Environmental review of 2022: another mile on the
‘highway to climate hell’
Deadly floods in Pakistan and record heat in the UK
were just two symptoms this year of the global crisis
Damian
Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Fri 30 Dec
2022 12.09 GMT
Two events
in 2022 symbolised the climate breakdown that humanity is careering towards and
the real, though fast-fading, hope that the world can still be steered away
from calamity.
The first
was the apocalyptic floods that submerged a third of Pakistan, the world’s
fifth most populous country, affecting 33 million people. Scientists found that
the climate crisis had made the deluge up to 50% more intense.
The second
was the re-election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the president of Brazil.
Experts had said the fate of the Amazon rested on the vote. Another term of the
rampant destruction seen under Jair Bolsonaro could have pushed the world’s
biggest rainforest past its tipping point, with global consequences.
Overall,
however, the climate crisis is bleaker than it has ever been. In October, a
slew of reports laid bare how close the planet had neared to irreversible
climate breakdown, with one UN study stating there was “no credible pathway in
place to 1.5C”, the internationally agreed limit for global heating, and that
progress on cutting carbon emissions was “woefully inadequate”.
Scientists
had revealed in September that five “disastrous” tipping points may already
have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating to date. These included the
collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise and
the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which
billions of people depend for food.
The climate
equation remains simple: carbon emissions must halve by 2030 to have an even
chance of keeping to the 1.5C limit. But in 2022 emissions will have risen to a
record level. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the
accelerator,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres.
It is clear
that no new fossil fuel projects are consistent with climate goals. But in May
the Guardian revealed that the world’s biggest firms are planning scores of
“carbon bomb” oil and gas projects, in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets
against humanity halting global heating. Many of the carbon bombs are in the
fracking fields of the US, the world’s largest oil producer.
With high
energy prices due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, 2022 has been a bonanza year for fossil
fuel companies, but it was also revealed that the oil and gas industry has
delivered $1tn a year in pure profit for the past 50 years.
The energy
crisis also meant global coal burning will hit an all-time high in 2022,
according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). But responsibility for
emissions is highly unequal, data showed, even in wealthy nations: in the UK, a
year of emissions from richest people is the same as the lowest earners produce
in a quarter of a century.
Deep impact
The effects
of the climate crisis were clearer than ever in 2022. The Pakistan floods were
preceded by a searing heatwave that also hit India and was made 30 times more
likely by global heating.
Dangerous
heatwaves also engulfed parts of China, Europe, and the US, with scientists
saying a northern hemisphere summer as hot as 2022 would have been “virtually
impossible” without global heating, and led to a record drought. In the UK,
temperatures rose above 40C for the first time, obliterating records and
shocking scientists.
In the US,
Hurricane Ian became the most deadly hurricane since Katrina in 2005, while the
American west continued to struggle with the most extreme megadrought in at
least 1,200 years. In Australia, hot seas led to the Great Barrier Reef
suffering its fourth mass bleaching in just seven years. Flooding also struck
around the world, including Nigeria, Australia, Thailand and Vietnam, and
Venezuela.
In August,
a Guardian analysis revealed how people across the world are losing their lives
and livelihoods to heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts, all made more
deadly and more frequent by the climate crisis. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s
climate minister, said in September: “This dystopia is on our doorstep; it’s
going to be next in their country [in the global north]. If you’re not
understanding that it’s right here, right now, then you’re really sleepwalking
into annihilation.”
A Guardian
investigation also revealed how a lack of crop diversity means that the climate
crisis was already threatening many of our favourite foods, including rice,
chickpeas, coffee and vanilla.
‘Turbocharged’ renewables growth
The Cop27
UN climate summit in Egypt in November was the key event intended to ramp up
global action, but two weeks of increasingly fractious and messy talks ended
“disappointment” for those hoping for progress on the global goal of limiting
temperature rises to 1.5C. The target came under attack from countries
including Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, Russia, Brazil and China.
However,
there were at least signs of a much-needed pact between the developed and
developing world in an agreement to set up a fund for loss and damage. Its
purpose is to help rebuild countries and communities laid waste by the
unavoidable ravages of climate breakdown. Rich countries will be expected to
pay into the fund and it will pay out to the poorest countries which are
suffering most. Deals to phase out coal use in South Africa, Indonesia and
Vietnam were also a plus in 2022.
In the US,
President Joe Biden passed the biggest climate bill in the country’s history,
channelling $369bn in support to renewable energy, electric cars and heating,
and energy efficiency. The US is the world’s second biggest polluter and the
bill could lead to emissions being slashed by 40% by 2030, compared with 2005.
In
Australia, after nearly a decade of destruction and delay under conservative
administrations, a new Labor government quickly increased the nation’s climate
target from a 26% reduction in emissions by 2030 to 43%. It also passed the
country’s first climate change legislation since 2011. The new climate change
minister, Chris Bowen, was nonetheless cautious, saying: “Today doesn’t mark
the end of the work; today the work just gets started.”
Russia’s
war in Ukraine pushed up energy prices. But it also sparked an efficiency drive
in Europe and “turbocharged” renewable energy growth, according to the IEA.
However, political turmoil in the UK delayed action on efficiency and its
government also approved its first new coal mine for 30 years and opposed solar
farms, undermining its international reputation on climate.
New forms
of climate protest sprang up in the UK and rapidly spread to other countries.
The most high-profile action by the Just Stop Oil group saw tomato soup thrown
onto the glass covering Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers painting. Another group,
called Tyre Extinguishers, claimed to have “disarmed” – deflated the tyres – on
more than 600 SUVs in one night, across nine countries.
Deal for nature
Humanity’s
destruction of wildlife and nature is seen by scientists as just as serious as
the climate crisis, with some arguing a sixth mass extinction is under way that
will undermine the clean air, water and food that civilisation depends upon.
Data released in 2022 indicates the destruction continues apace, with the
average size of animal populations now having plunged by 70% since 1970.
But while
more than 100 world leaders attended Cop27, the equivalent event for
biodiversity – Cop15 – attracted none. That was despite Cop15 being charged
with the greater task, sealing a deal on the action for the decade ahead.
In the
event, the deal struck by the world’s nations in Montreal was largely seen as
historic. It included targets to protect 30% of land and oceans for nature by
2030, reform $500bn of environmentally damaging subsidies, tackle species
extinctions, increase funding and, crucially, to promote and protect rights of
Indigenous peoples.
The test
will be whether these targets are met – the ones set a decade ago were all
missed.
Chemical cocktails
Pollution
is the third major environmental crisis and January saw scientists reach a
striking conclusion – the cocktail of chemicals pervading the planet now
threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends. The
release of 350,000 synthetic chemicals including plastics, pesticides,
industrial compounds and antibiotics, meant chemical pollution has crossed a
“planetary boundary”, they said.
Toxic air,
water and soil are already killing 9 million people a year, another report
found, making it responsible for one in six of all deaths. Pollution “is an
existential threat to human health and planetary health, and jeopardises the
sustainability of modern societies”, the review concluded.
More of the
impacts of pollution on people were revealed in 2022, with environmental toxins
being linked to the worsening obesity pandemic and to falling sperm quality.
The
presence of air pollution particles in the lungs, livers and brains of unborn
babies, long before they have taken their first breath, was revealed in
October. Researchers said the discovery was “very worrying”, as the gestation
period of foetuses is the most vulnerable stage of human development. Separate
research estimated that almost a million stillbirths a year can be attributed
to air pollution.
Microplastics,
another planet-pervading pollutant, was found in human blood for the first time
in 2022, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in
organs. In March, world leaders from 173 countries agreed to develop a legally
binding treaty on plastic waste over the next two years.
The problem
of sewage pollution was particularly high profile in England, with water
companies revealed to have discharged raw sewage into rivers 372,533 times in a
year. One company was also found to have dumped sewage onto bathing beaches 493
times in just eight days in November. A Guardian investigation revealed how the
privatised water companies suck billions of pounds a year out of England’s
water system in dividends and debt payments, a situation described by one
expert as “a scandal of financial engineering”.
Attention grabbers
Among the
stories that really caught the attention of readers in 2022 was a spectacular
collection of images, headlined: ‘It was like an apocalyptic movie’: 20 climate
photographs that changed the world. The stunning images included dust storms in
Australia, wildfires in Greece and huskies pulling a sled through water in
Greenland.
Another
spectacular story was the discovery of what may be the world’s longest animal –
a 45-metre-long deep-sea siphonophore, arranged in a feeding spiral and
trailing its deadly tentacles.
Calling out
bad behaviour was popular with readers, from the short private jet flights of
Kylie Jenner and other celebrities to the “word salad of nonsense” spouted by
Jordan Peterson about climate models.
Homely
subjects were also popular, including advice to UK gardeners to refrain from
mowing their lawns until May in order to let wild plants and insects thrive and
the news that a bird flu outbreak meant that free-range eggs were no longer
available after hens were moved indoors.
Finally,
2022 saw the deaths of the Guardian writer Dom Phillips and Indigenous activist
Bruno Pereira, murdered in the Brazilian Amazon. They were killed in “an
undeclared global war against nature and the people who defend it,” wrote
Jonathan Watts, a Guardian staffer and Phillips’s friend.
The British
scientist James Lovelock also died in 2022, at the age of 103. He was best
known for his Gaia hypothesis, the idea that life on Earth is a self-regulating
community of organisms interacting with each other and their surroundings.
Lovelock
worked well into his 90s, saying in 2011: “My main reason for not relaxing into
contented retirement is that, like most of you, I am deeply concerned about the
probability of massively harmful climate change and the need to do something
about it now.”
This article was amended on 1 January 2023
because an earlier version said “the oil and gas industry has delivered $1tn a
day in pure profit for the past 50 years”. The figure is $1tn a year.
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