“We are at the crossroads now: We either say: this thing is too big for us, this task cannot be done. [Then] we will be transformed by nature, because we will end up with a planet warming by 4, 5, 6 or even 12 degrees. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and I have all the evidence. Or we say: We’re doing the transformation ourselves.” — Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, climate scientist, Postdam Institute.

The Global Threat

One of the many facets of humanity threatened by climate change is language itself, our ability to construct narrative to make sense of the world around us. How does a collection of words capture what confounds the limits of human imagination? How do you thread together a story about the unweaving of life?

These are questions we struggle to answer every day, but the bitter, impossibly incomplete summary we have right now is:

We are killing each other. We are extinguishing the conditions necessary for the dignified survival of the human species.

The changes being unleashed, as well as the changes we are failing to make — the blind spots we are continuing to hold — are relegating lands and lives to the abyss.

This month has brought into better clarity the incomprehensible numeracy of the scars we are carving into the planet. The rates of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are close to breaching the 410 ppm threshold. The last time levels were this high was the Pliocene Epoch, 3 million years ago. This matters because during the Pliocene, sea levels were between 15–25 meters higher than today. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was consistently above 400 ppm was 16 million years ago during the Miocene, or about 25 million years ago during the early Oligocene, when the Earth was unrecognisable compared to anything homo sapiens have ever experienced.

The Arctic today has record low ice levels: in late winter it has about as much ice as it had midsummer 35 years ago. This is deeply worrying, as previous research has shown that Arctic ice melt could catalyze uncontrollable climate change.

New research has lent further weight to the claim that global warming is going to alter the jet stream, making it weaker and more prolonged — the result of which is that weather patterns may persist for longer, driving extreme droughts, heat waves, and storms. In fact, analysis shows that a “human fingerprint” can now be found over nearly all extreme weather events.

Such rapid changes are exacting a profound psychic toll the world over. Iowan farmer Matthew Russell, whose family has tended to their land for five generations, recounts:

“Psychologically, in the last few years, there’s a lot of anxiety that I don’t remember having 10 years ago. In the last three or four years, there’s this tremendous anxiety around the weather because windows of time for quality crop growth are very narrow.”

The World Meteorological Organisation’s State of the Climate report for 2016 shows a planet heading into “truly uncharted territory”, defined by tumbling temperature records, heatwaves, and glacial melting. Jeffrey Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona commented:

“Earth is a planet in upheaval due to human-caused changes in the atmosphere. In general, drastically changing conditions do not help civilisation, which thrives on stability.”

Ensuring that stability will be no easy feat. Scientists have come up with a daunting roadmap for meeting the Paris Agreement goals, and achieving decarbonisation by 2050: global CO2 emissions will need to halve every decade. Net emissions from land use (agriculture, forestry) will have to dive to zero. Carbon dioxide removal technologies — those that suck carbon from the atmosphere — will need to scale up massively to the extent that they will have to pull 5 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere (double what soil and trees do already).

We are nowhere near this level of action; instead, we’re seeing the highest rates of CO2 growth on record.

The human and non-human cost of all this is harrowing.

Species in every ecosystem are being affected by increasing temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. Marine animals are moving towards the poles at the average rate of 72 kilometres a decade.

A new study has shown that India’s dwindling groundwater is tied to variable monsoon precipitation, linked to climate change. The result has been the worst drought in a century across Southern India, where dozens of farmers have committed suicide following crop losses and financial difficulties in wake of the drought, and communities have been forced to eat rats due to food shortages.

Bleached coral off the eastern coast of Australia. Photo credit: Acropora.

Another new study shows oceans warming 13% faster than previously thought. Large swathes of the Great Barrier Reef — the world’s largest living organism — are now dead. Professor Terry Hughes, a specialist in coral reef studies, said that “we didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years.” Australian journalist Crispin Hull, a frequenter of the coral reefs of Eastern Australia, recently the Great Reef. As he looked at the bleached coral, tears clouded his diving mask. Crispin noted:

“This is not a crime against humanity. This is a crime by humanity. We have sentenced to death the largest living structure on the planet: the Great Barrier Reef. The sentence is being carried out slowly and painfully before our eyes.”

To make matters even worse, the reef was further devastated by a powerful cyclone, which turned parts of the reef into an “underwater wasteland”.

New data is sharpening scientific fears that the Middle East and North Africa risks becoming uninhabitable in a few decades, as the availability of fresh water has fallen by two-thirds over the past 40 years. This research comes as evidence signals that nutrition and food security levels in the region have deteriorated sharply over the last six years.