Forecasting the end of the world
A humble attempt at predicting when humanity will take climate change seriously
You may know that the 28 in COP28 stands for the 30th attempt at saving the planet. I will let others judge whether this was a good or a bad COP; it is enough for me here to say that it was not the trigger making the world enter a war economy against climate change.
Let us put the event aside and try to answer one simple question: when will the world start significant efforts to stop climate change?
A dose of realpolitik
Let us look first at another global issue that has been tackled recently: tax evasion.
Why did Switzerland and other tax havens start, in 2009, to share information about bank accounts? Why did they implement an automatic exchange of information (AEOI) in 2018? Why did the world inaugurate a 15% minimum tax on global companies in 2022?
No, seriously, try to guess the answer.
Here it is: because all tax havens are small countries and because the interest of the most powerful countries on this planet is to shut down tax havens, to avoid tax evasion. In short, the righteous fight against tax havens was successful mostly because giants were fighting dwarves.
Do not get me wrong: I am glad to see global capitalism being tamed, even if this is just a tiny bit. I am just trying to draw your attention to the fact that things started to change when the most powerful countries on this planet took action.
And then — a question.
Why shall we expect global warming and the reactions to this threat to be any different?
Significant actions to prevent and reduce global warming will be taken when the most powerful countries decide to move.
When will the world’s most powerful countries move?
The 1987 Montreal Protocol and its ban on CFC manufacturing are often mentioned as an example of cooperation at a global level to phase out a common threat.
The Montreal Protocol is not, however, an example of disinterested cooperation.
The Montreal Protocol was a success because the most powerful countries in the world perceived that their interest was to phase out CFC. This is a result of the perceived risk (increase of skin cancer within the population [1]) and the perceived hurdles to implementation of the ban (investment in new technologies).
Many people have highlighted the difference between phasing out CFC and fossil fuels: the former requires a bit of investment from the fridge industry, the latter a complete overhaul of the way we live our lives.
For the most powerful countries in the world to start taking real action, the risk they perceive must overcome the effort required. As we have seen that the effort required is substantial, we can forecast that no significant action will be implemented before the perceived risk is enormous.
The most powerful countries in the world will take significant actions when they perceive tremendous danger
When will it become a critical matter for the world’s most powerful countries to act against global warming?
Let us take a shortcut and rephrase this question: when will it become a critical matter for the US to act against global warming?
The US is a democracy, and it seems fair to predict that it will take extremely strong measures (by this I mean to enter a war-economy-approach to the fight against global warming) when a majority of US citizens are determined to fight against global warming, whatever it costs.
An optimistic point of view would be to assume that education and communication will bring the necessary votes. While I agree that the work of environmental activists has changed the world, I also believe that people will need to see and experience real troubles before they react.
Allow me here to relate a personal story. I was with a 60-year-old relative and mentioned that if we do not take action to stop global warming, the system will regulate itself anyway, through wars and disasters instead of through well-thought policies.
I was not prepared for his answer… What did he tell me? Yes, you are right! It is going to regulate itself anyway! Those bloody environmentalists… He cared so little about wars and disasters (supposed to be far away) that he thought that I was advocating for a status quo.
Allow me then to be pessimistic and consider that
the US will start to move when most Americans have experienced the direct consequences of global warming.
This shortcut enables us to switch from a subjective question (when will the US move?) to a more objective question (when will most Americans be directly impacted by global warming?).
When will there be too many catastrophes to ignore global warming?
I do not have the expertise to date when most of the American people will have experienced a catastrophe, but I can search for an answer in the IPCC reports.
And… I am sorry. I planned to find an approximation, something like “between 2050 and 2080”, and to conclude brilliantly that “if you are a realist like me, you can expect the world to end up at + X°C”. What I found is different though.
A reasonably pessimistic scenario is called SSP3–7.0. It is called the regional rivalry scenario and its assumptions are that
Greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures keep regularly increasing, with CO2 emissions almost doubling from current levels by 2100. Countries become more competitive with each other, prioritizing issues of national and food security. [2]
In this scenario, we expect temperatures to rise by 3.6°C by the end of the century. Let us be more pessimistic and assume 4°C. An article from the National Meteorological Service of the UK shows what impacts are expected from such a rise, with beautiful world maps easy to read for peons like me [3].
The quack is that the countries suffering the most from global warming are also amongst the global poorest and that although the US will be impacted, it is still hard to date when it will become so bad that an American president must go all-in.
My conclusion, then, is that my third premise (“the US will start to move when most of the American people have experienced direct consequences of global warming.”) is wrong.
I still believe that the world’s most powerful countries will start to move only when they are compelled to, but I am less sure that this necessity will come from a direct natural disaster risk. Would a nuclear power, suffering major damages from global warming, be more likely to trigger a global reaction?
The underlying assumption is that there will be no major disruption of the world in the twenty-first century. With the recent progress of AI and the return of history, we witness, this might be a bold assumption.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/05/us/us-report-predicts-rise-in-skin-cancer-with-loss-of-ozone.html
[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/latest-ipcc-climate-report
