The data for 2020 is in, so we can confidently say that neither the pandemic's economic ravages, nor all the corporate greenwashing, nor any jot or tittle of Paris-style agreements has made any dent whatsoever in any of the climate and climate-pollution numbers. Whether you take land-based temperatures, or land & ocean temperatures, or satellite readings of lower troposphere temperatures, they all set new records.
As for C02 concentrations, they're up 0.6%, methane is up 0.6%, nitrous oxide is up 0.3% and sulphur hexaflouride is up 3.3%. Even worse, the underlying trend in CO2 concentrations is not just that they are growing, but that that growth is still accelerating. Same thing with methane, same thing with nitrous oxide. The only greenhouse gas in which the rise in concentrations is actually slowing is. . . sulphur hexaflouride.
The lesson could not be clearer: our current approaches are all failing. There is absolutely no reason to believe that simply doing the same thing, but harder, more sincerely, will produce any better result. This approach has failed, is failing, and will continue to fail. It is way past time for environmentalists to own up to this dreadful fact.
The narrative urgently needs to change: only the discovery of how to operate a circular economy will buy us time