The UN now accepts that global warming is going to exceed 1.5°C but it’s unlikely that this will change anything governments or corporations do. It’s now too late to avoid catastrophic global warming. The task now is to limit further damage and prepare honestly for what follows.
I’m sure that most readers will be aware that the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has recently reported that it’s now too late to keep global warming under 1.5°C. The Limiting Overshoot report has been widely covered in the mainstream media, so I don’t intend to cover its details here. I will, however, observe that while UN confirmation of the overshoot that has been obvious for a while is welcome, the UN’s recommendations are basically more of the same old strategies that have been failing for so long, plus a much stronger dependence on undeveloped, unproven, risky carbon dioxide removal.
Rather I want to ask: is it too late?
For children, this year is the best weather of their lifetimes
The opening sentence of Do we still have time? is “‘We still have time’ has been superseded by ‘How much worse can it get’”. US-based Robert Hunziker briefly outlines the causes and rapidly escalating effects of climate change and the global failure of governments and industries to take the matter seriously – P&I readers are familiar with that sorry story. However, Hunziker makes some very interesting points.
First, Hunziker emphasises that although things look bad now, they are only going to get worse. Quoting Ben Horton, a sea-level change scientist, “There’s this phrase that right now ‘we are experiencing the worst weather of our lifetimes’. But for our children, this year is the best weather of their lifetimes because adapting to the climate of 2026 is pointless. Adaptation assumes we’ll see a stable climate. The climate of 2027 and 2028 and 2029 and 2030 is going to be worse. Unless we address this problem, it will only get worse to a point when adaptation is futile… we cannot adapt our way out of this”.
Second, humans live within a very small planetary boundary and when we exceed and stay beyond that boundary, civilisations won’t exist: “We’re overshooting Earth’s capabilities which requires a change in socio-economic behaviour from focus on infinite growth to husbanding finite resources”.
Third, with the relatively incontestable conclusion that “special interest money is dictating policy to the benefit of a few people”, Hunziker introduced me to Citizens United. It sounds like a worthy community mobilisation but it’s actually a 2010 US Supreme Court decision that has allowed unlimited and hidden corporate funding of US politics – dark money.
Yes! … er, sorry, no
David Suzuki (now 90) has stressed over many years that it is not too late to stop climate change. He has changed his mind. A year ago he observed that at the end of the first international conference on the atmosphere in 1988 the 300 participants said, “global warming represented a threat to humanity, second only to global nuclear war. If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference, we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Now, it is too late. I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. We’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions”.
Societal collapse is inevitable
In 2018, Jem Bendell published an extremely provocative and influential article called Deep Adaptation in which, following a review of the then most recent scientific evidence on climate change, he concluded that global warming and its effects were more advanced and progressing more rapidly than mainstream climatologists and governments claimed and that societal collapse was inevitable and may even have started.
The evidence Bendell presented was subjected to strident criticism (an interesting story in itself), largely focusing on allegations that he had cherry-picked and/or misinterpreted the evidence and ignored the less catastrophic conclusions of the world’s most knowledgeable climate scientists (which Bendell never claimed to be).
Bendell has recently reviewed the claims he made eight years ago against the current evidence and concludes that his claims have been validated. His point, he says, is not to crow, “See, I was right,” but rather to encourage climate scientists to learn from past mistakes and avoid making them again now the situation is even more dire. Bendell identifies four past errors and I particularly like his reference to scientists “giving homage to the secular God of positivity”, even when there is nothing positive in their research findings.
No chance that I’ll be seduced by positivity
My view is that in theory, yes, we do still have time to keep global warming under 2°C and at least limit the consequences. However, the simple fact is that we won’t. We’ll continue to squander the opportunities because short-term profits and power always trump human welfare and survival.
I’m completely convinced that life 50 years from now (both individuals’ daily existence and international relations or geopolitics) will look completely different from today. We, humanity, will either (i) have at some point in, say, the next 20 years taken the action necessary to avoid complete social and environmental collapse, in which case all societies and the social relations within them will be completely different, or (ii) (which I believe to be more likely) we won’t have done what’s necessary and global warming will have exceeded 2°C, many ecosystems will have been destroyed, loss of biodiversity will have accelerated, food and water shortages will be widespread … the litany of disasters is endless. In brief, catastrophic social and environmental collapse will be well advanced and it will be too late to do more than mount rearguard mitigation and palliative adaptation. Worse still, (iii) deteriorating conditions will have precipitated a nuclear war and any humans who are still alive will be experiencing a nuclear winter.
So we all just give up?
No. None of this is to suggest that Hunziker, Suzuki, Bendell or I think that there is nothing that should be done now to mitigate and adapt and that we should all just give up and enjoy life while we hurtle towards the precipice, Thelma and Louise fashion.
Rather, I think that we are all arguing for more honesty and transparency about the situation, its causes and consequences, not just by the UN but more importantly by politicians and corporate leaders, many of whom, for selfish reasons, are currently avoiding and obfuscating the issues. Only then can we build public demands for real action to limit global warming and help communities prepare for and be able to manage as well as possible the inevitable changes and disasters that will befall everyone.
The importance of the UN now accepting the evidence that the Earth will soon exceed global warming of 1.5°C is not that the planet has crossed an Earth System threshold that has been set by the laws of physics and that humanity and many other species are now doomed. Its importance is that it clearly spells the complete 30-year failure of governments and corporations to halt global warming – a failure based not on insurmountable natural barriers (such as a failure to stop a meteor crashing into the Earth) but on the inability and/or lack of desire of a small subset of the world’s population to change the trajectory of capitalism. These decision-makers haven’t even been able to moderate the more egregious outrages of capitalism such as the still increasing fossil fuel emissions, land clearing, pillaging of the world’s natural resources and staggering poverty, let alone consider the possibility that capitalism may not have the tools necessary for tackling the problems facing humanity.
Therein lies the real importance of the UN’s recent report: the exposure of individual greed, selfishness and incompetence and of national and global governance systems that are not fit for purpose.
But the immediate priority, as it has been for 30 years, is a rapid reduction of the consumption of fossil fuels. Nothing else is going to limit global warming. And frankly, that isn’t going to happen.
So, yes, it’s too late.
Peter Sainsbury is a retired public health worker with a long interest in social policy, particularly social justice, and now focusing on climate change and environmental sustainability. He is extremely pessimistic about the world avoiding catastrophic global warming.