We’re on the highway to hell, missing all the exits

The point of no return arrives in the mid-2030s, when the rising emissions of greenhouse gases pushes the average global temperature up past +2 degrees Celsius.

This picture taken on December 4, 2019 shows a passenger aircraft flying across the setting sun in Sydney, as smoke haze continues to hang over the city with more than 50 bushfires still burning across New South Wales. Picture: Saeed KHAN / AFP

‘The point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” warned UN secretary-general António Guterres as the 25th climate summit (COP25) opened in Madrid recently – and the multitude of delegates from more than 100 countries presumably understood what he meant. But they ignored it.

The point of no return arrives in the mid-2030s, when the rising emissions of greenhouse gases pushes the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere up past 450 parts per million and the average global temperature up past +2 degrees Celsius.

The 2 degrees Celsius of warming caused by human beings trigger natural processes (“tipping points”) that also cause warming – and once they start, humans cannot stop them. The Big Three feedbacks are the loss of the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover, the melting of the permafrost zone, and the release of vast amounts of CO2.

Guterres called it the point of no return because after that we lose control. The warming will continue even if humans stop their own emissions. We will be trapped in a world even 5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial average.

That is exactly where the World Meteorological Organisation predicts we will be by the end of this century if current promises on emissions cuts are kept, but no more is done. Long before the end of the century that would mean the collapse of food production in the tropics and the sub-tropics, famines and huge refugee flows, mass death.

They never spell these things out at the climate summits, but almost everybody there knows them. And yet, once again, they failed to produce a deal that moves the process forward.

How can they be so blind to their own long-term interest in survival? The answer, alas, is that human politics is dominated by those whose interests will be advanced or damaged by what the government does right now, not in 15 years’ time. Take Australia, for example.

Australia is the driest continent, and as the heat mounts (think the present heatwave) the number and scale of bushfires has exploded. The biggest blaze, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, has already burned over 400,000 hectares and is growing.

But Australia is also the world’s biggest exporter of coal, mostly to China and Japan. Coal-mining only employs 38,000 Australians, but it brings in a lot of money, some of which inevitably ends up as political contributions.

That’s why, two years ago, Liberal (ie conservative) politician Scott Morrison brought a lump of coal into parliament. It was “clean” coal: it had been lacquered so that it wouldn’t dirty people’s hands. Morrison passed it around saying: “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.”

Morrison, now prime minister, denies any link between burning coal and global heating. He offers his “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the fires, but insists climate change is one of “many factors” fuelling the bushfires.

Of all the major emitters, only the European Union is taking its responsibilities seriously. The rest range from the deeply conflicted (like China and Canada, both aware that climate change is an existential threat but both hugely dependent on fossil fuels) to the outright deniers (Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United States).

So one by one, we are missing all the exits on the highway to hell.