Is humanity on a path to collapse in a 3-degree hotter world? That's the question Breakthrough's recent report, Collision Course, sets out to answer. This is the report overview.
There is a chasm in outlook between the global climate policy-making elite with their focus on distant goals and slow, non-disruptive change, and activists and key researchers who see the world hurtling towards climate breakdown and social collapse. What light does recent evidence shine on these dissonant views?
In practical terms, the world has reached 1.5°C of warming and the pace of warming is increasing. An accelerated rate of warming is likely to continue to mid-century given the failure so far to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Many impacts are occurring faster than forecast, and beyond model projections, including the form, severity and frequency of extreme events such as unprecedented heatwaves and floods.
There is now clear evidence that a number of crucial large-system tipping-point thresholds have been breached or are close to doing so, including polar ice sheets and land-based carbon stores including forests and permafrost, which may further increase the rate of warming. Sustainable planetary boundaries have already been exceeded.
The physical risks may be abrupt and difficult to predict, and they may also cascade in a domino fashion which is 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.
Human emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane have not yet peaked; hence in absolute terms, decarbonisation has not 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.
The continuing growth in fossil fuel production and emissions increases the likelihood of warming exceeding 3°C, and perhaps substantially because current climate models do not adequately account for the full range of reinforcing feedbacks.
In a 3°C hotter world, new extremes will occur — of rainfall and unlivable 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 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 done safely.
Global climate-policymaking is embedded in a culture of sustained failure, with an emphasis on incremental, market-driven processes that are structurally incapable of assessing unquantifiable risks, or mitigating them. There is no longer any realistic chance of an orderly transition and large-scale economic disruption, which markets handle poorly, is now inevitable.
As with other global and existential risks such as war 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 state 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.
