[D66] ‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert

[René Oudeweg]

theguardian.com
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/30/total-climate-meltdown-inevitable-heatwaves-global-catastrophe>



  ‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be
  stopped, says expert

Robin McKie
8-10 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, /Hothouse Earth/, could
not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused
by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures
across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to
their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus
professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College
London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming
climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit
warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth.
Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of
storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current
extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us
avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the
point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and
temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where
summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where
our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020
will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire
insists.

Bill McGuire.

Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at
University College London and was also an adviser to the UK government.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK
government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position.
Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although
not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming
is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in
climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing
in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the
future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate
appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to
know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to
tackle the crisis.”

McGuire finished writing /Hothouse Earth/ at the end of 2021. He
includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted
the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months
after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found
that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble
with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time
it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are
moving.”

Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement
that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/19/a-wake-up-call-as-extreme-heat-blazes-across-uk-experts-say-net-zero-is-the-only-way-out#:~:text=Storms%20threaten%20more%20disruption%20on%20heels%20of%20record%2Dbreaking%20UK%20heat,-After%20temperatures%20reached&text=Hundreds%20of%20firefighters%20battled%20blazes,call%E2%80%9D%20for%20the%20climate%20emergency.>,
the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest
temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the
capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east
London
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/26/uk-cities-need-to-prepare-for-future-wildfires-say-fire-chiefs>.
Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. “Who
would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost
wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a
wake-up call then surely that is it.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/wildfires> have also swept across
Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in
the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone
national park
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/13/yellowstone-national-park-closure-flooding-mudslides>.
“And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out
there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”

Kurdish farmers battle a blaze in a wheat field in Syria’s north-eastern
Hasakah province, a breadbasket for the region.

Kurdish farmers battle a blaze in a wheat field in Syria’s north-eastern
Hasakah province, a breadbasket for the region. Photograph: Delil
Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images

These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate
breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises
translate into extreme weather.

“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated
up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is
changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate
models. That’s something that was never expected.”

2050: what happens if we ignore the climate crisis – video explainer

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by
just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was
agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to
1.5C
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/cop26-the-goal-of-15c-of-climate-heating-is-alive-but-only-just>,
although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon
emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire.
“Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that
date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in
less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C
will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought,
devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and
surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the
stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted
that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges
made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

>From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming
climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that
lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation
deteriorating even further, McGuire says.

The Fox Glacier in New Zealand in winter.

The Fox glacier in New Zealand in winter. It has retreated by 900m in a
decade. Photograph: Gabor Kovacs/Alamy

Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to
counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major
headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last
longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will
become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate
homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire
blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and
obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we
have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C
climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will
crash through it.”

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses
that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future,
and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly
calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will
be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate
breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would
appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival
of human civilisation.

“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue
yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an
electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle.
Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your
elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your
vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the
climate emergency.”

/Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide/ by Bill McGuire is published by
Icon Books, £9.99

The Gulf Stream is seen on map showing sea surface temperature

The Gulf Stream, starting in the Gulf of Mexico and running through the
Atlantic Ocean, is being weakened by climate breakdown. Photograph: NOAA
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