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To the apocalypse! And beyond! Possible futures in and beyond UN climate modeling …

Coastal Erosion at Atherington by Chris Richardson Wikimedia

By Paul Atkin

The new modeling now being used by the UN Panel on Climate Change to map possible futures has shifted its methods. I’m going to attempt to get behind the jargon to spell out what the projections indicate, but also to highlight some flaws in the process.

Key differences are

The old “no action” baseline projection of what would happen if nothing was done about climate breakdown at all has been dropped on the grounds that some action is being taken and will continue to be: so the points of comparison now are between the consequences of sticking with the current level of action, and advancing or retreating from it.

The overall effect is to remove the highest, most damaging scenarios, as fossil fuel use is peaking – despite Trump – and they can no longer be considered the most dominant future fuel source. This reflects the partial success of actions to date.

The inevitable claims by Trump and his acolytes that the removal of projections based on what would happen if the “drill baby drill” polices they advocate were universally applied that this proves climate breakdown itself is “a hoax” are beyond surreal. To spell this out. If the world were to act with blithe insouciance and just double down on fossil fuels in the way that Trump wants to do to secure “US Global Energy Dominance” based on them, the worst case scenario would be back with a vengance. In fact, if “every last drop” of fossil fuels on the planet were to be burnt, as they advocate, that would drive a rise in temperature of 16C.

On the contrary, this drop in the worst case scenario is a sign that the world is not being completely bullied into its own self destruction. As there is now $2 trillion a year investment in renewable energy (double the current level of investment in FFs) so most new energy even in the US, and even in Texas, is now being provided by renewables; as they are now too cheap to be replaced by coal. But, $1Trillion is still being invested in Fossil Fuels annually. This is because the rate of profit on the investment is four to five times greater than for investment in renewables; so the search for returns is risking all our futures.

Nevertheless, dropping the worst case scenario has come in for criticism, as it replicates at international level what the Trump administration is trying to do to the still legally mandated US National Climate Assessment. In so doing, it implies that the worst outcomes are not possible – which it would be rash to assume – and therefore that taking action has less urgency – which is dead wrong.

This is particularly the case as the lowest scenarios have been revised upwards, reflecting the rapidity with which the climate is heating – and implicitly highlighting the inadequacy of the measures taken so far to stop it.

The headline from this is that 1.5C will be overshot. Although the IPCC only counts a threshold being passed after ten years on average, we are evidently already there, or thereabouts. 1.4C this year. Possibly 1.7C next. Again, this has been seized on by climate deniers to argue that “the battle” that they didn’t want us to engage in in the first place “has been lost”; so we’d best just give up and adapt to a new normal.

The problem with that is that a new normal of unchecked climate breakdown is not a slightly balmier set of stable conditions, in which Yorkshire becomes like Tuscany, but a state of spiralling crisis, weather whiplash between extreme droughts and torrential rain, failed harvests and hunger; and the more we put off action the worst it will get. The UN has noted that even a temporary overshoot will do “irreparable damage”. Battles are only lost if we give up, and every tenth of a degree is a front line.

The deeper point about “overshoot” is that we’ve been overshooting since we passed the 350 CO2 ppm mark in 1986, so everything we are now doing is about damage limitation. We care now at 430ppm, and rising.

The possible futures they spell out are clear and make it clear that what happens next depends on what we do, and don’t do, now.

Possible futures

The new assessment puts forward seven scenarios ranging from high to low emissions trajectories. In these scenarios the range of possible heating is between 1.6C and 3.3C by the end of the century.

• The high scenario envisages emissions of 55 billion tonnes a year, significantly up from the 38 billion tonnes now. This gets us to 3.3C by 2100.
• The medium scenario, based on existing policies, projects 34 million tonnes a year, a minimal reduction. This gets to 2C by 2050, 2.9C by 2100 and 3C by 2150.
• The low scenario based on accelerated action cuts emissions to 9 billion tonnes but temperatures still rise to 1.8C by 2050 and fall back to 1.5C by 2100.
• The old baseline warning of the likely consequences of no action – the policy favoured by Trump, Reform, and now the Conservative Party (which has banned anyone who takes climate change seriously as a possible Parliamentary candidate) – was a possible rise of 4.6 – 4.9C by century’s end, and more beyond. Meltdown, basically. If these forces win in enough places, that is back on the table.
• As “there are no good outcomes above 1.5C” we are in for a lot of trouble at least for the rest of this century. This is why it is so mind bogglingly idiotic for the BBC to post a story entitled “what will you tell your grandchildren about the summer of 2026?”, as if what we have just experienced is a one off, a weird anomaly after which we get back to normal, not a warning of Summers to come, during which we may well reminisce fondly about how relatively cool it was just to have 35C heatwaves.

All these projections are essentially technical. And that the changes already in train will develop with an orderly predictable Fabian gradualism that we can slowly adapt to. tPlaying down the potential for sudden catastrophic shifts as we reach tipping points – the mass deaths of coral – the Amazon becoming a carbon source not a carbon sink – accelerating methane release from melting permafrost – gives a false impression that everything is under control. The point about tipping points is that that seems to be the case, until it isn’t. A report just out indicates that “Warming-induced” emissions of greenhouse gases from natural sources – including permafrost, wetlands and wildfires – could amplify global temperature rise by a further 20-30% for example.

We have to bear in mind that the rise in greenhouse gases driven by human industrial and agriculture activity now is 40 times faster than during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum 50 m years ago and over 100 times faster than during the warming at the end of the last ice age. Those who say that the Earth’s climate has always changed for natural reasons are right, but wrong to ignore the way our actions are giving it such a ferocious acceleration in such a short space of time. In the case of the PETM it took about 3,000 years for global temperatures to increase by 5-8C. On average, that works out at between .0017 and .0027 C a year. At the moment the temperature is increasing on average by .35C a year. So this is almost unbelievably fast, and so must our response be.

And we should bear in mind that the last time the Earth had a 430ppm concentration of CO2 was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when temperatures were 3-4C higher than the pre industrial average and sea levels were 5 – 25 metres higher.

This is the East coast at a 5 metre rise, the low end of that projection. Peterborough and Cambridge are on the Wash.

And the Thames Estuary would start around Wapping. At 25 metres it would start at Windsor. Current IPCC projections are for a 1 metre rise by 2100, with an outside chance of 2 metres, but the rate is rising and it keeps going after that.

A recent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (the Insurance Industry essentially) and Exeter University applied a planetary solvency model on the basis that the existing technical models underestimate the risks and the knock on negative impacts that are already being felt and are accelerating.

Their projection is that by 2070 – 2090 the impacts will be so severe that world GDP will halve and 4 billion people will die. While fact check websites poo poo this, this is actuaries making this projection based on insurance industry risk projections, so shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. And if it is even the most remote possibility, it should concentrate minds and give us more of a sense of proportion…and urgency.

Social and geopolitical factors

And here’s the core of the problem. All of these projections seem to be based on presumptions that all other factors are equal, and that existing social economic and political structures stay essentially the same, when there is actually no way that they can; if only because of the impact of climate consequences that are already baked in.

They rest on UN projections that the global population will rise from 8.23 billion now to 9.6 billion by 2050, peak at just over 10 billion around 2080, then slowly decline from then on. By the end of the century, the projection is that people will be, on average, 10 -25% poorer than they are now.

But, there is no average person, no average state. Projections of climate impacts vary – with the Canadian government projecting rises of 3-5C by 2100, with 10C in the Arctic, the threat of mass deaths from wet bulb temperature events at a global average of a 2C rise primarily in Northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Eastern Asia, the Arabian Gulf and the African Sahel Zone. Lets not forget that the medium scenario gets us to 2C in 2050 – 24 years from now.

Further, the existing state of affairs is not socially or economically static. It is characterised by rapid shifts in wealth and power within states and between them. The ever growing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands in the West under neoliberalism, the increased global weight of the BRICS in general (with a combined economy now greater than the G7) and China in particular, with its colossal exports of renewable products and technology. Part of this is an attempt by the Western ruling classes to sustain their bloated lifestyles by keeping the global South as poor as possible to keep kits carbon footprint down. The UK government decision under Starmer to cut ODA, including climate finance to pay for the first installment of increased war spending expresses this perfectly.

These questions will be resolved in political struggle within and between states. The most decisive of these now is to defeat the attempt by the United States to sabotage international cooperation, to shore up its slipping global imperial dominance by preparing itself and its allies for an apocalyptic war, to roll back the deployment of renewable energy and transport, to secure “global energy dominance” through its own abundance of fossil fuel reserves, control of those of other states, and enforced dependence on its exports by those without. Part of this is an attempt to sustain the bloated lifestyles of the western ruling class by keeping the global south as poor as possible. The UK’s cut of ODA, including climate finance, to pay for the first installment of increased war spending expresses this perfectly.

The good news on this is that we could be reaching tipping points in this energy shift. The cost of renewable technology, wind, solar, batteries, has dropped so far and so fats that they are now cheaper than FF alternatives just about everywhere. More than half of countries have passed peak FF use and China is plateauing, with solar now producing more energy there than coal for the first time and other GS countries having a viable sustainable path to development which also liberates them from FF dependence and everything that goes with it. Its possible we could move not only away from unipolarity but through multi polarity to no polarity as a result. And because electric energy is so much more efficient that FFs, every unit of additional RE displaces 3 units of FF energy. And the total amount of extractive mining needed for all the resources needed for the transition up to 2050 is equivalent to the amount needed just for coal, just in 2024. Once the initial bottleneck of grid upgrades is dealt with, costs will drop even further. Quids in.

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