Heat Waves - In Red & Black: Survey says scientists fear climate chaos

WILLIAM RAU

‘We are on a highway to climate hell
with our foot on the accelerator,’
— António Guterres, UN Secretary General

Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor for The Guardian, had a brilliant idea. He sent questionaires to 843 lead authors and review editors of reports for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and 380 of world’s best climate scientists responded. When writing IPCC reports, individual scientists are constrained by a strict code of scientific objectivity and the requirement for group consensus in studies. Both lead to overly cautious estimates whose predictions are often revised upward in subsequent reports. Asking individuals to respond to a survey removes these constraints.

Unleashed IPCC scientists deliver dire, emotionally anguished news. Nearly all see global heating blowing by a temperature increase of 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times (Carrington 2024b). Beyond 1.5°C, damage to the world’s ecosystem becomes increasingly severe, all encompassing, and dreadfully costly in lost treasure and lives. Particularly alarming is the 77% of respondents pegging increased end of century temperatures at 2.5°C (4.5°F) or greater. And more than half (52%) of those under age 50 expect a rise of at least 3°C (5.4°F), a level which will turn our “blue boat home” into a dystopian tinderbox. “There is no safe place for anyone,” replied one, and “No place to run,” said another (Carrington 2024a).

These predictions of extreme temperature increases explain the fear, despair, and anger running through scientists’ replies. One expert on food security is “scared mightily — I don’t see how we are able to get out of this mess.” Another sees searing heat as “the biggest threat humanity has faced, with the potential to … kill millions, if not billions, through starvation, war over resources, displacement.” Yet another sees “humanity … heading toward destruction.” A U.S. scientist offers some American angst: “I feel resigned to disaster as we cannot separate our love of bigger, better faster, more. …. Capitalism has trained us well” (Carrington 2024a).

Extreme heat will reshape the planet in mind boggling ways. By 2090 a 2.7°C (4.9°F) rise will remove 2.7 billion people from the “human climate niche” where our civilizations emerged (Lenton et al. 2023). These billions will have to migrate or face grave difficulty surviving in a deadly, impoverished hothouse. At 3°C, nearly 200 coastal cities housing 900 million people — including Alexandria, Bangkok, The Hague, Miami, Osaka, Shanghai — will be under water (Webb 2023). Once more, migration to higher land will be the only viable option for many. We are already facing the beginning of what will become the largest population displacement in world history as increasing sea levels are already forcing an exodus out of small island and coastal villages (then cities), while increasingly unlivable heat will force another exodus out of the tropics.

In the past, Democrats and Republicans would unite over climate chaos as a crisis; they would simply have healthy disagreements over solutions. No longer. At a recent gathering of oil executives at Mara-Lago, Donald Trump offered the oil tycoons tax breaks and eliminated regulations worth $110 billion if they would kick in $1 billion to his election campaign (Dawsey & Joselow 2024; Milman & Noor 2024). This used to be called a bribe.

America is already travelling down the road to climate hell. If Trump is elected, we will be putting the peddle to the metal. How quickly we can get there?

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