Stop making federal land a climate-change contributor The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that we have only nine years left, until 2030, to reduce global emissions by half to avoid increasing warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. If temperatures go above this, we can expect the effects of climate change that we have been witnessing â extreme water shortages, hot, wind-driven fires, hurricanes, massive flooding, extinctions of species â to accelerate and intensify to potentially unfathomable (and in some cases, unsurvivable) extremes. Fossil fuels cause climate change. The president has direct authority over extraction of fossil fuels on federal land or water.