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Five Times Faster
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Five Times Faster

Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change

Simon Sharpe
Cambridge UP, 2023
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Applicable
  • Visionary

Recommendation

Despite mass protests, government initiatives, and global accords, people keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and exacerbating global warming. Simon Sharpe, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, maintains that to contain climate change, nations must make sure global temperatures do not increase beyond 1.5oC [2.7°F]. Emissions must drop dramatically and quickly. Sharpe asserts that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, human thinking – and the world’s economies – must change.

Summary

Leaders and policymakers underestimate the climate change crisis.

Even leaders who accept the science behind climate change – and whose countries are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions – often underestimate the risk climate change poses. Those same officials often resist pursuing proper risk assessments for climate change. They tend to think they don’t need a proper risk assessment because they already accept climate science, because accurate risk assessments portend an apocalyptic future, and because they assume such an assessment must already exist. 

A proper risk assessment could lead to concrete policies limiting greenhouse gas emissions that would benefit both human health and the economy. Establishing such policies will be difficult and will require money and political effort.

Politicians, policymakers, scientists, and citizens must invest in research on climate change’s worst impacts.

Since 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has advised policymakers on climate science. Its 2013 report found that people knew little about climate change’s worst...

About the Author

Simon Sharpe, Director of Economics for the UN Climate Champions Team, is a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.

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