“We don’t have the luxury of pessimism,” was a strange rallying cry I heard at the Cop30 negotiations in Belém.
Yet it was hard not to be pessimistic when you consider where we are in the world. In the main pavilions, I could hear leading scientists warning that climate change was coming faster and harder than earlier models had predicted.
We will now inevitably exceed the safe temperature limits set in the Paris Agreement nearly 10 years ago.
To get things back on track, we will have to rely on what is called an “overshoot” approach, where in future decades we store carbon to bring temperature increases back to safer levels. That’s the optimistic scenario.
The more pessimistic – or some would say realistic – one is that we will cross some climate tipping points, such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the Atlantic ov
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