitigate humanity\u2019s suffering? Guterres has vowed to protect nature \u2014 relevant especially given that the Amazon will serve as the backdrop for this year\u2019s COP \u2014 and push back against profit-driven fossil fuel companies. Journalists in Bel\u00e9m and around the world will be watching to see whether countries will follow his lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is republished from the site Covering Climate Now. \u201cSuffering increases with each tenth of a degree of warming.\u201d So says renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, speaking yesterday in an\u00a0expert panel\u00a0that CCNow and Sammy Roth of the new newsletter\u00a0Climate-Colored Goggles\u00a0convened in response to a widely circulated and much-discussed memo by Bill Gates, in which the … Lees verder<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1669,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"iawp_total_views":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1778,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions\/1778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scientistrebellion.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}