The Guardian newspaper recently carried out a major survey, contacting over 800 climate experts, basically everybody who has ever been involved in the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. They were asked for their views on where the planet is heading in terms of climate change, and temperature in particular. The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, are not exactly cheerful.
Around half the experts responded to the survey, which is a very good response rate for this sort of exercise, and only 6% of those believe that we are going to stay within the 1.5°C (2.7F) internationally agreed temperature increase target (compared to pre-industrial days). The majority feel we are heading for a much worse outcome. As the Guardian says, “Almost 80% of the respondents … foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F)”.
It’s hard to see in truth how anyone can think we will stay within that 1.5°C level. Last month (April 2024) again saw the threshold exceeded. As the New Scientist reported, “Global temperatures last month were the highest ever recorded for the month of April, making this the 11th month in a row to set a record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The average global surface air temperature during April 2024 was 15.03°C (59.05°F), which is 0.14°C above the previous record for April set in 2016.
I know the definition of the Paris agreement 1.5°C talked about exceeding it for some years before we admit that it has been “broken”, but that feels like semantics really. It seems that 1.5°C is dead, as many of the experts said in the Guardian survey. The El Nino effect, which warms the oceans in the south of the planet is now on the wane, moving towards a neutral state, but it does not yet seem to be having any moderating effect on those temperatures. Marine air temperatures last month remained unusually high. And El Nino does not explain anywhere near fully the streak of records over the last year.
But despite the gloom, we need to keep pointing out that every 0.1°C still matters. There is an argument that by going on about 1.5°C, this has been positioned as an all or nothing level, which of course is nonsense. The difference between an eventual increase of 2°C versus 3°C for instance would be huge. When we think about the extreme weather we have seen in the last year , the prospect of another 1°C plus on top of the recent average is scary. At 3°C, cities such as Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Miami and The Hague will be underwater, according to the climatologists (and Venice, of course).
So the Guardian says, “Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck”.
Some of the experts report feelings of depression, despair and hopelessness. The younger scientists were more pessimistic than older, with women more pessimistic than men. They not surprisingly believe that the world must take action both to reduce emissions but also to prepare for the likely coming climate and weather disasters that we will almost certainly see.
We are going to hear the adaptation word more and more over the coming years – taking action to mitigate the risks and the events linked to climate change. But another issue is that many of the biggest problems are going to hit the poorest nations on earth, who cannot afford the sort of responses that the rich nations can. (Dubai might become in effect a totally air-conditioned city, I suspect, where you never need to step into the “real” heat. Mali or Bangladesh are unlikely to have similar options).
For businesses, it means looking harder and deeper into the impact that climate might have both in terms of internal operations and supply chains. We’ve seen extreme weather in unexpected places – the storms in the UAE recently, for example. Allied to the volatile political situation in different parts of the world, this is a time to put real effort and investment into supply chain risk management, if you’re not doing so already.