As the tenth anniversary of the Paris agreement looms, self-proclaimed “climate realists” argue that the targets set in Paris a decade ago are unachievable. Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 is “utterly implausible” and we are on track to blow past not just 1.5°C, but also 2°C, perhaps heading towards 3°C by the end of the century. So says Varun Sivaram, a former aide to John Kerry, who directs the Council on Foreign Relations’ Climate Realism Initiative. It’s a view that is catching on across the international centre-left: the Tony Blair Institute is another fount of climate realist thinking.
The logical corollary of this “realism” about the failure of climate mitigation is that we must now prioritise some combination of adaptation (to help us cope with the inevitable consequences of rising temperatures), carbon dioxide removal (to mop up the emissions we failed to abate) and geoengineering (to take the edge off by dimming the sun).
What makes climate realism appealing is that it eschews wishful thinking—or at least claims to. In their new book, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm put this claim in the dock. They dissect each of the technological “solutions” proffered by realists in turn and find that every single one is riddled with flaws. The realists, it transpires, have merely swapped wishful thinking about humanity’s ability to kick its fossil fuel habit for magical thinking about our ability to upend the laws of physics and chemistry.
The Long Heat is the second half of a two-book project the authors (half-jokingly) refer to as “a Marxist IPCC report of a readable nature”. In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, which was published last year, they excoriated the actual IPCC for legitimising what they call “overshoot ideology”: the idea that we can overshoot 1.5°C and then turn the global thermostat back down later—and that everything will be fine if we do so. Carton and Malm return to this theme in The Long Heat, arguing that the idea of “overshoot and return” is based on outdated science.
In a chapter that should be required reading for every person on the planet, they chronicle the evolution of climate science from its “gradualist” beginnings in the late 19th century to the paradigm-busting science of climate tipping points in the early 21st. Climate tipping points burst onto the scene in 2008, with the publication of an article by Tim Lenton and colleagues on “Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System”. Lenton and his colleagues looked at 15 subsystems of the climate system—the Amazon rainforest or the Greenland ice sheet, for example—and introduced the idea that there is a tipping point for each of these subsystems, beyond which “the future state of the system is qualitatively altered”. When a tipping point is crossed, Carton and Malm explain, “the change takes on a dynamic of its own. Like an avalanche proper, it feeds itself… and develops a runaway momentum.” In other words, tipping points are thresholds beyond which a certain aspect of climate breakdown—the collapse of a particular ice sheet, for instance—becomes effectively irreversible.
The vital question is where these thresholds are. Sadly, the news is not good for the overshoot-and-return plan. The latest science indicates that “the crucial zone between 1.5°C and 2°C is populated by [tipping points] the crossing of which would have effects that might not be possible to wind back on a timescale meaningful to humans”. The Greenland ice sheet, which would contribute seven metres of sea-level rise, could enter a death spiral at 1.6°C. The tipping point for the West Antarctic sheet, which would add another five metres, is thought to be somewhere between 1 and 1.5°C—meaning we may already have passed it. That doesn’t mean five metres of sea rise is imminent: the process of collapse may take decades or even centuries after the tipping point has been crossed. But the crucial point is that, however slowly it plays out, the process is effectively unstoppable, even if we do eventually reduce the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere and return average temperatures to below the threshold.
Then there’s the permafrost: expected to thaw abruptly at around 1.5°C. The Amazon rainforest: expected to tip into “a spiral of dieback driving [it] into the alternative state of a dry scrubland” at, you guessed it, 1.5°C. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—a system that should be of particular concern to those of us living in Britain, since, were it to collapse, it could make outdoor farming all but impossible in these isles—is thought to have a tipping point somewhere between 1.4 and 2.2°C.
Adaptation clearly becomes orders of magnitude harder in a world where tipping points have been crossed
What does all this mean for the climate realists’ agenda? Adaptation clearly becomes orders of magnitude harder in a world where these tipping points have been crossed. Carbon removal becomes a largely futile exercise; cooling the planet after tipping points have been passed won’t bring back ice sheets and glaciers that are a legacy of the last ice age. Geoengineering appears to hold more promise: “if it were to be deployed tomorrow, we could go back below 1.5°C to 1.3°C and 1.1°C and onwards in what would, for all practical purposes, be an instant”.
By far the most plausible form of geoengineering that could be deployed at a cost easily “within the means of an advanced capitalist country” is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). It would require a fleet of high-flying planes to patrol the stratosphere spewing sulphates that reflect solar radiation back out into space, thereby cooling the planet below. We know this technology works because it basically mimics what volcanoes do. Indeed, when SAI first started to be discussed in the 1990s, it was known colloquially as “the Pinatubo option” after the 1991 volcano in the Philippines, which sent so much sulphur into the stratosphere that average global temperatures fell by half a degree for a whole year after the eruption.
But SAI has serious drawbacks, too. One predictable effect, according to Carton and Malm, is that “average cooling would translate into comparative ‘overcooling’ of the tropics and ‘undercooling’ of the poles”. Since the steep temperature gradient between the equator and poles is what drives most of the earth’s weather systems, this would “scramble regional climates and send them off like rafts on a swirl of eddies, their courses and ultimate destinations impossible to foretell”. India’s monsoon could be permanently enfeebled, inducing chronic drought. Globally, yields of maize, rice, soy and wheat would be negatively impacted by the hazy light (the whole sky would be turned milky white by the sulphates, much like the sky over the worst-polluted cities in the world today). Solar panels would become less effective. So too wind turbines, as long periods of no wind would become more common in many places. And, eventually, the sulphates injected into the stratosphere would drift back down to earth, polluting the air and causing damage to human lungs and hearts. There’s a reason strenuous efforts have been made to reduce the sulphur content in marine fuels and to scrub sulphates from coal-plant emissions: these are deadly particles.
Despite all this, Carton and Malm think it is almost inevitable that SAI will be implemented. “It is simply too easy to do, with too immediate apparent gains in temperature reduction, poised against too overwhelmingly extreme dangers from untreated heating… One day, someone – not anyone, but someone – will do it; perhaps one day soon, perhaps in the early 2030s, perhaps a little later.” They have a pretty clear idea of who the “someone” will be: the United States government. Why? Because the US remains today the pre-eminent military superpower. It has the wherewithal to run the operation and, more importantly, it has the wherewithal to stop anyone else doing it. Why would the US allow a rival superpower to “grab the reins of planetary governance”?
From this flow further implications. The US is, today, the largest producer of fossil fuels in the world. Not only do US fossil-fuel companies stand to lose trillions in a transition away from oil, gas and coal, so do US banks and asset managers, who are heavily exposed to the sector through their lending and investment portfolios. It is therefore inconceivable that a US-led geoengineering effort would be accompanied by a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. This is problematic because, as the authors point out, “every negative side effect from geoengineering will worsen the longer it goes on and the larger the quantities of sulphates injected”. (Italics in original.)
Surely, though, there is some hope that a future US administration, a little more enlightened than the present one, would choose to act rationally by deploying SAI to buy time, while simultaneously driving a rapid decarbonisation of the global economy?
Carton and Malm are scathing about the “rationalist-optimists” who think this scenario is plausible: “the climate crisis is determined by irrational forces through and through – and into this forcefield, the rationalist-optimists throw their project, with hopes that amount to giving a hallucinatory psychotic the codes to an atomic bomb and expecting that it will work out just fine.” Unless the source of the irrationality—the nexus of vested interests that the authors refer to as “fossil capital”—is tackled, the idea of SAI being deployed “prudently” is a dangerous illusion.
Lentonist science requires, in the authors’ view, a Leninist response
This brings us to the seemingly inevitable endpoint of Carton and Malm’s argument: to achieve any kind of good outcome, the climate movement’s top priority must be the destruction of fossil capital. To the extent that hype around geoengineering or carbon removal distracts from this central task, it is making our predicament worse. Adaptation is a necessity, but scientifically illiterate sanguinity about our ability to adapt to a world 3 degrees hotter than the pre-industrial average is, to put it politely, unhelpful.
The authors do not shy away from the revolutionary implications of their analysis. “It would obviously be much nicer,” they write, “to live in a social-democratic, evolutionary, reformist world in which social and natural systems are re-engineered by increment. Alas, we do not.” Lentonist science requires, in the authors’ view, a Leninist response. They refuse to take the continuing victory of fossil capital as a given, though they are far from optimistic about turning the tables. The climate crisis lacks a ready-made revolutionary subject akin to the 19th-century proletariat, which, through resistance, extracted laws to limit the length of the working day, for example. “Because climate limits are not embodied in a class, breaking them does not call forth the same response as the breaking down of workers’ bodies… The formation of a subject of resistance is here a far more circuitous, drawn-out, uncertain affair.” But at least they only refuse to accept political realities, rather than scientific ones.
