Climate Crisis
The increasing greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades are disrupting atmospheric patterns and further damaging ecosystems across the world. Even without elevated greenhouse gases, the damage to the living Earth would spell disaster. Fossil fuel emissions intensify an already sad situation. The concerted global response to Covid-19, that is working together to develop vaccines to tackle the virus, must be replicated with regard to the challenge of the global climate crisis.
The Climate Crisis Article 1
The globally agreed target of 1.5C is on track to be missed. For those working to prevent disaster, the only option is to keep trying.
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
For Prof Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the world is falling into an “abyss of risk”, recent reports published by three UN agencies all point to the failures of governments to make – and keep – sufficient commitments to ensure that global temperatures will not rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which was the target of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
​
So far human activities in relation to the Living Earth have increased global temperature by around 1.1 C since the beginning of The Industrial Revolution. If current emissions continue to increase that figure is expected to rise to 2.5C within 30 years. That would – and probably will – mean destruction of much of the Living Earth on a scale that is difficult to imagine.
​
Optimists came away from Cop26 in Glasgow 2021 believing that unsteady progress there – particularly in the crucial area of US-China cooperation – could be built on afterwards. Those hopes have now been dashed, with only some 24 countries submitting new plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), over the past year – and even the adjusted pledges falling short of what is needed. Climate tipping points including the collapse of the Greenland ice shelf, scientists warn, are becoming unavoidable, with increases in methane emissions in 2022/3 a particular source of alarm. Gloomily, experts note that Russia’s war on Ukraine and worsening relations between the west and China are likely to make reaching agreement in the near future even more difficult.
​
Global heating of 2.5C is a terrifying prospect, especially for the millions of people who live in the places most dangerously exposed to sea-level rises etc. What has happened over the past few year is disappointing and inadequate. Even people who understand fully the risks from global warning are sometimes reluctant to publicise them because of possible public panic. Transformation of the global energy system, combined with a package of financial support for the global south from the north, is arguably more likely to be achieved if people believe that a greener future is within reach, but only if immediate and positive action is taken.
​
For Bill McGuire (emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London): “We have – for far too long – ignored warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.” The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now a diminishing chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We may have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) and 40C plus as we have witnessed in many parts of Europe in 2022, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2023 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did.” McGuire insists.
Most climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say. Meanwhile time is of the essence.
For McGuire: “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the climate crisis itself.”
McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK 2022. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”
​
The Climate Crisis Article 2
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
A temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on July 19 2022. The highest ever recorded in the UK. These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather. “Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says McGuire.(see (1) “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.”
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030. “In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”
We should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C. From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further.
Certainly, Britain – although relatively well placed to counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, possibly responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050. “Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.
As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.”
The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.
This is a call to action,” he says. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”
Soon the world will be unrecognisable. The question is: Is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99
The Climate Crisis Article 3
Approximate Read Time:
4 Mins
In their book: 'The Future We Choose' Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac tell us that the goal of halving global emissions by 2030 represents the minimum we must achieve if we are to have a chance of safeguarding humanity from the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
​
In relation to the climate crisis, scientists must somehow summarise the present state of the natural world in order to help clarify for people throughout the planet the gravity of the present human predicament. Time is not on our side. The basic ethical question relating to today’s climate crisis is: What ought to be done about anthropogenic climate change, and by whom? The question arises because there is a lot of evidence that global warming is already having harmful impacts on both humans and the natural world.
​
Continuing high rates of greenhouse gas emission can be expected to bring devastating harm in the future, leading to further, complex questions of global and intergenerational justice, as well as to questions regarding our ethical obligations to non-human nature.
​
The increasing greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades are disrupting atmospheric patterns and further damaging ecosystems. Even without elevated greenhouse gases, the damage to the Living Earth would spell disaster. Fossil fuel emissions intensify an already bad situation. The concerted global response to Covid-19, that is working together to develop vaccines to tackle the virus, must be replicated with regard to the challenge of the global climate crisis.
​
António Guterres, the UN secretary-general told the Guardian some time ago, that new commitments were urgently needed: “We know that we are not yet where we should be. We know that nine years after the Paris Agreement global warming is still running faster than we are.” For Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister who oversaw the Paris Agreement: “There has been some sort of revolution in climate change, internationally. The great difficulty is to implement the Paris Agreement. Now is the time for action.”
​
The many years of refusing to respond to the climate crisis have wasted crucial time. Today the tundra is thawing and Greenland’s ice shield is melting fast, and nearly every natural system is disrupted, from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to droughts, floods, heat waves and the failure of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed; the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being in the future is here, now.
​
We need to talk about global warming, the result in large part because of human actions, as a conflict against nature, against the poor and against the rest of us, in particular the poor of the world . There are casualties, there are deaths and there is destruction, and it’s all gathering pace. While we’re at it, why not adopt the term “Protecting the Living Earth life” to talk about those who are trying to save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the collapse of the complex systems on which all life on Earth depends.
​
The complex array of damaging effects, the result of the man-made climate crisis and the unfair distribution of the Earth’s resources, as well as their scale makes it more difficult to talk about than almost anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what are the great obstacles to those who are trying, to do so much to make things better? The answer: The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, and their staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists and the politicians in its clutches. It seems that those who benefit most from the status quo are always the least willing to change.
​
Fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them “have humanity by the throat”, the UN secretary general has said, in a “blistering” attack on the industry and its backers, who are pulling in record profits. António Guterres compared fossil fuel companies to the tobacco companies that continued to push their addictive products while concealing, or attacking, health advice that showed clear evidence of the damage caused, and still causing.
​
For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for global warming and damage to the Living Earth, yet often continue to undermine ambitious climate policies. The foundations of prosperity are precarious. Disasters long talked about, and long ignored, can arrive with no warning, turning life inside out and shaking all that seemed stable and normal.
​
Global warming will be slower than the say the pandemic but more massive and longer-lasting. If there is a time for governments to show bravery in heading off such disaster, it is now.
​
“The fossil fuel industry is exploiting precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.” Guterres also castigated governments that are failing to rein in fossil fuels, and in many cases seeking increased production of gas, oil and even coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Meanwhile the US president, Joe Biden, last year travelled to Saudi Arabia to push for more oil production. Some EU countries are seeking to source gas from Africa and developing countries around the world, and the UK is talking about licensing new gas fields in the North Sea.
​
Guterres is understood to be furious that after the Cop26 climate summit, and after three dire reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the starkest warning yet from climate scientists – countries and businesses are ignoring the science and squandering opportunities to put the world on a more greener and sustainable path, at a time renewable energy is cheaper and safer than fossil fuels.
​
The International Energy Agency warned last year that all new exploration and development of oil, gas and coal must cease this year to hold to the 1.5C threshold. A senior UN official told the Guardian: “Even given the secretary general’s impressive track record of speaking truth to power, this is a blistering intervention, to the leaders of the world’s largest economies. The fossil fuel industry is taking a page out of big tobacco’s playbook, and that is utterly unacceptable to the secretary general. He’s determined to call out the fossil fuel industry and its financiers, and he won’t be constrained by any diplomatic niceties.”
​
Katharine Hayhoe in a Ted Talk some years ago said that the most important thing you can do to fight the climate crisis is to: talk about it. It was an entertaining masterclass relating to the science of communication, which pulls no punches about the threat that humanity confronts, or the size of the task to avoid catastrophic consequences. She counselled against trying to shame people into changing their behaviour. There is a warning that offering up more facts about climate change can actually increase polarisation among those who refuse to accept the evidence. She also described attempts to shame people to make changes as “a zero-sum game” because “when others attempt to impose their value system on us, we understand fundamentally, that it is about making them-selves feel better at our expense”. A recent survey found that only 4% claim to be “not at all concerned” about the climate crisis. Her motto is “bond, connect and inspire”, which embodies her approach of always seeking common ground. We can all do our bit to bring about success just by talking about the issue.
The climate crisis resembles a huge planetary lockdown, trapping humanity within an ever-deteriorating environment.
​
In 2016 375 scientists – including 30 Nobel prize winners – wrote an open letter to the world about their frustrations over political inaction on the climate crisis. Sadly, since then little has changed, indeed, it seems that today things are even more critical.
​
​
The Climate Crisis Article 4
Approximate Read Time:
4 Mins
Gaia Vince is an author, journalist and broadcaster. In her latest book: ”How to Survive the Climate Upheaval”. For her, while the climate crisis can seem overwhelming, never the less there are radical, pragmatic solutions – and they all begin with an idea. She asks: Is there any hope?
An alarming trend is humans are pushing the Earth’s living systems to dangerous extremes. She writes about planetary-scale ecosystem destruction but with a focus on the human species extraordinary capacity to adapt, and it is key to surviving into the future. There are radical, yet pragmatic, solutions to the global climate crises. But fear of what will happen if we don’t act is imprisoning people in a mind-set that makes alternatives seem unthinkable.
Again, for her, we are living inside the imagination of earlier generations. Ideas such as democracy, public libraries, municipal sewage, air travel consumerism etc., are the result of yesterday’s and today’s imagination, then actively formed into a shareable vision that others could collectively mould, modify, reimagine and nurture in their minds. Eventually, a concept that once existed solely inside a person’s mind – an idea that may have seemed impossible, unachievable, even crazy – became our unremarkable reality, part of what is normal.
Today, looking at the state of the world it can seem as if we are stuck in a socioeconomic status quo, condemned to a scary future. We are experiencing worsening global crises, ranging from climate chaos to biodiversity loss and food shortages. The scale and urgency of our crises are overwhelming and the mismatch in the ambition of our leaders to address these challenges feels frightening. It’s a burden that weighs particularly heavily on young people, who naturally have the greatest stake in the future. For herPeople are anxious and afraid.
Anxiety and fear stems from a sense of hopelessness and the realisation that there are limits to how much agency we have as individuals to affect global change. But things are not hopeless, far from it. The future is still unwritten; we cannot know what it holds, but we will make it first in our minds, in our imaginations.
In this time of multiple global crises, we need the understanding and exercise leadership to help us build a path towards a sustainable future. Instead of aligning policy to clearly stated goals on climate targets or poverty reduction or biodiversity, governments are blundering around with mixed messages and policies that undermine their goals or deliver little progress.
For Gaia Vince we need honesty from our governments and decision-makers about what our choices are and what the trade-offs will be for each of us. There are no easy options now, but there are still plenty of choices for us to discuss, debate and democratically decide on. But we need first to decide what kind of future we want, what is important to us, and what kind of society we want to live in. Only then can we take pragmatic steps towards a sustainable future for all.
First, we have to notice. We have to raise our heads from the all-consuming business of daily life and pay attention to what is wrong with today’s “normal”: notice who in our society is being failed and which of our human activities are damaging our communities and natural spaces. See the opportunities in what needs to be fixed. Understand not just intellectually, but emotionally what we face as our world heats. And then actively choose to imagine an alternative, a future that is liveable. The question is: how do we get to this future from our current reality?
​
With thoughtful decision-making we can build vibrant communities with people safe to walk and cycle in, comfortably and rich in community spaces and various plants. It will mean rethinking our towns and cities, planning the architecture, materials and energy systems for sustainability, so our buildings generate rather than simply use energy, for instance. We’re in a transition right now to a greener economy – we can seize this opportunity to reset all aspects of our society, to make things fairer and more sustainable.
​
Individuals can generate ideas, but it takes a community to create a reality, to act together and adopt positive policies. Think more creatively and wisely, and longer-term. Refuse to limit your mind to the narrow realm of today’s political circus. Don’t get stuck thinking that things have to be the same as before. Don’t think they will inevitably get worse.
Imagine people across the world having enough nutritious food, clean rivers bubbling with fish, restored wildlands, cheap, abundant energy, a liveable future. If anyone tells if it’s impossible, ask why. Is it impossible because of the laws of physics, or is it impossible because of the rules of society?
Societies change. We can change them. The scale and nature of the challenges demand a step-change. We need bold, imaginative ideas and the exercise of leadership and shared learning. And nothing can be done without collaboration, a shared picture for a better and more sustainable world, both in an environmental and social context.
​