Hothouse Earth coming
It would be churlish to ask what took them so long. Let us be grateful, instead, that the climate scientists are finally saying out loud what they all knew privately at least 10 years ago.
What 16 of them are now saying, in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that if we don’t soon get off the highway we are currently travelling on, we will be irrevocably committed to a Hothouse Earth.
How soon is soon? Probably no more than 10 to 20 years away. That’s the last exit. The article has the usual low-key scientific title: Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. The authors never raise their voices, but they do point out that the likeliest of those trajectories – the one we will stay on even if all the promises in the 2015 Paris Accord on climate change are kept – runs right off a cliff.
Hothouse Earth is not very hospitable to human life. Hundreds of millions or even a billion or two would probably survive, but the damage to agricultural systems would be so extreme that billions more would die. (The authors don’t say this, of course. Putting it into words is too alarmist – but the people who actually have to think about these contingencies, like the military in the developed countries, know it very well.)
What the authors are saying is that global warming, driven directly by human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, is only part of the problem. In fact, it’s the smaller part. The real threat is the unstoppable natural feedbacks triggered by the warming that we have caused that will take us up to the killing temperatures of Hothouse Earth.
They list 10 of them, the biggest being the loss of Arctic sea ice, the melting of the permafrost zone, dieback in both the boreal and the Amazon forests, and changes driven by warming in the ocean circulation system. Just triggering one or two of these feedbacks could cause enough additional warming to set off others, like a row of toppling dominoes, and take us up to those lethal temperatures within this century.
Now, this is not really news to climate scientists. When I was writing a book about climate change 10 years ago, I interviewed scores of them in half a dozen countries, including Dr Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the lead authors of this paper and then the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany (and Angela Merkel’s climate adviser).
He already knew all this stuff then. Everybody did at Potsdam, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change in England, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and in universities that had a serious climate research programme. It was the point of departure, the underlying assumption of every conversation I had.
Yet the role of these feedbacks in the system was not discussed in the scientific journals, not included in the predictions of future warming issued every four or five years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and definitely not part of the public debate. Why not?
If you spot smoke billowing out of a house, you don’t wait to see actual flames, check what substances are burning, and calculate the heat of the fire. You call the fire department immediately. But that’s not how science works.
When you make a statement in science, you have to be able to prove it, generally with hard numbers and testable predictions. The hard numbers simply weren’t available yet – and if you go public without that evidence, you will be torn to pieces by your scientific colleagues (who are also your rivals, of course).
So the climate scientists didn’t make grand assertions – but they did manage to get the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius higher global