I read Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet when I was 14 years old, and it scared the life out of me. Lynas takes the reader on a journey of what to expect from a world that’s one degree warmer, two degrees, three degrees, all the way up to six degrees. By the middle of the book, your blood pressure is high; by the end, you’re on the floor.
It is a well-researched book that offers us a window into many possible futures. Fortunately, the scientific consensus has moved away from the most extreme scenarios since its publication. Unfortunately, a lot of the public messaging has not. Many people believe a pathway to 5°C or 6°C is already locked in, and the only thing we can do now is prepare for the worst.
Let’s look at what the latest science says about where we might end up by 2100.
If no countries stepped up their climate efforts, simply preserving what they already put in place, we might end up at 2.5°C to 3°C higher than preindustrial temperatures by the end of the century. If countries met the targets they set for 2030 but enacted no policies afterward, we’d end up at 2.4°C. Many countries have set ambitious targets to reach “net-zero” emissions — most by the middle of this century. If they achieved this, we’d be in a 1.8°C warmer world.
This is both good news and bad news.
The good news is that we’re no longer heading for the worst-case scenarios that scared me as a teenager. The plunging costs of solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles, a step up in national policies, and a better understanding of what our energy future might look like have taken us off that terrifying path. And, importantly, countries have put commitments on the table that would keep us “well below 2°C.” Now, we’d be naive to assume that they’ll all deliver. But it does give us concrete pledges that we can hold governments to account on.
The bad news is that one of our global targets of keeping temperatures below 1.5°C of warming is now out of reach. And a 2.5°C warmer world — which we’re on course for — is still a scary and unacceptable one. It could spell the end of many coral reefs. It could cause significant damage to food production, especially in some of the poorest countries. Large parts of the world will experience grueling heatwaves. Arctic sea ice will be gone in the summer. Ice sheets are at a much higher risk of becoming unstable. We really want to avoid ending up there. And we can: 2.5°C or 3°C is not “locked in.” There is still time to put ourselves on a better trajectory.
To actually get on that trajectory, we need to think about our climate targets more constructively.
First, let’s be honest about where we’re heading. The 1.5°C target is dead. If our carbon emissions dropped to zero tomorrow, we could achieve it. But the reality is that our emissions aren’t going to fall quickly enough (I’m optimistic, but I’m not delusional). We need to be honest about this for a couple of reasons. One, countries need to adapt to the post-1.5°C world we’ll soon be living in; pretending this won’t happen robs them of the time they need to prepare. Two, the public — who are repeatedly told that 1.5°C is still within reach — will start to lose trust when we pass that target.
Second, we must avoid the temptation of throwing in the towel. That’s the most important message here: There is no point of no return that makes it pointless to act. Our 1.5°C and 2°C targets are not cliffs or thresholds. Every tenth of a degree is worth fighting for as it reduces the impacts of climate change and limits the damage that’s to come. 1.7°C is better than 1.9°C, which is better than 2.1°C. We need to stop obsessing over arbitrary targets and focus on how we can help reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as possible.
Third, we should all watch out for headlines based on worst-case scenarios. We’re not on the same trajectory to 4 or 5°C that we thought we were a decade ago. Unfortunately, a lot of reporting and studies are still based on these worst-case scenarios. It’s sometimes hard for nonexperts to know what scenario is being assumed without reading jargon-filled academic papers. My one quick piece of advice is to look out for any mention of “RCP8.5”: This is the acronym of the worst-case (but now implausible) scenario that has often been used in climate modeling. Of course, knowing the impacts of these extreme cases is useful for scientists, but not for policymakers or the public, who assume that this is the most likely outcome. It does make for a great apocalyptic headline, though.
With all of that said, let’s turn our attention to concrete actions you can take to reduce your personal carbon footprint: If you drive, then cycle, walk, or take public transport more. If you need a car, then an electric one is much better than a gasoline or diesel one. If you fly, this will be a big chunk of your footprint. I won’t tell anyone to stop flying completely (because for most people, it’s not going to happen), but reducing the amount you fly would make a massive difference.
We must avoid the temptation of throwing in the towel.
At home, heating and air conditioning will be your biggest energy-guzzler. Getting your home insulated and switching from a gas boiler to an electric heat pump will slash your home’s footprint (and your bills). Installing solar panels at home will also reduce your carbon footprint while cutting your energy bills. Some can’t afford the upfront costs — or rent a flat where they don’t have the option of putting up solar panels — but it’s a worthwhile investment for those who can. Also, if you can manage, switch to a renewable energy provider; this sends a signal that more and more people care about climate change and want low-carbon energy.
When it comes to food consumption, consider eating less meat and dairy and moving toward a more plant-based diet. This doesn’t mean you have to go fully vegan; for many, the all-or-nothing approach is daunting. But you can still have an impact by cutting back, especially on beef and lamb.
And finally, stress less about the small stuff — recycling, plastic bags and food wrappers, food miles, turning the lights off, leaving devices on standby — especially if it comes at the expense of the big things listed above. This is a concept called “moral licensing,” in which people feel they’ve contributed to the small stuff and therefore ignore their more carbon-intensive behaviors. People will often feel proud about bringing their plastic bag to a supermarket (which has a tiny carbon footprint) and then fill it with meat and dairy (which has a much bigger impact).
Of course, all of these individual actions on their own are not going to get us to the climate future we want. At a societal level, we need to go bigger and faster.
We’ll have to deploy low-carbon electricity sources like solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal as quickly as possible. To do that, we’ll need massive reforms around infrastructure projects so they can be completed more quickly. We’ll also have to accelerate advancements in batteries, which hold the key to the energy transition, and electrify as many sectors as we can, including road transport, heating, steel manufacturing, and short-haul aviation. Electrification is the most efficient way to decarbonize.
Additionally, we must reduce global meat and dairy consumption, while innovating high-quality protein alternatives, and invest in forest and ecosystem restoration to suck up lots of carbon. And finally, we should continue innovating in sectors that are not yet ready for large-scale deployment: cement and steel manufacturing, long-haul aviation, and ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
One of the most common questions I get asked is: Won’t we reach a point where it’s game over and our planet’s systems collapse, a point where we trigger runaway warming? Tipping points — a threshold where a system moves into an irreversible state — matter, but they don’t change what we need to do now to reduce emissions. There are a few key misconceptions about tipping points that are worth looking at here.
First, people often think that the planet has one single tipping point. Or they assume that the 1.5°C or 2°C targets themselves are a global tipping point: that once we pass them, we’re thrown into oblivion. That’s not true. There’s nothing special about 1.5°C. Things are not fine at 1.49°C but disastrous at 1.51°C.
Rather than a single global tipping point, there is a range of local or regional systems with different tipping points. Tropical coral reefs are one. The Amazon rainforest is another. The Greenland ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet. They won’t all “tip” irreversibly at once. While scientists don’t know exactly what temperature would trigger these individual points, there is a real risk of doing so, especially as warming gets toward 2°C. We shouldn’t hide from the devastating impacts this would have on regional ecosystems. But it’s not the case that they will set off runaway global warming, pushing us to 5°C.
All of these individual actions on their own are not going to get us to the climate future we want. At a societal level, we need to go bigger and faster.
Some tipping points will increase global temperatures a bit, but not by whole degrees. For example, if we were to have sea-ice-free summers in the Arctic (which seems likely), global temperatures would increase by around 0.15°C. A tipping point in the Amazon might have a similar effect. Hitting several of them could increase temperatures by 0.3°C or 0.4°C. That’s a lot. But it’s not the same as an abrupt change to a “Hothouse Earth.”
Another misconception is that these tipping points happen quickly: that if the Greenland ice sheet collapsed, sea levels would rise by 10 meters within years. Most of these large tipping points — like ice sheets — play out over centuries or even millennia. It might be 2500 or later before the ice sheet is mostly gone. Now, that would still be terrible — we don’t want to hand that problem to future generations. But it’s a very different problem from our coastlines shrinking within a decade, which is what people assume when they think about ice sheets “collapsing.”
All of this is to say that it’s not game over, despite what many apocalyptic predictions would have you believe. What we do matters, and what we ask of others — governments, companies, investors — does too. It’s never “too late” to protect what remains and build a better future that future generations deserve.
This article Don’t let climate fatalism become a self-fulfilling prophecy is featured on Big Think.