Comment

Joëlle Gergis
Can we handle the truth on climate?

As the latest round of United Nations climate talks were under way at COP30 in Brazil, the Liberal Party finally caved in to the pressure of climate change deniers in the National Party, reminding us that the climate wars are well and truly alive and kicking in Australia.

On November 13, Liberal leader Sussan Ley not only announced that the party would abandon its former commitment to Australia reaching net zero emissions by 2050 but also vowed to repeal Labor’s legislated 2030 and 2050 targets from the Climate Change Act 2022 and to renew support for coal and gas. It was a stunning act of spite and stupidity from the very people elected to protect the livelihoods of the inhabitants of one of the nations most exposed to climate risk on Earth. Instead of having an opposition constructively challenging the gaping loopholes and contradictions in Labor’s climate policy, the Coalition is back at square one, dismissing the fundamental reality of our planet’s fossil-fuelled warming, and undermining Australia’s ability to show genuine leadership at this critical time of global transition.

Sadly, the denial and delay playing out domestically was also on full display at the 30th round of international climate negotiations taking place in Belém. Addressing world leaders gathered in the Amazonian town for the opening ceremony, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared that this would be the “COP of truth”, with no hint of irony. As a climate scientist listening in, I couldn’t help but think of Jack Nicholson thundering “You can’t handle the truth!” in the courtroom drama A Few Good Men.

To understand why these climate summits are so consequential for the future of our planet, we must anchor ourselves in some hard truths about the physical reality of our predicament. The first is that the climate crisis is bad and getting worse. Greenhouse gas concentrations hit historical highs in 2024, unleashing record heat across the planet. The past three years have been the three warmest on record, with human-induced warming now increasing at an unprecedented rate of 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. The relentless burning of fossil fuels has increased the Earth’s energy imbalance by 25 per cent in the few years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report in 2021.

This build-up of excess heat has driven up oppressive humidity and torrential downpours on land, with record heat absorbed by the ocean spawning monstrous storms and obliterating marine ecosystems. The combined influence of record warm oceans and rapidly melting ice has accelerated the rate of sea level rise, increasing the threat of inundation of close to one billion people living in low-lying coastal areas around the world. If current trends continue, a child born today living within three metres of sea level will almost certainly lose their home within their lifetime.

This leads us to the second hard truth – the world’s collective failure to reduce emissions means that overshooting 1.5 degrees is now inevitable. Based on the updated national climate pledges submitted ahead of COP30, it is clear that our politicians are still not showing the genuine leadership needed to transition rapidly away from fossil fuels, which are responsible for close to 90 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. According to the UN Environment Programme’s latest figures, nations are not on track to meet their 2030 targets, let alone any revised 2035 pledges that were expected to reflect a ratcheting up of ambition.

As things stand, a continuation of current policies gives the world a 90 per cent chance of about 3.3 degrees of peak warming by the end of the century. If all net zero pledges are honoured, that figure drops to 2.3 degrees, which still exceeds the upper end of the Paris Agreement targets designed to limit dangerous levels of global warming. On our current trajectory, the world is expected to breach 1.5 degrees by 2030, reaching 2 degrees around 2048.

Although exceeding 1.5 degrees is now unavoidable, this doesn’t mean we give up on that target. Aside from the legal and moral imperative to maintain a liveable planet, there are very real scientific reasons why we need to minimise the magnitude and duration of this overshoot. Once net zero is achieved, global warming is expected to stabilise as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) theoretically balances out emissions.

Unfortunately the road doesn’t end there. The world needs to go well beyond the neutralising effect of net zero and begin drawing down cumulative historical emissions to achieve “net negative emissions”. This means that every tonne of CO₂ released from today onward also needs to be removed from the atmosphere to bring the temperature increase back toward 1.5 degrees, which will be a very expensive and dangerous experiment.

The latest report on global tipping points is a terrifying warning of how every fraction of additional warming increases the risk of irreversible changes to our planet – even within Paris Agreement levels. Since the 2023–2025 mass coral bleaching event that devastated 85 per cent of the world’s coral reefs, it is widely accepted that the tipping point for their survival has been breached. This means most people alive today will witness the death of the “rainforests of the sea”, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Aside from their intrinsic beauty, coral reefs support a quarter of all marine life. The cascade of impacts across tourism, fisheries and cultural practices will be profound and immeasurable. Because coral reefs are out of sight, or experienced by most people only on holiday, we aren’t nearly as alarmed as we should be by the collapse of this fundamental part of life on Earth. After I mentioned the imminent demise of coral reefs to a large audience of institutional investors responsible for the management of $40 trillion across the Asia–Pacific region, a delegate approached me to say that while the Great Barrier Reef is “nice to have”, it was my comment about 50-degree days becoming a regular feature of summer in Sydney and Melbourne that really hit home.

As someone who has spent close to 30 years immersed in climate science, hearing the loss of the largest living structure on Earth trivialised in this way left me speechless. If the most vibrant symbol of ecological destruction is “no biggie”, then what hope do we have of getting people to care about the melting of ice sheets or the acidification of our seas? We scientists pride ourselves on maintaining political detachment lest our objectivity be questioned, but the truth is, science doesn’t operate in a moral vacuum. If the people who know most about the climate crisis self-censor – or fail to convey the ethical dimensions of our work to the decision-makers determining the fate of our planet – we will continue to enable the gutless mediocrity in our political class that is leading to the biggest policy failure in human history.

This brings us to the final hard truth: despite all of the feel-good tree planting associated with carbon offsets, net zero is an insidious loophole that is delaying genuine reductions in fossil fuel emissions. Our leaders are comfortable with the idea of overshooting 1.5 degrees because they are under the delusion that CDR measures underpinning net zero pledges will save the day. But according to the Global Carbon Project’s latest numbers, vegetation-based CDR is currently absorbing the equivalent of about 5 per cent of annual fossil carbon dioxide emissions, while embryonic technology-based CDR accounts for only about one-millionth of the CO₂ emitted from fossil fuels. So while the Tropical Forests Forever Facility introduced at COP30 to reduce deforestation is important for keeping nature’s own carbon removal system intact – with the bonus of protecting biodiversity – relying on the land sector to do all of the heavy lifting simply diverts attention from the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels. Unfortunately, even the most noble conservation efforts are likely to be swamped by an overheating planet, as fossil fuels continue to flood the atmosphere, outpacing nature’s resilience.

To avoid an irreversible melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which would commit the world to more than 10 metres of sea level rise in coming centuries – even if temperatures decline later on – the concept of “real zero” needs to be on the COP agenda. Of course, that will never happen. Instead, we will continue to see elaborate arguments from powerful petrostates to water down ambition and delay the inevitable.

The lack of scientific literacy and entrenched ideological resistance to net zero, even in an advanced country such as Australia, is a reminder that 35 years on from the first IPCC report, fossil fuel interests are still deliberately corrupting the political response to climate change. Throwing money at the problem isn’t going to change the fact that society can’t adapt, year after year, to an endless escalation of destructive weather – it is hard to hit a moving target. As long-suffering scientists keep repeating: the burning of coal, oil and gas must stop. How hot we let things get, and for how long, will determine the future liveability of our planet.

So what have we learnt from the “COP of truth”? Despite three decades of well-intentioned climate summits, our political leaders are still allowing the fossil fuel industry to destroy our planet. The hardest truth of all is that we are doing this to ourselves.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Can we handle the truth?".

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