"It's a paradox but this was one of the most
chilling books I've read this year. It's the definitive guide to where we're
heading ..." ANTHONY HOROWITZ, New York Times bestselling author of The
Word Is Murder and The Sentence Is Death
"This accessible and authoritative book is a
must-read for anyone who still thinks it could be OK to carry on as we are for
a little bit longer, or that climate chaos might not affect them or their kids
too badly." MIKE BERNERS-LEE, author of There is No Planet B: A Handbook
for the Make or Break Years
‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate
meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert
Globe with steam rising from it. North and South
America in view.
Record high temperatures and extreme weather events
are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images
Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must
accept how bad things are before can we head off global catastrophe, according
to a leading UK scientist
Robin McKie
Sat 30 Jul 2022 16.48 BST
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 complacence 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.
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, 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. 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 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. “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.”
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.”
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, 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.
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
Five unexpected threats posed by the pumping of carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere
Under our feet As vast, thick sheets of ice disappear
from high mountains and from the poles, rock crusts that had previously been
compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger earthquakes and
tsunamis. “We are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not
only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one,” says Bill
McGuire.
New battlefields As crops burn and hunger spreads,
communities are coming into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who
will promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace. Most
worrying are the tensions over dwindling water supplies that are growing
between India, Pakistan and China, all possessors of atomic weapons. “The last
thing we need is a hot war over water between two of the world’s nuclear
powers,” McGuire observes.
Methane bombs Produced by wetlands, cattle and
termites, methane is 86 times more potent in its power to heat the atmosphere
than carbon dioxide, though fortunately it hangs around for much less time. The
problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in layers of Arctic
permafrost. As these melt, more methane will be released and our world will get
even hotter.
Losing the Gulf Stream As the ice caps melt, the
resulting cold water pouring from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the
Gulf Stream, which carries a prodigious amount of heat from the tropics to the
seas around Europe. Signs now suggest the Gulf Stream is already weakening and
could shut down completely before end of the century, triggering powerful
winter storms over Europe.
Calorie crunch Four-fifths of all calories consumed
across the world come from just 10 crop plants including wheat, maize and rice.
Many of these staples will not grow well under the higher temperatures that
will soon become the norm, pointing towards a massive cut in the availability
of food, which will have a catastrophic impact across the planet, says McGuire.
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