Surprise, surprise: all that climate stuff scientists have been warning us about is coming back to bite us. And by us, of course, we mean all of humanity.
As reported by the Guardian, scientists just published a warning that Earth is approaching a point of no return. A new study in the journal One Earth shows multiple climate systems — the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, boreal permafrost, the Amazon rainforest — are all much closer to collapse than previously thought.
“Research shows that several Earth system components may be closer to destabilising than once believed,” the researchers urged. “While the exact risk is uncertain, it is clear that current climate commitments are insufficient.”
The analysis is based on climate “tipping points,” meaning collapses of environmental systems that lead other climate systems beyond their own tipping points, creating a snowball scenario where the planet spirals into a worst-case-scenario known as “hothouse Earth.” Under this scenario, the long-term temperature is projected to rise about 9 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial averages — which would be really bad.
“Crossing even some of the [tipping point] thresholds could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said Christopher Wolf, a scientist at the environmental group Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.”
What makes this all particularly insulting is the fact that the poor people of the world — those who will suffer the earliest and deepest losses as a result of climate change — are powerless to stop these tipping points from boiling over. And not for lack of will: the global climate movement is growing steadily, as Americans have perhaps never been more aware that climate change will impact the low-income people of the world the most.
Unfortunately, the power to reverse these decisions doesn’t belong to the people, but to a small cabal of the ultra-rich. The future of the planet is so far out of our control that some environmental experts argue not even the world’s most powerful governments can stop the collapse.
As University of Manitoba professor David Camfield and author of the 2022 book “Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change” has explained, the level of political power held by the ultra-rich and their corporations is so immense that even a government with popular support and commitment to emissions cuts would struggle under the weight of corporate investment strikes, pressure from credit agencies, and catastrophic market disruption.
“To weaken those political obstacles sufficiently that a government could get a just transition underway would take massive pressure of the kind that only movements can unleash,” Camfield asserts.
The math, in other words, is brutal. Capitalism’s logic demands unending accumulation of wealth, leading to a world in which corporations must grow or die, no matter the consequences. To transition out of this mess would mean weakening capital’s entire grip on power — something which has only ever been achieved when the great masses of toiling people come together to demand a better world.
More on climate change: The Richest 1 Percent Burned Their Entire Share of Carbon for the Year in Just 10 Days