The Boiling Point
A new year has brought with it another new climate linked disaster. The fires that now encircle Los Angeles have so far destroyed more than 10,000 buildings and forced almost 180,000 people to flee their homes. The economic cost of the ongoing blaze is set to surpass $135 billion, while the current death toll of ten will surely rise once a full assessment of the damage has taken place. Although Southern California is no stranger to wildfires, the ferocity of the current fire as well as its proximity to densely populated urban areas have seen it described as unprecedented. But there should be no doubt that this is part of a new normality, an emerging reality in which climate change induced catastrophes intrude more and more upon all of our lives.
As the suburbs of one of the world’s most famous cities went up in flames, scientists from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service today (10th January) released data showing that last year the average global temperature was 1.6°C above the pre-industrial average. This is the first time that the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C has been surpassed and while this goal is measured on the average over several years, it is now abundantly clear that it has become impossible to achieve.
2024 was a year that demonstrated just how catastrophic global warming can be. The millions impacted when Hurricane Milton pummelled Florida, the devastation wrought by once in a century floods in Spain, the hundreds dying in India as a result of temperatures that at times surpassed 50°C, the 13.29 million acres of Canadian forests destroyed by fire, and the widespread failure of crops in southern Africa are all foreboding reminders that the planet is now warmer than at any point in the entire history of human civilization.
As we shoot past the grim milestone of 1.5°C, we can expect further catastrophic impacts. In some parts of the tropics, the heat will be too much for humans to safely endure. High humidity combined with high temperatures will mean that sweat will no longer evaporate off people’s bodies and the internal mechanisms that keep us cool will eventually break down. If (or to put it more appropriately, when) we surpass the 2°C mark, major centres of civilization such as the Middle East, India and parts of China could become literally uninhabitable. And even in areas where humans can survive, heatwaves and droughts will render agriculture extremely difficult. It is possible that humanity will thus endure an unprecedented global food crisis this century. At the same time, floods that used to occur once every hundred years will strike annually. Wildfires will burn like never before, encroaching upon cities just as we have seen this week. Hurricane season will last longer, and storms will become more intense. Unless you are a good deal older than the aged millennial writing these words, all this is likely to occur in your lifetime.
Worryingly, it is entirely possible that we have already passed the point at which any of this can be prevented. A concept worth paying close attention to in this regard is that of a “tipping point”, defined as “the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change”. In the climate system, a tipping point occurs when changes in the environment “kick off reinforcing loops that ‘tip’ a system from one stable state into a profoundly different state.” Such tipping points include the collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and in Antarctica, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of the ocean current system in the Atlantic, and the melting of sea ice in the Arctic. Each of these tipping points today appears to be on the verge of being reached.
Examining just one tipping point — the melting of Arctic sea ice — can show us how tipping points work, and just how close we are to the precipice. The Arctic has been warming far faster than the rest of the planet, and this means that over time there is less and less sea ice. Ice reflects a large amount of the energy from the sun back into space but when sea ice melts that heat is instead absorbed by the ocean, warming the planet and causing even more ice to melt which in turn results in hotter seas, and so on and so forth. Eventually, we should expect to see the emergence of an inescapable feedback loop. The tipping point will have been reached, and no amount of climate change mitigation can turn back the clocks.
The bad news doesn’t end there. The warmer Arctic weather accompanying the loss of sea ice will also result in the thawing of the permafrost, releasing vast deposits of methane; a greenhouse gas that has a warming effect “80 times stronger than carbon dioxide”. Global warming will then accelerate and cause more ice to melt, thus intensifying the feedback loop that results from the tipping point. As with so many other indicators of climate change, the melting of the permafrost is occurring far sooner and much quicker than many scientists predicted.
Similar dynamics are at play with all the other major tipping points, although there is a high degree of uncertainty over when they will be triggered, or even whether they already have been. Such unpredictability should be a cause for further alarm. We have surpassed 1.5°C of warming earlier than most scientists believed possible and there are now concerns that “an unexpected factor has kicked in, causing a worrying acceleration of global heating”. Could it be that we have already triggered one or more of the major climatic tipping points? While there are several potential reasons as to why last year was warmer than expected, one study suggested that once we hit 1.5°C of global warming, four of the five major tipping points shift from being merely possible to being probable. When this occurs there could be “A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests [that] could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile”. Nobody is truly certain whether it is too late or not to prevent this outcome, but there are indications aplenty that if it is not too late, it will be soon.
Despite the dire nature of our situation, we are yet to undertake the type of radical action needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. While the data has not been released, 2024 looks likely to have been another record year of carbon emissions. It is worth pointing out that some are more to blame for this than others. Today, as fires continue to decimate the wealthy suburbs of Los Angeles, Oxfam reported that “The richest 1 percent have burned through their share of the annual global carbon budget — the amount of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere without pushing the world beyond 1.5°C of warming — within the first 10 days of 2025”. According to their analysis, it would take an individual from the poorest half of humanity three years to produce the same level of carbon emissions. As a result of the continued recklessness of our warped economic system, we remain on track to experience a truly cataclysmic rise of 2.7°C this century.
And yet we march on, edging ever closer to the tipping points that will doom our civilization. 2024 was the hottest year on record, but as one climate scientist sardonically put it:
Personally, I’m finding it a little difficult to enjoy. One reason for this is the likely answer to a question I have been posing to myself in recent days. That question concerns whether we might reach a different type of tipping point anytime soon. A societal tipping point, where one single climate linked disaster proves to be so devastating that it alerts us to the danger we face (and in particular, wakes up the more powerful social classes). A tipping point that compels us all to agitate for the sort of socio-economic transformations that this crisis demands.
Might the fires currently encircling Los Angeles be such an event? Even if we ignore the rampant climate change denialism across society, I feel there is little cause for hope in this regard. The aerial images of burned-out urban areas in California look eerily similar to those in Gaza. As a society, we have largely averted our eyes from the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and there is no reason to believe that once the fires are extinguished in Los Angeles they too won’t soon be forgotten. Destruction and human suffering, war, natural disasters, the rapid disappearance of entire communities, potentially even entire nations, no longer holds our attention for long. As the frequency of tragedy grows, we seem to notice it less and less. As such, the type of event that might herald a long overdue transformation of society is also likely to be the type of event that will tell us it is already too late.
There is a famous fable in which a frog is gradually boiled alive but does not jump out of the pan even though it would be easy for him to do so. The story goes that since the water is tepid to begin with, the frog feels no discomfort. As the water is slowly brought to the boil, each incremental rise in temperature does not concern the frog and he remains in the water. Eventually, of course, he is boiled alive. So, fellow frogs, it seems to me that the tipping point, and the boiling point, and the wake-the-hell-up point, are all rapidly approaching. Maybe it’s time we hopped out of this saucepan?
Zack Breslin is an essayist and author of several books including Donald Trump: Deadbeat Tyrant and The Coming Storm
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