We Just Got Our “Final Warning” on Climate Change — And It’s Terrifying
If You Don’t Think the Future of Human Civilization Is at Risk, Think Again
It was just yesterday that I wrote about whether or not we’re “doomed.” As if right on cue, today, the UN released its “final warning” on climate change. And if you think I’m a “doomer,” well, it turns out I’ve got nothing on…the world’s best scientists, who wrote much of this report. What does it say?
Global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas.
That might not sound like a big deal, but it is, because 1.5 degrees was of course the target that we hoped to limit warming to. Instead, it’s all but certain we’re going to cross it…in the next decade, probably much sooner. The message: this is our last chance.
Hence, the Secretary General of the UN’s been using increasingly apocalyptic language: “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast.” Guterres is desperately trying to get our civilization, our leaders, our nations, to do something.
Guterres called on governments to take drastic action to reduce emissions by investing in renewable energy and low-carbon technology. He said rich countries must try to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions “as close as possible to 2040”, rather than waiting for the 2050 deadline most have signed up to.
Why is he pleading? Let’s delve into what the report really say, beneath the headlines, which is even scarier than they are. See that red line in the pic above? It’s not temperature. Oh, no — we should be so lucky. It’s carbon emissions, and under current policies, they never come down, which means…the temperature goes on rising. How far? To three degrees, by 2100, but since this much warming arrived way faster, with far worse consequences than expected, that’ll probably happen much sooner, too. The picture, in other words is…well, let’s keep going. The main warning, I’d say, is this: “without a strengthening of policies, global warming of 3.2C is projected by 2100.”
How bad is that? Really, really bad.
Why? Because, well, think in polycrisis terms — all these facets of crisis interact, and so risks go on exceeding even our worse estimates. Remember — the mega-scale impacts of climate change, not so long ago, weren’t supposed to arrive until the 2050s. And yet we’ve seen one after the other over the last few years. The beginning of the 2020s. That’s three decades early. What kinds of mega-scale impacts? Mega-floods, mega-fires. Pandemics. Rivers drying up. Mass extinction accelerating. It’s hard to even keep count. And all those risks interact. Each produces unforeseen consequences, amplifying the others. This is a kind of cascade — maybe better called avalanche — effect.
You might not know it, but you have an example of that — risk cascading in unforeseen ways, one amplifying another — right in front of your eyes. Right in front of economists’ puzzled eyes, too. See banks beginning to fail? Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, and so forth? Why is that happening? Well, there’s not a hugely good reason — which is why conspiracy theories abound — until you really look at the economy from a civilizational point of view. What’s been happening from that perspective? Inflation, a sudden tidal wave of it. Not so long ago, orthodox economists thought Covid was the cause — but Covid’s receded as a thing that locks societies down, and yet there inflation is, spiraling away. So what’s causing it? As I’ve explained recently, climate change is. Crops are failing and rivers drying up. Our civilization’s hitting its limits, and so, of course, prices are rising, and rising fast. As a result, central banks hammered home interest rate rises — which went on to cripple banks. This bank crisis? It’s the first one that’s caused by climate change — even if it’ll take us a while to really grasp that.
But it won’t be the last. In this way, risks interact. If I’d told you, a little while ago, that interest rate rises were a bad idea, because inflation was caused by climate change, not people having too much money (LOL) due to Covid aid, you probably wouldn’t have believed me. If I’d told you that was going to amplify risk in the economy, and make it harder to invest, by causing banks to fail, you’d have wondered: what is this guy on? But that is what I said, and it’s exactly what happened. The point isn’t to pat me on the back, it’s to understand how interwoven, complex, and imbalanced all this risk is — it leaves us in a place of profound fragility. We’re discovering, the hard way, all over again, how fragile our banking system is — just read the headline below the “UN issues apocalyptic report” one.
But that’s true for all our systems now. Fragility is growing, to the point that it’s overwhelming any semblance of stability. Take the simple example of food. How much are a dozen eggs these days? If you can even get them? Basic goods are beginning to go into regular shortage, like a heartbeat hitting arrhythmia. In Britain, LOL, vegetables are rationed, because it was foolish enough to pile Brexit — sovereign risk — atop climate risk. Just the other day, the first report of its kind concluded that demand for water is going to exceed supply by 40% in the next decade. That’s not because you and I are suddenly building Olympic sized swimming pools. It’s because we’re running out of water.
Our systems are growing increasingly fragile, because they are not able to manage risks of this kind — risk cascades, risk explosions. You can see it in every single system around us now. Our agricultural systems can’t provide enough foodevenly and at stable levels, hence prices rising. Our banking system is beginning to go down — maybe this time, they’ll be able to limit the contagion, by bailing out this kind of creditor, or that kind, but what about next time? Water, energy, healthcare, you name it. Our systems cannot cope with these risk cascades and explosions.
That’s for a very good reason. They weren’t built to. They were built, all of them, with a pretty simple assumption: the planet would give, and keep on giving, and taking it all was OK. Our Industrial Age systems were all built with the assumptions of stability, of plenitude, and of impunity. We could take as we much we wanted — water, food, air, animals. Whatever harm we did wasn’t going to be much, certainly not enough to kill the golden goose. That was because plenitude was nature’s gift to us. All of this was weirdly colonial when you think about it — the mindset of a colonizer moving into a new domain or territory, that it regarded as virgin, while indigenous people had in fact managed and used it carefully for centuries, but I digress. The point is that our systems are failing.
Already failing, I should say. You know that, because you’re living it. How hard is it to make ends meet these days? Just to put food on the table? Aren’t we all, most of us, just in survival mode, gritting our teeth and burying our emotions, just to get through another bleak day? And yet this is what happens at…
One degree.
You see, most people get that our systems are failing. But they don’t get the really crucial lesson yet. Our systems are failing at just one degree. So what happens at…one and a half? Two? Two and a half? Three?
Let’s go back to the UN report. “Every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards.” In what way? Why should we be shuddering? Because, well…
With every additional increment of global warming, changes in extremes continue to become larger.
The bolding’s mine. Did you get what that means, though? It’s said as plainly as it can be said, really. With every increment — the consequences get disproportionately worse.
Consequences like what? Here’s a particularly terrifying one. At three degrees — which is really more like four plus, as tipping points are hit? Crop and fisheries yields basically halve. Now imagine what happens to food prices. Countries. Democracy. Life.
That’s one illustration of a larger theme.
In the near term, every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards (medium to high confidence, depending on region and hazard), increasing multiple risks to ecosystems and humans (very high confidence).
Hazards and associated risks expected in the near-term include an increase in heat-related human mortality and morbidity (high confidence), food-borne, water-borne, and vector-borne diseases (high confidence), and mental health challenges (very high confidence), flooding in coastal and other low-lying cities and regions (high confidence), biodiversity loss in land, freshwater and ocean ecosystems (medium to very high confidence, depending on ecosystem), and a decrease in food production in some regions (high confidence).
Cryosphere-related changes in floods, landslides, and water availability have the potential to lead to severe consequences for people, infrastructure and the economy in most mountain regions (high confidence). The projected increase in frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation (high confidence) will increase rain-generated local flooding (medium confidence).
That’s…everything. Food, water, air, diseases, mortality, the water cycle, all of it. Let’s keep going so you really understand how bad this is. What does it really mean? It means that we are facing a nonlinear situation of cascading risk.
Risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change will escalate with every increment of global warming (very high confidence). They are higher for global warming of 1.5°C than at present, and even higher at 2°C.
With further warming, climate change risks will become increasingly complex and more difficult to manage.Multiple climatic and non-climatic risk drivers will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions.
Climate-driven food insecurity and supply instability, for example, are projected to increase with increasing global warming, interacting with non-climatic risk drivers such as competition for land between urban expansion and food production, pandemics and conflict.
LOL. This report is making the Last of Us seem pretty rosy. We are talking about everything as we know it, more or less, going down, breaking, shattering, failing. The report is trying to make the point — and God bless these scientists, but they need a whole team of writers to really make this crystal clear to the world — that we’re just at one degree. And we’re on track for three degrees. Between now and then lies a whole universe of outcomes that get disproportionately worse, and they include everything from disease to water to food to inequality to conflict. We are talking now about…
Civilizational risk.
That is what this report really is. Some documents are just bureaucratic tomes, destined for history’s dustbin. But others? They’re watersheds. Hammurabi’s Code. The Rosetta Stone. The Magna Carta. This report is one of those.
It’s a “synthesis report,” in the IPCC’s jargon, which means it doesn’t present new data, but does synthesize what we know so far. And its synthesis is a) damning b) utterly horrifying and c) more than a little heart-stopping. This is the first time that the IPCC has really put all this together, in such stark, simple terms, and I encourage you all to read the report, even if you have to get familiar with its strange language to really get into it. This is one of our civilization’s first proper documents of civilizational risk.
If we make it — and that’s a big if — future generations will study this report. Pore over it. In the distant future, they’ll look at the way we look at Hammurabi’s code. This is a civilization acknowledging a thing called civilizational risk for the first time. What does that mean? They were at one degree, and began to realize that the risks were far, far greater, more severe, faster, harder hitting, than they’d assumed. And they began to understand that on the course they were on — three degrees — those risks would become disproportionately, nonlinearly worse and worse. But those risks subsumed everything, from their water to food air to health and disease to their economy. They confronted risk at a civilizational scale for the first time.
Or at least they were asked to. Because I’m putting it optimistically. The IPCC tries to be optimistic in the latter parts of the report, which basically say, hey, guys, we still have a decade to try and do something about all this. LOL — that’s a sympathetic laugh, not a mocking one. It’s a sad laugh. Because you know and I know that in the next decade? We’re going to be lucky if we avoid another world war, if fascists don’t seize the American Presidency, if the EU stays afloat, if the banking system doesn’t go down, if we can still all afford food and so plenty of us don’t turn to authoritarians, who blame the Bad Times on scapegoats. We’ll be lucky just to…not completely fall apart as polities and societies.
But to actually make the kind of progress we need to have a hope of staving off just the kinds of dire impacts that are in store for us? We’d need to cooperate and take collective action on a scale never seen in human history. Never even envisaged, really. Like what? Well, the IPCC offers a helpful list of stuff we have to do — skip this if you want, as I’ll summarise it below.
Net zero CO2 energy systems entail: a substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use, minimal use of unabated fossil fuels, and use of carbon capture and storage in the remaining fossil fuel systems; electricity systems that emit no net CO2; widespread electrification; alternative energy carriers in applications less amenable to electrification; energy conservation and efficiency; and greater integration across the energy system (high confidence).
Large contributions to emissions reductions with costs less than USD 20 tCO2-eq-1 come from solar and wind energy, energy efficiency improvements, and methane emissions reductions (coal mining, oil and gas, waste) (medium confidence).
There are feasible adaptation options that support infrastructure resilience, reliable power systems and efficient water use for existing and new energy generation systems (very high confidence). Energy generation diversification (e.g., via wind, solar, small scale hydropower) and demand side management (e.g., storage and energy efficiency improvements) can increase energy reliability and reduce vulnerabilities to climate change (high confidence). Climate responsive energy markets, updated design standards on energy assets according to current and projected climate change, smart-grid technologies, robust transmission systems and improved capacity to respond to supply deficits have high feasibility in the medium- to long-term, with mitigation co-benefits (very high confidence).
So we have one decade to a) take on Big Oil, b) reform our financial systems, c) transform our manufacturing, d) transform agriculture, e) not to mention shipping and aviation, f) and power and water, and all that’s just as a beginning. Forgive me, but I think the odds of that are low to nonexistent.
Biden’s agenda for America is astonishing — even Europe’s racing to copy it. but Americans? LOL, they don’t give him the faintest shred of credit for it. He’s the world’s leader right now in all this, and he has earned zero political capital from it. What does that tell you? Well, that we’re nowhere near ready to make such changes. As ever, in human history, first apocalypse, then transformation, maybe, from whatever ashes are left. That’s the endless story of human folly, from World War to empire to feudalism and if you ask me, we seem to be be replaying, only this time, on an existential scale.
Does that mean — hold on, let me imitate a New York Times columnist caricaturing me — “we’re doomed!!” My friends. Take a moment to think in sober and serious terms about the plight we’re in. One degree, and our systems are failing. All of them. From food to banking. What few leaders there are trying to point the way forward — from Biden to Guterres — well, nobody much likes them, respects them, admires them, gives them the attention their words and actions deserve.
Mostly, these days, people are glued to Netflix or Instagram, in survival mode, trying to shut their brains off, from the trauma that’s sure to come tomorrow. Who’s going to get me, hurt me, exploit me, today? And so democracy goes on declining. I’d feel differently, perhaps, if democracy were proving itself capable of meeting this moment — but it’s not. People aren’t up in arms about any of this. Mostly? They could care less. Weird fascist manfluencers have bigger followings than anyone who wants to save the planet, civilization, or democracy. That’s not a good sign.
I’m not saying we’re doomed. I’m just saying that the greatest crisis in human history, all 300,000 years of it, is now upon us, and well, here we are, pretending that hating each other, worshipping some billionaire, celebrity, AI, creepy authoritarian, or desperately ignoring the fear, pain, and hurt, whatever way we can, is going to solve it. Nope, totally…not doomed. Surely “doom” isn’t when you put your PIN code in the ATM and nothing comes out. Or when you turn the tap and drip, drip. Or when the price of food is 100% of your healthy middle-class salary. When billionaires build bunkers and operate their weird fascist comms platforms from them, because, why not add to the chaos? Is it doom when human longevity and mortality take a hit because, well, now nothing works, and it’s every person for themselves, on a dying planet? When crop yields are off by 50%? That’s not doom, is it?
What did they used to say, even as it was unfolding all around them? It can’t happen here.
Umair
March 2023