SHARJAH: (United Arab Emirates): Global warming is real as evidenced by the increasing intensity and frequency of climate disasters and the solution is to stop the pollution and go big on renewables, according to award-winning science writer and author, Gaia Vince.
She said while carbon trading can impact places like Sabah in a positive way, it should not be an “exchange for polluting (going on) elsewhere”.
Gaia who was among the speakers at the ongoing Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) 2025, was asked about the effectiveness of carbon trading as a conservation mechanism against climate change.
She said it won’t solve the problem.
“Carbon credits are a sort of mechanism by which rich countries continue to pollute, saying they are buying credits in poor countries.
“Carbon trading is not actually solving the problem. It is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. In the end, the overall production of global greenhouse gases keeps increasing.”
She agrees there should be a price on carbon. But that it should be something which is paid for. Not paid for instead of other places emitting carbon.
“Those two are different things. They’re both very, very important. But you don’t trade one for the other.
“Basically… there are multiple benefits for preserving the environment, especially everything from water conservation, etc,” said the author of “Nomad Century”.
“Carbon is just one part of that. The indigenous people that live there (forest), it’s a very, very precious part of our planet.
“It absolutely should be preserved and wealthy countries should pay for that because biodiversity is being lost everywhere. But it should not be an exchange for polluting elsewhere,” she said.
In any case, she believes it may be too late for carbon trading to be effective.
“Twenty years ago, you could tolerate this kind of exchange. Now, it’s too late for that. We need to stop polluting. That’s very important.”
Gaia, whose extensive research has included Sabah, said a contemporary movie that comes closest to the depiction of climate change in modern society is “Don’t Look Up”.
The movie explains in laymen’s terms how the current generation perceives global warming as a whole and how turning a blind eye on the crises can lead to the downfall of the planet.
Asked by the moderator whether the world is going “hot” or “cold”, an annoyed Gaia said:
“We are not going cold, obviously. We are in 2025 now. Quite simply, what is happening is there is a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“What happens is that the Earth gets energy from the Sun that comes down as mostly as visible light. It then bounces back in a different form of light that we can’t see, infrared light, which is heat.
“That heat is invisible to us, but it is blocked by these greenhouse gases, which we also can’t see. That energy, that extra energy, is being trapped in the atmosphere.
“That extra energy is what is driving these much hotter heat waves, these chronic droughts, these much more violent storms, coastal erosions, hurricanes that pick up more energy, more heat energy from the hotter oceans.”
She cited Hurricane Melissa that hit Jamaica and the super typhoons in the Philippines lately.
“The Philippines at the moment is being hit by incredible typhoons. We are seeing very, very destructive weather systems,” she said, adding that any climate scientist would say it is caused by the accumulation and rising concentration of greenhouse gases.
“Mostly, it’s carbon dioxide, but methane also plays a huge role because methane is more potent in the short-term. It breaks down quite quickly.”
She said these methane leaks need to be addressed, including other greenhouse gases.
“What is happening is the temperature of the atmosphere is going up,” she said, warning about the seriousness of the situation.
“We’ve already had a whole year where the average temperature of the planet has been 1.5 degrees hotter than the pre-industrial average, and is continuing to climb.
“We will hit more than two degrees within the next five to 10 years, and that temperature is only going to climb.”
Gaia said this would lead to making parts of the world increasingly unliveable and it’s making people move because their homes are destroyed.
She cited the tragic Los Angeles fire in the United States, which happened early this year in the most expensive real estate in the world.
“We saw the richest climate refugees in the world.” And it’s happening everywhere, from Bangladesh to Maldives and UAE.
She said the victims of global warming may not be immediately visible to urban dwellers because those affected are the hundreds if not thousands of migrant workers who are dying of heat exhaustion and kidney failure, among others.
She said climate change affects the volume of harvests, which in turn affects global food prices.
“When harvests are failing, it pushes up the food prices and causes hunger from Sudan to Mali. What we will see is not just occasional harvest failures, but simultaneous harvest failures regionally, happening at the same time.”
She pondered on what would happen to those people when the world becomes more unliveable for them.
“They will have to move. Are we talking about this honestly? No. The climate crisis is already here.”
She said mankind needs to move away to a post-combustion world, immediately stopping with the burning of fossil fuels.
She noted that the UAE and across the Middle East, have very rich resources in fossil fuels.
“That is the 19th-20th century energy source. Now we have other energy sources. It’s the most amazing place for solar,” she said, adding that the UAE has the world’s biggest concentrated solar power facility.
“We need to move to that much faster. We also need to invest in renewables, not lend countries money, changing their agricultural systems, in adapting their homes and businesses, in allowing them to move to safer places within their own borders.”
On climate refugees, she said the world needs to “accept that people will not be able to remain within their own borders”.
“Some will have to move across borders, across continents, and we need to make adjustments for that,” she said.
Gaia Vince is a science writer, broadcaster and Anthropocene researcher exploring the interplay between human systems and the planetary environment.
For more info visit
https://wanderinggaia.com
