And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of impending climate catastrophe, we have—for too long—ignored the stark warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously warming the Earth. We will now pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heat waves that will easily exceed today’s extremes. The crucial point, he argues, is that there is no longer any chance of avoiding a dangerous, all-powerful climate collapse. We have passed the point of no return and can look forward to a future in which deadly heat waves and temperatures above 50C (120F) are common in the tropics. where summers in temperate latitudes will always be hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a much more hostile world than their grandparents,” insists McGuire. Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London and has also been an adviser to the UK government. In this regard, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazards Task Force, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still argue that we still have time, albeit not much, to bring about substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A quick move to net zero and halting global warming is still within our grasp, they say. Such claims are rejected by McGuire. “I know a lot of people who work in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. To be sure, they are all much more fearful about the future we face, but they won’t admit it publicly. I call this climate appeasement and I think it makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can even hope to start dealing with the crisis.” McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth in late 2021. It covers many of the record high temperatures that have just hit the planet, including the extremes that have hit the UK. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication approached, he found that many of these records had already been broken. “That’s the problem with writing a book about climate collapse,” says McGuire. “By the time it’s published it’s already out of date. That’s how fast things move.” Among the records broken while editing the book was the announcement that the temperature reached 40.3 degrees Celsius in eastern England on July 19, 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 deal with blazes across the capital, with a blaze 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 fires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a wake-up call, this 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 devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone National Park. “And as we move into 2022, it’s already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognizable to any of us.” Kurdish farmers battle a fire in a wheat field in Syria’s northeastern Hasaka province, a breadbasket for the region. Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images These changes highlight one of the most surprising aspects of climate collapse: the speed at which average global temperatures are rising is translating into extreme weather events. “Just look at what’s already happening in a world that’s warmed just a little over a degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out that the climate is changing for the worse much faster than predicted by early climate models. This is something that no one ever 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 last year’s Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow, it was agreed that every effort should be made to limit this rise to 1.5C, although to meet such a target, it was estimated that global carbon emissions would need to fall by 45 % by 2030. “In the real world, that’s not going to happen,” McGuire says. “Instead, we are on track for almost a 14% increase in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us breaching the 1.5C barrier in less than a decade.” And we must not doubt the consequences. Anything above 1.5 degrees Celsius will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. A rise of 2C or more will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most optimistic estimates of the emission reduction commitments made at Cop26, the world is set to warm between 2.4 and 3 C. From this perspective it is clear that there is little we can do to avoid the coming climate collapse. Instead, we need to adapt to the greenhouse world ahead of us and start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation from getting even worse, says McGuire. Fox Glacier in New Zealand in winter. It has receded by 900 meters in a decade. Photo: Gabor Kovacs/Alamy Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to deal with the worst effects of the coming climate collapse – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated homes in the UK will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050. “Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these unsuitable homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire. As for the reason for the world’s woefully slow response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inaction, mismanagement and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured we have sleepwalked to less than half the dangerous 1.5 C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some kind of miracle, we’ll crush it.” The future is forbidding in this regard, although McGuire emphasizes that if carbon emissions can be significantly reduced in the near future, and if we start adapting to a much warmer world today, a truly catastrophic and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be darker, but not catastrophic. We may not be able to give the slip in climate analysis, but we can go further in what would appear to be a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilization. “This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to stick yourself on a freeway or block 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. put pressure on your elected representatives both locally and nationally; and use your vote wisely to put a government in power that will talk about the climate emergency.” Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99 The Gulf Stream, which originates in the Gulf of Mexico and flows across the Atlantic Ocean, is being weakened by climate collapse. Photo: NOAA
Bites on the tail
Five unexpected threats posed by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere Beneath Our Feet As huge, thick sheets of ice disappear from high mountains and from the poles, previously compressed rock crusts begin to bounce, threatening to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are well on our way to bequeathing to our children and their children not only a much warmer world, but a more geologically strained one,” says Bill McGuire. New Battlegrounds As crops burn and hunger spreads, communities clash and the election of populist leaders – who will promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace. More worrying are tensions over shrinking water supplies rising between India, Pakistan and China, all of which possess nuclear weapons. “The last thing we need is a hot water war between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” observes McGuire. Methane Bombs Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane is 86 times more powerful at warming 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 become even hotter. Losing the Gulf Stream As the ice melts, the resulting cold water pouring in from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf Stream, which carries a huge amount of heat from the tropics to the seas across Europe. Signs now show that the Gulf Stream is already weakening and could shut down completely before the end of the century, triggering severe winter storms in Europe. Calorie crunch Four-fifths of all calories consumed worldwide come from just 10 cultivated plants, including wheat, corn and rice. Many of these staples will not grow well under the warmer temperatures that will soon become the norm, indicating a huge reduction in food availability,…
