Revolution Or Collapse? The Climate News Many Are Too Scared To Tell

Latest climate science poses stark choice

It could be a line from Don’t Look Up but unfortunately it is only too real: current climate science suggests we may only have 3-4 years to plan an economic revolution to avoid societal collapse.

This is what I have learned from a recent dive into the literature sparked by an enlightening conversation I recorded for a podcast episode with Prof. Pierre Friedlingstein a few weeks ago.

I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it since.

The main reason I can’t let it go is because something about our conversation just didn’t add up. The maths was perfect, it was the way the interview made me feel that I couldn’t immediately process.

In the interview, Pierre told me that achieving 1.8C is a very optimistic goal and that we are currently on course for 3 or 4 degrees, so limiting to 2C or just under would be a win.

Essentially, any hope of 1.5C is misplaced.

He also said that even to achieve just about sub-2C amounts to reducing CO2 emission by 5% year on year for the next 20 years. For scale, 5% is the same reduction we saw in 2020 as a result of a global lockdown to keep us safe from the outbreak of Covid-19.

An emergency response level of activity to keep the show on the road.

The conversation seemed to sway from truly terrifying figures to relaxed reassurances that everything is going to be fine, which when you’re first getting to grips with such dramatic shifts in your idea of the future, aren’t really very reassuring at all, no matter the kind intention.

In fact, they made me feel like I was missing something or going crazy.

There was a dissonance in our conversation between what he was saying is coming and his kindness to me as a listener receiving such information.

How could he seem OK with 1.8C being a win when island nations disappear at 1.5C?

I think the reason is that the truth is so awful, telling it feels like you’re hurting people and no one wants to do that. There has also been a consensus in academia that telling the unadulterated truth is counter-productive to encouraging behaviour change, a point I strongly disagree with (more on that another time).

I am sitting with this discomfort right now as I type in case what I write hurts you - but remember, the future hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s why the truth hurts

After my conversation with Pierre I read a lot of academic papers but two of them stood out to me, which I will share with you here:

The Future of The Human Climate Niche

and

Climate Tipping Points - Too Risky To Bet Against

The first paper explains how human development has centred around an average Mean Annual Temperature niche of 13C as this is linked to crop yields, livestock reproduction, human populations and economic activity. There is a band around the planet within this range where most settlements have occurred and civilisation has played out.

“We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.”

Current data suggests that this niche will move northward as temperatures rise.

As the paper sets out:

As conditions will deteriorate in some regions, but improve in other parts (Fig. 4C and SI Appendix, Figs. S9 and S10), a logical way of characterizing the potential tension arising from projected climate change is to compute how the future population would in theory have to be redistributed geographically if we are to keep the same distribution relative to temperature (methods and detailed results in the SI Appendix, Material). Such a calculation suggests that for the RCP8.5 business-as-usual climate scenario, and accounting for expected demographic developments (the SSP3 scenario [15]), ∼3.5 billion people (roughly 30% of the projected global population; SI Appendix, Fig. S12) would have to move to other areas if the global population were to stay distributed relative to temperature the same way it has been for the past millennia (SI Appendix, Fig. S13).

And here’s the killer line:

Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT* >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.]

(*MAT is short for Mean Annual Temperature.)

This paper is saying that if we continue to pursue business as usual practices, by 2070 billions of people in the global south will either die or migrate north as their environment becomes uninhabitable.

The second paper responds to Prof. Pierre indirectly by addressing the issue of 1.7-1.8C not being without the potential for catastrophic consequences too:

Information summarized in the two most recent IPCC Special Reports (published in 2018 and in September this year)2,3 suggests that tipping points could be exceeded even between 1 and 2 °C of warming (see ‘Too close for comfort’).

And:

If current national pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are implemented — and that’s a big ‘if’ — they are likely to result in at least 3 °C of global warming. This is despite the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit warming to well below 2 °C. Some economists, assuming that climate tipping points are of very low probability (even if they would be catastrophic), have suggested that 3 °C warming is optimal from a cost–benefit perspective. However, if tipping points are looking more likely, then the ‘optimal policy’ recommendation of simple cost–benefit climate-economy models 4 aligns with those of the recent IPCC report 2. In other words, warming must be limited to 1.5 °C. This requires an emergency response.

It closes by saying that partial collapse of habitat is likely to now be unavoidable:

We argue that the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best. Hence we might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping — and hence the risk posed — could still be under our control to some extent.

The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action — not just words — must reflect this.

One of the authors behind both papers is Prof. Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter.

Tim is a world class earth systems scientist and one of those academics that Universities love and are proud of. He does incredibly important work and brings in the research funding to go with it. He is a student of James Lovelock and prolific in his writing and research, covering Gaia theory, climate science and straddling many interconnecting disciplines.

He doesn’t do social media of any kind he just does his job. Most of us don’t read academic papers but for him, this is his way of shouting from the rooftops albeit in a very polite, well spoken and well-meaning way to warn policymakers of what’s at stake.

The second paper also makes reference to a cost-benefit analysis by economists of allowing 3 degrees of warming in order to protect the economy.

An economy that supports the lifestyles of those in the Global north (including me and you) at a staggering cost to the planet. If everyone on Earth lived as we do we would need something in the range of another 4 planets to sustain us all.

So let’s put this information together.

The Emerging Picture

We are on course for 3-4C of warming.

Economists have said that this is the best economic outcome for business as usual to continue.

There are no signs of this slowing as governments the world over continue to subsidise oil and gas. In fact, we are burning more than ever and emitting more than ever:

As a consequence, a third of the world’s population is likely to have to either migrate or die.

The burners of the oil will remain in a relatively safe temperature niche, save for increasingly volatile weather events with greater instances of flood, drought and storms.

The habitable area of the planet will shrink, within your lifetime.

The non-linearity of potential tipping points also encourages a faster response - possibly giving us only a few years to address our course.

And with every day that passes the challenge gets harder as more and more gets invested in our business as usual trajectory and our carbon debt mounts, with compound interest. The level of the required year on year emissions reductions grows.

Incremental Sustainability Is Over

Incremental sustainability activity strapped onto business as usual is clearly no longer an option.

In fact, with every passing moment the options shrink, leaving only the more and more radical on the table.

And here’s my final worry for this very worrying post.

In my conversation with Pierre he says that we don’t have time for democracy to fix this, that we need leadership from government and business that simply isn’t there right now.

As things are shaping up, if governments, corporations and finance don’t take radical, bold action to decarbonise the economy (read: radically transform) , nothing short of revolutionary action will prevent the future of the human climate niche from shrinking.

That is another way of saying that our current mode of civilisation will cease to function. And in fact, the act of decarbonising the economy in the time available is nothing short of a revolutionary act in itself.

Hence, revolution or collapse.

But let’s be clear, we have every reason to believe that humanity will continue despite a 3 or 4 degree global average temperature increase but at the cost of billions of lives and the considerable loss of nature’s creativity, memory and intelligence as ecosystems collapse and cease to support the myriad species with them.

In all my reading and conversations of the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting in response to such news, looking for a line in the sand that I can make sense of on a personal level.

I’ve been looking for my own personal tipping point, and here it is:

If governments don’t release a 20 year plan by 2025 for a what a thriving fossil fuel free economy looks like and how to get there in full, it will be time to consider my options and find a safe and productive piece of the shrinking human climate niche to call my own in order to best care for my family, local community and bioregion.

Now before you call me a prepper, I’m not so far gone as to be fully signed up to Deep Adaptation as I think this paper shows the flaws in the argument well (collapse is not inevitable even though it is entirely possible).

Even writing this now, I still keep finding myself asking ‘have I gone mad?’ ‘Am I wrong?’ ‘Have I been radicalised?’

Doubt in this situation is clearly protective but to answer my own questions:

No. No. Yes.

Radicalised by science as I cannot see anything other than radical action making a dent.

Much of current sustainability activity at this point is no more than a placebo button - it makes us feel like we have agency but it is not enough. It is essential, it is necessary and it is how we will live in the next economy but it is not how we will get there.

Getting there means taking on existing power structures, addressing and fighting obscene injustice and putting an end to the fossil fuel economy. It means creating a vision for a post-carbon economy that is so bold and beautiful that we are prepared to weather the storms to get there.

It requires a revolution in our economic thinking, a revolution in our identity as a species and a revolution in what it means to live well in a shrinking climate niche.

Revolutions are messy and difficult. They create instability for a long time as new power dynamics establish themselves.

But messy or otherwise, or whether it’s partial or full collapse or even a global revolution - change, as Greta tells us, is most certainly coming whether we like it or not.

And it is coming fast.

Given the mounting scale of the decarbonisation process growing year on year and with it the mounting risk of tipping points and cascades that seal in 3-4 degrees, the road ahead forks in 2025: transformation or collapse, there is no going back.

So what do you believe is possible?

What is easier for you to believe in: the swift end of the fossil fuel economy or the shrinking of the human climate niche?

We are going to get one of them.

Which one do you choose?