Cutting carbon emissions would immediately decrease climate change, says researcher

There is a misconception that there is a delay between emissions of carbon dioxide and climate’s response, says Damon Matthews, associate professor of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal. Policy makers argue that cutting emissions now will not affect the climate for many decades, he reasons. That makes the climate problem seem more intractable than it actually is.

“I think the sense that there is… inevitable future warming regardless of what we do,” says Matthews. “…(it) makes it seem like mitigation efforts are important yes, but important for the next generation… there’s less sense of hope that we are able to deal with it.”

Immediate decreases in CO2 emissions would in fact result in an immediate decrease in the rate of climate warming according to a review of climate science by Matthews and MIT’s Susan Solomon and reported in a recent Science article.

“I hope people stop talking about future warming as inevitable,” says Matthews. “In a sense there is inevitability in the system but that inevitability emerges from human inaction.”