While this article was published in the Business Post in early August, it was already patently clear that 2023 was going to be the hottest year in recorded history, and so it has transpired. I set out the risks as plainly as I could, framed around a warning from 15 years ago by one of the most brilliant scientists of the last century as to exactly what lay ahead.
IT WAS ONLY A matter of time before a year like 2023 came along. I just never imagined it would be so soon.
Despite tracking the unfolding climate emergency closely for many years, I still clung to the notion that we would be into the 2030s before the signs of widespread climate breakdown became impossible to ignore. I was wrong, dead wrong. The future we have long feared is here, now.
In 2008, the brilliant scientist and inventor James Lovelock shocked an interviewer with this parting advice on the climate crisis: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan”.
That was 15 years ago, and that quote has played on my mind ever since. Apart from inventing the instrument that detected ozone depletion and so helped avert an earlier global calamity, Lovelock famously developed the Gaia hypothesis.
This is the concept that all elements on Earth are part of a complex self-regulating super-organism that holds in equilibrium the subtle mix of conditions conducive to supporting life. Climate science has since largely validated this once-exotic hypothesis.
Lovelock was more cynical than your average scientist. He was convinced that the ultimate obstacle to our survival is intractable human stupidity. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead’, but they don’t want to change anything”.
Sound familiar?
Lovelock’s grim projections for the 2020s are now playing out in real time. Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, it is truly remarkable how few people have any idea just how dangerous the situation now facing humanity truly is.
Another visionary, Professor James Hansen, a former director of Nasa and the scientist who alerted the US Congress to the growing dangers of global warming in 1988, warned in recent days that the world is now shifting into a superheated climatic state unlike anything in at least a million years.
We are, Hansen added, “damned fools” for ignoring decades of repeated warnings that this crisis, left unchecked, would destroy human civilisation and much of the natural world.
Research published last month indicates that the vast ocean current known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) could collapse as soon as 2025, but most likely by mid-century, with catastrophic consequences for billions of people worldwide. Such a shutdown would likely drastically alter the climate of Ireland, reducing average temperatures by several degrees and wiping out our agricultural systems.
“We have to stop making excuses and do whatever is necessary, no matter how difficult, to preserve the climate system we all depend on”, leading oceanographer Professor Stefan Rahmstorf told me in Dublin in April. Once the Amoc shuts down, then, in human timescales, it’s gone forever, he warned.
Meanwhile, deep in the southern hemisphere’s winter, an entire continent is beginning to awaken from aeons of frozen slumber. Antarctic sea ice has fallen to an all-time low, and it now covers an area 2.5 million square kilometres below average.
Scientists describe this drastic ice loss as at least a “five-sigma” event, meaning that under normal conditions, you would expect a winter ice melt event of this magnitude only once every 7.5 million years. “To say this is unprecedented isn’t strong enough”, said the oceanographer Edward Doddridge. “It’s gobsmacking”.
And then there are the heat waves. The hottest day on Earth for probably 125,000 years occurred at the beginning of July. Both June and July 2023 are now confirmed to be the hottest months ever recorded. Heat waves are rapidly increasing, both in frequency and ferocity. The northern hemisphere has been battered by contiguous extreme heat waves covering much of North America, Europe and large areas of Asia.
Neither have the oceans been spared. A marine heatwave is currently affecting an area of the North Atlantic Ocean covering around 40 million square kilometres, an area four times larger than Europe.
Seven Hiroshimas
The world’s oceans are accumulating the equivalent of the energy of seven Hiroshima bombs per second. That’s around 220 million Hiroshimas in excess energy each year. This is the fuel for future weather extremes unlike anything endured by modern humans.
Apart from the obvious misery and danger to humans and other animals, droughts, heat waves and floods are also fast degrading global food systems. What few seem to grasp is that all this dangerous disruption is a result of a global average temperature increase of barely 1.2°C.
Once we breach the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds, planetary tipping points from Amoc collapse to the disintegration of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice packs, to the disappearance of Arctic sea ice cover in summer begin to kick in. Any one of these events will potentially redraw the map of the world. And as one planetary domino falls, it pulls other seemingly stable systems down with it.
These are what scientists call non-linear events. In other words, things get much worse far more quickly than societies can possibly adapt to. Our tragic failure to act commits us to a near future of mass migration, famine, economic collapse, violence and political and social breakdown.
We still have choices, though years of delay mean all the easy options are long gone. We now have to choose between wrenching austerity in order to drastically cut emissions, or carrying on regardless and letting the sixth mass extinction run its course.
For once, let’s be brutally honest: we’ve already chosen, haven’t we?
