There is a chasm in outlook between the global climate policy-making elite with their focus on distant goals, market solutions and non-disruptive change, and activists and key researchers who see the world hurtling towards climate breakdown and social collapse.
A prime example was the 29th global gathering of 50,000 climate policymakers and lobbyists at the the United Nations’ COP conference, held this year in the petrostate of Azerbaijan, which failed much as its predecessors have done. It was not a surprising outcome. Every participating nation has a veto over every decision, which a bloc led by Saudi Arabia used to great effect. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev told the conference that oil and gas are a “gift of God“. Climate activists were dismayed at the outcome.
The two main COP29 “successes” were a flawed carbon trading deal which means the system may essentially give countries and companies permissions to keep polluting, and a 2035 climate finance deal that was just 30% of the amount estimated by the Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance as necessary for the most vulnerable states.
And key experts including former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson in a damning statement said that COP climate talks are “no longer fit for purpose” and need an urgent overhaul.
Whilst governments and policy wonks at the COP ritually reiterated their mantra about “keeping warming below 1.5°C”, several agencies are reporting it is almost certain that 2024 will be hotter than 1.5°C and surpass 2023, even though the El Niño had faded earlier in the year.
In practical terms, the world has reached 1.5°C and the pace of warming is increasing, an acceleration likely to be sustained to mid-century given the failure so far to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and the remote prospect of a rapid decline.
Many impacts are occurring faster than forecast, and beyond model projections, including the form, severity and/or frequency of extreme events such as unprecedented heatwaves and floods. “This is happening at a much faster rate than ever documented in the past… If anything, we are much more likely to underestimate the impact of those changes on human society than to overestimate them,” says Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy.
Yet 1.5°C is not a safe nor morally reasonable goal. There is now clear evidence that at 1.5°C a number of crucial large-system tipping-point thresholds have been breached or are close to doing so, including polar ice sheets such as on Greenland and West Antarctica, and land-based carbon stores including forests and permafrost, says Potsdam Institute Director Johan Rockström. These changes may further increase the rate of warming. Many of the dynamics are not incorporated into the climate models on which many policymakers base their advocacy.
The physical changes may be abrupt and the risks difficult to predict, and they may also cascade in a domino fashion which is also difficult to incorporate into climate models. So methods of understanding climate risks should pay particular attention to the plausible high-end possibilities, because these worst-case scenarios will result in the greatest damage.
But the gatherings of policymakers have never given attention to the plausible high-end scenarios, because to do so would expose the dissonance at the heart of their advocacy.
Human emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane have not yet peaked; hence in absolute terms, decarbonisation has not yet occurred. Contrary to global policymakers’ stated collective intent, petrostates and big oil have signalled their intention to continue to expand production in the coming decades, which would ensure that warming will go far beyond the 2°C threshold.
So now we face the likelihood of warming exceeding 3°C, and perhaps substantially. This scenario is described in a new report, “Collision Course: 3-degrees of warming and humanity’s future”, from the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration.
In a 3°C hotter world, new extremes will occur — of rainfall and heat, flooding and drought — beyond past human experience. And a committed sea-level rise of tens of metres will be in the process of inundating coastal cities and deltas. Large parts of the tropics will suffer “near-unlivable” extreme heat conditions, and the dry subtropics will dry out and may desertify.
Together these events will have catastrophic impacts on food and water security, societal stability, and global governance. There is no evidence that, at this level of warming, current human societies can be supported, and there is a significant risk that states and global economic and political networks will crash.
Reducing emissions, even very fast, is not enough to stop the catastrophic systemic changes that are under way. Drawing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels back to safe, near pre-industrial levels is a necessary but slow process; and in the meantime actively cooling the planet must be on the agenda if it can be proven safe.
Global climate-policymaking is embedded in a culture of sustained failure, with an emphasis on slow, market-driven processes such as carbon trading. But the extent of climate damage is radically uncertain — that is, basically unquantifiable in money terms — so that cost–benefit analysis, which is a basic tool of private-sector risk management, ceases to work. The risk cannot be priced and markets are unable to fully assess or mitigate them. Just as they can’t for other large-scale and unquantifiable risks, such as war, pandemics and the threat posed by AI.
There is no longer any realistic chance of an orderly transition; and large-scale economic disruption which markets handle poorly is now inevitable. The risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft assesses that “there is ‘no longer any realistic chance’ for an orderly transition for global financial markets because political leaders will be forced to rely on ‘handbrake’ policy interventions to cut emissions”.
As with other global and existential risks such as weapons of mass destruction and pandemics, transformative political leadership is now the key element in preventing societal collapse, but this runs contrary to the prevailing neo-liberal ideology that markets and the financial system are most efficient with little government regulation.
The urgent need is to strengthen and rebuild government institutions in order to redirect production to climate-relevant, socially-necessary goals: to plan and manage the transition and adjustment and to provide a path out of the climate and ecological crises via an emergency mobilisation that consciously makes returning to a safe climate the first priority of economics and politics.
