What do I really think is going to happen?

A friend recently asked what I really thought is going to happen to the world as a consequence of climate change. It was a good challenge because it forced me to put my thoughts in order and clarify loose ends, so here we are.

What follows is based on thirty years of observing, as an interested lay person, climate science and the political debate around it. Key inputs are mostly listed on my climate change page. (Hansen’s ‘pipeline’ paper (introduced here, full pdf here) is the latest addition. It’s a real wake-up call: 10 degrees baked in! And Hansen has a long history of being right.)

I’ve also had fifty years of reading relevant thought experiments, mostly presented as science fiction. Some of the best recent attempts are reviewed here on Green Path (list). Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is the most important of them, since it is one of the few plausible road-maps for a way out of the mess we have created (my meta-review is here).

Radical change is inevitable

I don’t think anyone in power has any real conception of the extent of the changes which are inevitably coming our way, regardless of what we do or how well we manage them. They are likely to make WW2 look quaintly decorous, and almost no-one now alive experienced WW2 or has experienced anything so serious. Local conflicts have been, well, local; and none of them have been fought on the lands of the rich and powerful.

We’re now looking at mass migrations, i.e., refugees, in the hundreds of millions; excess deaths (a term COVID has made familiar) in the tens or hundreds of millions; and costs to the economies of every country greater than the costs of any war they have ever fought (the Stern Review flagged them in 2006. No-one took any notice).

If we’re not urgently proactive, all the changes will be for the worse in both short and long terms. If we do act fast enough, only most of them will be for the worse in the short term and some may be for the better in the long term.

Confounding factors

Any of several non-climate events may derail any of the predictions below. For instance:

• The global economy is a Ponzi scheme, and may collapse.
• Supervolcano, major earthquake or meteorite strike.
• The pesticide-driven insect apocalypse leading to a food production collapse.
• Another pandemic.
• The Singularity.

More positively:

• The Population Bomb will not go off. The UN expects that the world population will peak at around 10.4 billion people in the mid-2080s, while a study commissioned by the Club of Rome projects that the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline.
• Nuclear annihilation now seems unlikely even in the event of political insanity such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel, since the major powers would simply not join in.
• Genetic engineering could have positive or negative consequences, or both.
• Antigravity or an equally radical technology could make solving the climate crisis much easier.

Visions of possible futures

Short term – next five years

Things will get worse, whatever we do, because turning around current trends will take longer than that.

(1) Climate: Extreme weather events are ramping up faster than expected. The good side of that is the motivation they generate; the bad side, apart from the suffering, is that money which should have gone on avoidance and mitigation will have to go into recovery.

(2) Tech: We have all the technologies to achieve the change we need. Our need is for political and social action.

(3) Politics: We are in the era of the politics of desperation. So many stresses have built up in countries all round the world that communities are fractured and polarised, and are making some very poor choices.

Medium term – until 2040

This is the critical time frame: if we do well, the medium-long term can be sustainable; but if we don’t, we will be locked into a cycle of disasters and recovery efforts which leaves no resources for making longer-term changes.

Our best guide to the likely impacts of climate change comes from the IPCC and the best source for most of us is their Summary for Policymakers, a 40-page document with a minimum of technical language. We need to bear in mind, however, that the IPCC’s projections, for structural and political reasons, have always been too cautious, too optimistic. The world has followed the worst-case trajectories of one IPCC report after another and there is no reason to assume that their most recent projections will be any different.

Also in this timeframe, we will either reduce our emissions (almost) to zero or exceed our carbon budget. My chart, from Three Years to Safeguard Our Climate (Figueras et al, 2017), is even more worrying now than when it was published, since our emissions haven’t yet begun to decline.

Wicked problems

The next 15 – 20 years are going to be very difficult as the world tries to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy while dealing with an endless stream of disruptive weather events and the resultant political and social upheavals: famine, refugee crises and more.

But another change we need to make at the same time may be even more difficult: transitioning from a growth economy to a sustainable economy without catastrophically collapsing the Ponzi scheme. And we won’t be able to achieve that without radically redistributing the obscene wealth of the mega-rich. Only with the taxes they should have paid, and now must pay, will governments be able to fund the energy transition and disaster mitigation we so desperately need.

Medium-long term, 20 – 60 years, 2040-2100

The best sustainable world we can reasonably hope for …

(1) Environment

• Global warming peaking at 2 – 3 C if we’re lucky (this will probably require some geo-engineering; emissions reductions are unlikely to be enough).
• Global extinctions – possibly 25% lost by 2100. Coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, are doomed.

(2) Society

• Mass migrations handled compassionately. The ageing global north needs young workers, so this should be a win-win scenario.
• Once the transition is winding down, we may, if we’re lucky, have a world in which population stabilises at 4 – 6 billion, most of whom have a standard of living (and environmental footprint) roughly comparable to 1950s America or Europe. We have been in overshoot (exceeding Earth’s carrying capacity) since about 1970 and this would bring us back into equilibrium.

…and the worst we’re likely to create.

(1) Environment

• Global warming hitting 4 C by mid century.
• Tipping points (collapse of ice sheets or ocean circulation; melting of the tundra) making recovery impossible.
• Insect armageddon leading to a broader ecosystem collapse.

(2) Society

• Climate refugees blocked at borders by richer countries
• Mass starvation
• Even if we achieve stability (which is a kind of minimal sustainability), we may create the world of The Peripheral or The Water Knife, i.e., mega-rich oligarchs and starving masses.

Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac presented their own, extremely well informed, best and worst scenarios for 2050 in The Guardian a couple of years ago: ‘Air is cleaner than before the Industrial Revolution’: a best case scenario for the climate in 2050, and ‘The only uncertainty is how long we’ll last’: a worst case scenario for the climate in 2050.

Which of these futures will we create?

We won’t know until 2040, by which time one or the other will be locked in.

Our recent history suggests, sadly, that the dystopian vision is more likely.

Against that, however, we must set the fact that the ever-increasing urgency of the situation will make the need apparent to all of us, and we still have some time in which to act.

Also, and perhaps as importantly, the current generation of world leaders are the last to have reached maturity in ignorance of climate change, and (because they will be dead before the worst arrives) the last whom climate change will not directly affect to any great extent. Their successors, who are already beginning to take over, grew up knowing about climate change and have a very personal interest in ensuring that the world of 2050 is as liveable as possible.

Asked to choose one future or the other as the most likely, I choose hope.

That choice, ‘optimism of the will’ though it may be, is the only practically and morally defensible position.

Further reading

Older articles here on Green Path address various aspects of the climate crisis in more detail:

• Beyond Climate Grief is about our self-care in the face of the challenges we face.
• How can I decarbonise my life? and Eating for the Planet suggest practical steps we can take as individuals.
• Needed: radical solutions and Ethical investing look at what we might do with our votes and our money.

But there are many bigger and better articles and books out there for anyone seeking more detail on specific subjects. All I can do is mention them, as I have in this post, and encourage my readers to explore them.