Just how bad could climate change get?
Worrying climate change news is now so continuous it has become background noise. Much like the war in Ukraine, the sheer weight and frequency of bad news means that psychologically we are left with little choice but to either deny it, or sideline it from our attention, to push it out of awareness just so that we can get through the day without feeling depressed.
If you’re susceptible to climate anxiety, or if you’ve decided that pushing it out of awareness is simply the best move for you in terms of mental health, then I advise you to stop reading. Seriously - what follows is no picnic.
Reports from reputable scientific bodies like the IPCC - dire and worsening as they are - still sound like something we can cope with. They talk about parts of the earth becoming uninhabitable, about increasing risks of extreme weather events and sea-level rises. They talk about food shortages, mass migration and a rise in tropical diseases in areas where previously it was too cold. All of which sounds terrible, but manageable. It gives the impression that we’re in for a bumpy ride, but that broadly speaking humanity will be “okay”.
But if you read a little deeper, and you pick beyond the carefully couched language, and “the culture of climate science to ‘err on the side of least drama’; to not to be alarmists”, it becomes clear these outcomes are not just a possibility, they’re all but certain. Moreover, the scenarios put forward by bodies like the IPCC are merely what we know. Beyond that there are large uncertainties about dangerous surprises.
Rarely discussed by the IPCC or mainstream news outlets are the complexity of the feedback loops, the multiple interlocking tipping points, several of which have already been breached, the wide margins of uncertainty involved in what happens when all of this unfolds simultaneously, and the worst case scenarios which that uncertainty permits.
In a paper published just over a year ago by Luke Kemp et al., some of these worst-case scenarios are considered. They discuss the release of methane, a gas with more than 20 times the warming effect of CO2, from the Arctic permafrost as it melts 70 years earlier than predicted. They discuss the ice sheet collapse in Greenland, where a temperature of over 23° was recorded in 2021, melting 444 billion tonnes of ice. And they discuss intense fires and droughts in the Amazon, which now emits more CO2 than it absorbs, where 180 pink river dolphins have died from overheating. And they explain how these tipping points are all mutually reinforcing - breaching one makes breaching the next more likely, until a domino effect becomes inevitable.
They also discuss “poorly understood cloud feedbacks” which might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming:
“Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative ‘unknown unknowns’ that are still being discovered. For instance, recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming.”
Additional. That is to say, on top of warming from other causes. 8°C, just so we’re clear, means the near-extinction of the human race.
Saying that the world is going to end used to be a pastime reserved for people with long hair and a crazed look in their eyes holding signs outside supermarkets. Now you can write it in scientific journals.
It’s tempting to end by presenting the other side of the coin. The version of events where we pull our finger out and unite the earth and burst through the evolutionary bottleneck into a sustainable, united planetary civilization. This future is still possible, but to bring it up here is not to give the gravity of the situation the space and respect it deserves.
But this much is certain - we are not powerless. Which of these futures comes to pass still depends on us, on the choices we make right now. Getting the train instead of flying, cutting down on meat or choosing to protect and restore the world’s most precious and biodiverse ecosystems makes a difference, not least because of the influence it has on the people around you.
What you can do, do, but be honest about your limitations. Virtue signaling doesn't help anyone, but neither does your guilt.
Even in the final analysis: if the world were to end tomorrow, plant a tree.
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