Accelerating Warming Time-Bomb
Faster than Forecast Impacts Pressure Albanese Government
Smoke Haze Blankets Sydney As Bushfires Burn Across NSW 2019. (Photo by Jenny Evans/Getty Images)
Summary
- Global warming has reached 1.5°C fifteen years ahead of projections.
- The warming rate is accelerating, and extreme events are occurring faster than expected.
- System tipping points have already been crossed.
- A 3°C scenario threatens social collapse, displacement, and ecological damage.
- Australian risk assessments underestimate impacts, leaving communities and the government underprepared.
- The business-as-usual delusion embraced by policymakers that climate is just another issue is laid bare by the 1.5°C time-bomb.
Is the Albanese Government up to the task? Can the delayed first National Climate Risk Assessment deal with a fast-changing reality?
Global average warming of 1.5°C was not projected to occur till 2040, but has now been reached 15 years earlier than IPCC scientists suggested just seven years ago:
- In 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mid-range prediction for the world to warm to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was 2040.
- Now, a new World Meteorological Organisation report indicates Earth will cross this point in just two years, with a “70% chance that the 2025-2029 five-year mean will exceed 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average”.
- In fact, 2023 was 1.5°C and 2024 reached 1.6°C, and the running average for the last 24 months has been close to 1.6°C. For all practical purposes, the warming trend has reached 1.5°C.
Scientists have been shocked at the pace of change. The rate of warming has accelerated from less than 0.2°C per decade to 0.3°C or more per decade. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing at an increasing rate. Impacts and new extremes are occurring faster than forecast.
Big oil and gas are backtracking on reduction commitments fast, and planning increased production to 2050. Big banks and big business are abandoning previous climate net-zero commitments, in part because the COVID mobilisation and the Ukraine and Middle East wars have reduced focus on climate policy. There is the prospect of global emissions dropping only 10–20% by 2050 on the current policy path.
The Earth will likely hit 2°C of global average warming around 2040 and the system will then be more difficult to control as stronger positive feedbacks in the physical climate system will drive further warming.
In 2018, a group of leading scientists warned of a “Hothouse Earth” scenario in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining (that is, without further human perturbations). The late Prof. Will Steffen was the paper’s lead author and said that, “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway”.
We are at the gateway to hell right now!
A majority of climate scientists say we are heading to 3°C or more. Three degrees will very likely mean widespread social conflict, large-scale people displacement, war, failed states and social collapse. In a 3°C hotter world, new extremes — of rainfall and flooding, heat and drought — beyond past human experience will occur. And a committed sea-level rise of several metres will be in the process of inundating coastal cities and deltas. Large parts of the tropics will suffer “near-unlivable” extreme heat conditions, and the dry subtropics will dry out and desertify, together having catastrophic impacts on food and water security.
A January 2025 report on Planetary Solvency by the UK Actuaries Institute and the University of Exeter found that by 3°C, GDP losses may be ≥50%, with human mortality of ≥50%. In their estimation, there would be breakdown of critical ecosystems and Earth systems, and high levels of extinction of higher-order life. There would be significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/or state failure with rapid, enduring and significant loss of capital and systems identity.
We must now also face the bitter reality that when it comes to exceeding 1.5°C of warming, 2040 has become 2025. In other words, we have just “lost” 15 years from the emissions-reduction timetable.
What does that mean? At the 2015 Paris climate conference, the goal of holding warming to 1.5-2°C was agreed to, together with actions (in theory) to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, based on projections that warming would be 1.5-2°C by 2050. Logically, that “lost” 15 years means that this net-zero-by-2050 goal from 2015 — itself full of holes — now needs to be net-zero-by-2035.
We must now also face the bitter reality that when it comes to exceeding 1.5°C of warming, 2040 has become 2025. In other words, we have just “lost” 15 years from the emissions-reduction timetable.
Most policymakers, including the Australian Government, seem not to have recognised this so far. When the penny drops in Canberra that we are already at 1.5°C, will that realisation be reflected in the government’s overdue first National Climate Risk Assessment? If the assessment offers impact assessments for various levels of warming, but does not attach them to plausible timeframes — including worst-case scenarios where the damages are greatest — it will not be of much use in planning what needs to be done, and at what speed.
Australian Governments at all levels appear to be having trouble grappling with climate risk, and often appear to be in “catch-up” mode. When there are recurring “one-in-a-hundred-year” or a “one-in-five hundred-year” extreme events — for example flooding — the only conclusion is that the assessments of future climate risks are too conservative, and so vulnerable communities and governments are under-prepared. For example:
- Civil engineer Alan Hoban says flood maps around Australia drastically underestimate the impact climate change will have on rainfall due to conservative assumptions about how fast rainfall intensity will increase. “Very few flood maps in south-east Queensland, or even Australia, yet account for these changes,” he says.
- Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires were of an intensity not projected to occur till towards the end of the century.
- Parts of inland Australia are experiencing heat extremes several decades ahead of expectations. On 18 December 2019, Australia’s hottest day on record with an average maximum of 41.9°C, the heat in some areas aligned with worst-case 2040-2060 projections.
And the big risks are the tipping points in large-scale Earth systems, such as polar ice and forest and permafrost carbon stores. Tipping points are occurring now, including at both poles. Permafrost, boreal forests and the Amazon are becoming net carbon emitters. This year, new research has reaffirmed that 1.5°C is too high to prevent tipping points: researchers said there is a “significant” risk of large-scale Amazon forest dieback if global warming overshoots 1.5°C, yet we are there right now. And there is a new scientific warning that “ 1.5°C is too high for polar ice sheets”. The evidence grows that the 1.5°C target was never a safe target for humanity.
There are growing signs of system instability across a wide range of social spheres: democratic, security, economic and health (pandemics and food), to name but a few, as well in natural systems with exceedance of -planetary boundaries. “There is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one-way traffic into the unknown,” wrote the historian Mark Blyth in 2021.
All of this leads to one conclusion: we are on the edge of a precipice and humanity now needs to throw everything at the climate threat, literally “all hands on deck”. The business-as-usual delusion embraced by policymakers that climate is just another issue is laid bare by the 1.5°C time-bomb.
The risks are global, cascading and systemic, and not containable within borders, so the response requires unprecedented global co-operation, and a collective mobilisation of resources unprecedented in peacetime to protect human security and humanity’s future.
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About the Author
David Spratt
Research Director and Climate Analyst
Author examining existential threats, policy failures and urgent mitigation requirements globally.
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