Fossil fuel rule has triggered planetary chaos

One of the world's best ice scientists says "society must brace for catastrophe"

Imagine you’re canoeing down a river.

The sun is out, the birds are singing, a light breeze ripples the air. You start to hear a distant rumble, like a jet engine. You look up, see some planes in the air and think nothing of it. But the roar gets louder and louder. You look left and right, over to the banks of the river, expecting to see a vehicle. To see something. But there’s nothing. You stop paddling, fear creeping, the current gently moving you forward. Then up ahead you see a rainbow against a wall of spray, the river dropping away. Your brain starts to untangle the various clues and you realise: waterfall. You frantically try to angle your canoe towards the riverbank, paddling as hard as you can, but it’s too late. The current has you gripped now and you’re dragged over the edge.

At some point in the journey you were committed to your fate, you just didn’t know it. By the time your fate was clear, it was too late to change the outcome. Now imagine the canoe is planet Earth and inside that canoe is humanity.

Tipping points

Climate change is about more than just the planet getting hotter, wetter or drier. The Earth system has what scientists call tipping points. These are elements of the climate – such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the transfer of heat in the North Atlantic ocean – that work together to regulate and stabilise the global climate. These elements working in predictable tandem are all we’ve ever known as a global civilisation. Among other things, that’s why we can grow food for so many people. We know roughly when and where it will rain and how much. We know roughly where and when it will be too hot for certain crops. We know roughly how much food will be harvested in which countries and when. If it gets a bit hotter or a bit wetter or a bit drier in certain places the system can – and right now is – largely absorbing that. But push these systems beyond a threshold and they tip into a new state, the fundamental dynamics having changed—the canoe plunging over the waterfall. For a long time it was assumed these tipping points could only be activated by extreme levels of warming. But that’s changed. Scientists now believe these tipping points are activated at much lower levels of warming than previously thought. And there is evidence that some may already be in motion.

Over the edge

Climate change is accelerating. Two hundred years of digging up organic matter and burning it up into the sky means there is a higher concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than there has been for millions of years. And this concentration is increasing ten times faster than has happened in 66 million years. And it’s getting hotter, drier and sometimes much wetter as a result. But worse than that (and this is already very bad) we’re moving ever closer to the edge of that waterfall.

Ice cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheets show clearly that abrupt climate change has happened many times in the past. How abrupt? A temperature increase of 8C in a couple of decades abrupt. Consider that at a global average warming of ‘just’ 1.3C the UK is already experiencing 40C (104F) summer days.

With the Earth 1.3C hotter on average than before factories started burning fossil fuels, it looks like we are much closer to irreversible tipping points that previously thought. Why irreversible? Because even if we removed the propulsive factor – the person paddling – the canoe is now being dragged forward by forces outside the control of the paddler. Or in our case, stopping fossil fuel burning would no longer prevent parts of the system being dragged into a new state.

The early climate change reports produced for governments by scientists said the risk of triggering tipping points probably wouldn’t come into play until 4 or 5 degrees of global warming. But those assessments have been steadily revised down. The latest thinking is that a little over 1C is enough to push a system past a threshold. And that is exactly what has already happened in Greenland and parts of Antarctica.

“The fact is it just hasn't really sunk in, even in the science community, that we've effectively lost the ice sheets. It's just a matter of time before we see many metres of sea level rise. So, society has to now brace itself for a catastrophe."

These are the words of Jason Box, one of the world’s best Greenland ice sheet scientists. Let me type that out again: Society has to now brace itself for a catastrophe. Just the current levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the air is enough to melt the Greenland ice sheet and ultimately raise sea levels 8 metres, wiping out coastal cities. So to stop Greenland melting we need to suck greenhouse gases out of the air. But the opposite is happening. A global economy set up for endless growth means that despite catastrophic impacts caused by fossil fuel burning, emissions from fossil fuel burning are at record highs.

We need the ice

Another system committed to a new state is West Antarctica. “Parts of West Antarctica are going to fall apart no matter what.” These are the words of Antarctic ice sheet scientist Eric Rignot. He warns that “we actually don’t have any idea how fast some of these systems can react to climate warming. What the past 20 years of data are showing us is that they are reacting fast.” How soon might we see these big changes? A paper last year said that the ice shelf holding back the so-called doomsday glacier Thwaites is on course to collapse in a matter of years. The water around the ice sheet is just too warm now. Thwaites holds enough water to raise global sea level by over two feet.

Another climate system close to tipping is the northern permafrost, frozen land which traps huge quantities of organic material, preventing it from entering the atmosphere. A recent study warns that the permafrost in Sweden, Norway and Finland will irreversibly melt in a little over 15 years, and Western Siberian permafrost is likely to follow soon after.

Our civilisation really needed the ice to stay as it was. By reflecting heat, locking up water and trapping gases, ice gave us a stable climate and unmoving coastlines. With the ice going away, positive feedbacks unleashed by melting will drive Earth more quickly into a newly volatile and violent state.

At sea, on land

Clear signs of tipping are also being seen in the North Atlantic, where the system of water circulation that brings warm air and moisture up from the tropics to northern Europe is moving more slowly that is has done in the past 1000 years. A shutdown of this system would have profound consequences for northern Europe. The reduced rainfall would effectively wipe out all arable farming in the UK, rivers would run dry and there would be water shortages across society. Scientists say this system “may be close to a critical transition.”

On land, news of the Amazon’s destruction is nothing new, but the climate system implications are not always well communicated. A NASA study found that just a relatively small amount of reduction of total tree cover in the Amazon – 0.8% - caused drought over 2.1 million square miles, half of the size of the continental US. Another study supports this, saying the destruction of millions of trees and ecosystems has weakened the South American monsoon, with continent-wide implications.

The greenhouse gases already pumped into the air through fossil fuel burning means that a profound shift in the conditions that enabled our civilisation are already underway. The mass media has got better at reporting these climate facts, but often does so bloodlessly. They rarely tell the truth: elite fossil fuel rule has locked in irreversible change and condemned our children and their children to an alien planet of far greater suffering.

Yet still the burning goes on, the three biggest historical polluters showing no signs of changing: so-called progressives Biden and Trudeau giving the greenlight for Arctic drilling and approving new tar sands projects. In the UK the government is licensing more North Sea oil than in years. As the biggest historical emitters these countries have the most responsibility, but emerging powers aren’t blameless. Far from it. China is approving more coal mines than it has in many years and India continues to expand coal.

The money to do this comes from global finance. Since just 2015 the biggest banks have given fossil fuel bosses $3.8 trillion in finance to dig, drill and scrape new fossil fuels from the Earth. Fossil fuel emissions are again reaching record highs, getting on now for a decade after the Paris Agreement that was supposed to change everything. They will never, ever stop. Not willingly at least.

At this point only deep, revolutionary change can stop the whole system spinning out of control.

(Artwork as always by @ronniefurbear on IG)