We Just Got Our “Final Warning” on Climate Change — And It’s Terrifying
image: AR6 Synthesis Report 2023
If You Don’t Think the Future of Human Civilization Is at Risk, Think Again
by umair haque
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?
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.
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 food evenly 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?