How Close Are We to Climate Catastrophe?

Our challenge is to reinvent our future, but we cannot solve a problem using the same insatiable pursuit of growth.

The issue at hand is painfully obvious: the machinery of our global economy is hurtling toward an unforeseen obstacle at breakneck speed. For decades, the insatiable pursuit of economic growth has been the driving force propelling Predatory Capitalism forward with a seemingly unstoppable momentum.

But now, a formidable force threatens to slam on the brakes, sending shockwaves through our systems and societal structures: the climate crisis.

The future is a casualty of present actions, and risks being broken before it even has a chance to unfold.

The world’s wealthiest organizations are failing to assume the risks and costs, and networks are beginning to crash. The only way to move forward seems to be to look the other way and pretend everything is alright. That’s what happens when you hit rock bottom, isn’t it?

Welcome to a reality known as the “global cost of living crisis,” a complex and insidious economic cycle of stagflation and inflation, where the concept of economic “growth” is mostly smoke and mirrors: the rich get richer, the rest of us struggle to survive, and incomes fall from a cliff. Do you see any average person with too much money? Anyone you know sending rockets to the stratosphere? I didn’t think so.

According to recent groundbreaking research, half of our economies could be wiped out by 2070. This isn’t just a financial loss — it’s a future torched, drowned, incinerated, droughted, and flooded.

This research doesn’t come from mere “alarmists” or advocacy groups; some of the most cutting-edge thinking about climate change today stems from the British Institute of Actuaries, a credible and conservative source. They calculate risk, the backbone of the insurance industry. Consider the European heatwaves that claimed over 60,000 lives, and then imagine what will happen when similar heat thresholds are crossed in Latin America, the Sub-Sahara, or Southeast Asia.

The next report in that series has just come out, and if anything, it’s even…scarier. And they’re making it clear: climate change is a risk too big to bear.

Playing God, No Matter the Era We Live In

Scientists like William Ruddiman from the University of Virginia argue that humans started messing with the climate way before factories and cars. We’re talking over 6000 years ago when early farming and deforestation activities released enough greenhouse gases that would have offset a slow, natural decline toward the next ice age.

Whether you buy into Ruddiman’s hypothesis or not, it’s undeniable that we ramped up our climate-altering activities during the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. We started spewing millions, then billions of tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere through our addiction to burning coal, oil, and fossil gas for energy and transportation. This has heated up our planet and triggered significant climate changes.

Look around you. Every critter on this planet combined weighs less than all the stuff humans have made. That’s how much we’ve changed things.

Despite this, geologists recently rejected a proposal to mark the end of the Holocene, the last 11,700 years of relatively stable climate that allowed farming and civilizations to thrive, and into a more dangerous era shaped by our actions: the Anthropocene.

Erle C. Ellis, a professor at the University of Maryland, explains that “If there is one main reason why geologists rejected this proposal, it is because its recent date and shallow depth are too narrow to encompass the deeper evidence of human-caused planetary change.”

There is no better measure and the wake-up call of the massive impact we are having on our climate today than the hockey stick curve. Published over two decades ago, it’s become a symbol of human-driven climate disruption. It shows us, in simple visual terms, that our actions are drastically reshaping the Earth’s climate.

Yes, the planet has been warmer before. About 125,000 years ago, during the Eemian period, it was probably hotter than it is now. But that warming took thousands of years. We’re doing it in decades. And back then, there wasn’t a global civilization of eight billion people whose survival hinged on a stable climate.

Meanwhile, the world keeps heating up and adding to the graph, largely due to the relentless release of greenhouse gases. Fossil fuels remain the primary energy source, and this has pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from the pre-industrial 280 parts per million (ppm) to around 424.55 ppm today, increasing by roughly 2 ppm per year.

And models have predicted that this climate mess we’ve created isn’t going away anytime soon. We’re talking at least 50,000 years of dealing with the consequences — and probably longer.

And that’s on us.

Apologies for what you are about to read

This is the direct transcript of the key findings from the Actuaries report:

1. The rate of global warming accelerated in 2023 — There is early indication this is not temporary. Scientists are not yet sure what the cause is and, therefore, do not know how much of this is a temporary fluctuation or permanent change. If this is a permanent change, it reduces the time available to reduce emissions.
2. Life in the tail — Increased warming is now driving more severe impacts across the planet: Climate change has arrived, with severe impacts emerging at lower temperatures than expected. The distribution has shifted; historic tail risks are now expected. Climate risks are complex and interconnected and could threaten the basis of our society and economy. A systems approach is required to consider how connected risks might increase societal impacts. Even without considering cascading impacts, there is a 5% chance of annual insured losses of over $200 billion in the next decade, with total (insured and uninsured) economic losses breaching the $1 trillion mark.
3. An overshoot of the 1.5°C temperature threshold is likely: There is an increasing disconnect between current net zero carbon budgets and the 1.5°C temperature goal, with several scientific agencies reporting that levels of global warming in 2023 were close to or already at 1.5°C. An overshoot of the 1.5°C temperature goal by 2030 is increasingly likely, and current net zero carbon budgets give a low probability of limiting temperature. Given uncertainty and experience to date, we need to re-calibrate carbon budgets.
4. The sting in the tail of the Earth’s climate sensitivity: The Earth’s climate may be more sensitive than we thought, meaning the planet may warm more quickly than expected for a given level of greenhouse gases. This would reduce carbon budgets. It is unclear how much more warming we are committed to post-2030. This is uncertain due to many factors, including the ice melt rate decreasing Earth’s albedo, the impact of aerosol cooling, climate tipping points, and the pace of the energy transition.
5. Warming above 1.5°C is dangerous, increasing the risk of triggering multiple climate tipping points. Tipping points include the collapse of ice sheets in Greenland, West Antarctica, and the Himalayas, permafrost melt, Amazon dieback, and the halting of major ocean current circulation. Passing these thresholds may constitute an ecological point of no return, after which it may be practically impossible to return the climate to pre-industrial (Holocene) stability. Tipping points may interact to form tipping cascades, that act to further accelerate the rate of warming and climate impacts.

This is serious stuff. And it isn’t just about how close we’re to the brink of climate disaster; it’s about the impact on our societies and us.

Here’s a simple and direct breakdown:

• First, climate change is speeding up. This isn’t a debate anymore.
• Second, risk isn’t a straight line. More warming equals bigger disasters. A wildfire yesterday is an entire country on fire today.
• Third, we’re not meeting the 1.5-degree limit. Our planet is more fragile than we thought, more prone to chaos and instability.
• Fourth, we’re on a collision course with every single climate tipping point and the cascading domino effects, which will further accelerate warming.
• Fifth, we are not close to catastrophic climate change; we are living through it.

The Modern Human Experience is Made of Tail Risk

I live in the mountains of the Argentinan Lake District in northwest Patagonia: a supposed “climate haven,” high enough latitude and altitude to avoid the worst heatwaves, isolated from a stormy ocean coast, and historically wet. But last winter, we were flooded with 5 months of record rainfall, followed by severe droughts and destructive wildfires.

Yes, I am glad to live where I do, close to my friends, the mountains, and the lakes that are still protecting us from… well, us. But there’s no such thing as a “climate heaven” anymore.

The report from the British Institute of Actuaries speaks of “tail risk”: rare events with extreme magnitudes (those usually wearing the prefix MEGA and escorted by phrases such as “once in a thousand years”). The reality is that climate change is making such “rare” catastrophes increasingly common. No matter where you are, expect more frequent and off-the-chart phenomena and epidemics. It looks a whole lot like the world is now made of tail risk.

After all, think about other forms of tail risk. The “political tail risk” of a fascist movement rising and wreaking havoc once a century. The “social tail risk” where extremism isn’t the exception anymore, surrounding us and radicalizing the masses.

This is the essence of tail risk — once rare extremes becoming the new norm.

For millions of years, a delicately balanced planetary system of regular, multi-millennial changes in the Earth’s spin and orbit has strictly governed patterns of warm and cold. Now, this system has suddenly been disrupted by the injection of a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in just over a century. And we are clueless about producing food or manufacturing basic materials like concrete, steel, glass, and plastic without relying on fossil fuels.

Our challenge is to reinvent it, but you don’t solve a problem at the level it was created. In essence, the Anthropocene is ours to shape, and not in the soil or mud: the golden spike is to be found in our heads.

Our challenge is to reinvent our current situation, but we cannot solve a problem using the same approach of insatiable pursuit of growth no matter what created it. The Anthropocene era is ours to shape.

And the solution lies not in the soil or mud, but within our heads.

Be loud.

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