Climate Policy-Making off the Rails?

Has climate policy-making gone right off the rails? That question pops into my head with increasing frequency these days, most recently when I glanced at a Guardian news headline: ‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3°C of global heating.

The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has a new report, Strengthening resilience to climate change recommendations for an effective EU adaptation policy framework,  and the story quoted Board member Maarten van Aalst saying that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit… It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science.”

This is truly extraordinary.

I thought of Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute, who has repeatedly warned that even 2.5°C “would lead to a complete melting of the big ice sheets, which would be a 10 metre sea level rise”, plus the collapse of all the big biomes on planet Earth and of marine biology, and with over one-third of the planet around the equatorial regions uninhabitably hot.

Warming has in practical terms already reached 1.5°C, the rate has accelerated by half, and 2°C by around 2040 seems likely. The global LNG industry sees exports doubling by 2050. That’s a 3°C or more path, and most scientists agree.

The worst thing we can do is pretend that living in a 3°C warmer world is not such a big deal, that it is a “doable” task.  Such an assumption is fundamentally flawed.

The European report recognises that “without adequate adaptation, most climate risks in the EU are projected to reach critical levels by mid-century” and taken together the risks threaten “eroding and destabilising the EU’s economic and social foundations”.

Yet it recommends adopting a reference scenario for adaptation planning of  2.8–3.3°C of global warming by 2100. This is considered the lowest acceptable baseline and should be complemented by the use of “more adverse emissions pathways for stress-testing”, where warming may exceed 4°C.

The same week, a group of world-leading scientists published The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory, warning that Earth’s climate is now crossing critical temperature thresholds that “may trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that amplify warming and destabilise distant Earth system components”, such that the system keeps warming and runs away from human effort to control it. Ominously, they say that  “we may already be close to or beyond the critical threshold”.

If that is the case, why focus on a 3°C adaptation scenario, when doing so normalises the idea that such adaptation is actually feasible?

This drift toward ever-more elaborate and fanciful notions of adaptation occurs because political leaders have lacked the courage to confront what the science actually demands: an emergency-scale mobilisation for deep, immediate decarbonisation and measures to cool the planet. Adaptation has become a surrogate for leadership and a way to appear pragmatic while avoiding the hard tasks.

This is the ‘adaptation trap’, because in reality the impacts are so significant that the only practical adaptation strategy is to avoid such levels of warming at all costs. Indeed, the European report recognises that there are immutable “hard limits” and “only reducing the rate and magnitude of warming can generally prevent these being reached and breached”. But it does not discuss what those limits might be.

In a major report 20 years ago, The Age of Consequences, a group of US security analysts described a 3°C hotter world, in which “massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events… nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges… armed conflict between nations over resources is likely and nuclear war is possible… the social consequences range from increased religious fervour to outright chaos.”

Have adaptation planners fully considered such analyses of the systemic risks? It appears that all too often a blind eye is turned to inconvenient truths. And Australia’s climate adaptation plan released last year also says it is “prudent” to plan for global warming levels of 2°C to 3°C by the end of this century.

In 2021, a report from the Australian Academy of Science, Risks to Australia of a 3-degree Warmer World, said that at 3°C, yields of key crops would reduce by up to 50 per cent.  Other research estimates that “beyond 2°C warming, the declines in suitable areas for the 30 crops [analysed] become more pronounced – in some cases approaching and passing 50 per cent”.  That in itself would cause global chaos.

Yet nowhere in the 2025 Australian adaptation plan is the most fundamental question asked: it is actually feasible to adapt to 3°C of warming, to sea-levels in the process of rising by tens of metres, a wholesale retreat from the coast, northern Australia being unliveably hot, and crop yields reducing by up to half, whilst people flee tropical Asia in their tens and hundreds of millions?

The question cannot be asked, because the answer is “no”, and that would shine a searchlight on Australia’s role as a petrostate, intent on expanding coal and gas exports till the global system collapses.

Australia’s adaptation plan suffers from all the weaknesses of the National Climate Risk Assessment on which it is based: siloed analysis, lack of integration, fence-sitting, conservative estimates of the pace of warming, a failure to examine systemic risks, and an unwillingness to ask the big questions, including about “hard limits”.

This is where climate policymakers have got to: an endless word salad of vacuous terms and mantras that are not solutions but obfuscations: “net zero”, “overshoot”,  “carbon capture and storage”, “resilience”, “keeping 1.5C alive”, and so on.

Climate policy-making has become Orwellian. It is why, after 30 COPs, emissions are still rising and the rate of warming is accelerating. It has lost contact with basic scientific realities, and is no longer fit for purpose.