An exploration of climate futures for working class militants.
Modelling the future of global warming is a deeply difficult exercise. There are two main sources of uncertainty. One is uncertainty in the geophysical climate models. We know that increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions warm the planet, but the complexities of the climate system make it hard to know by how much. The amount of warming produced by a given amount of GHG emissions is called ‘sensitivity’, and it is still subject to debate. The median estimate of sensitivity is that doubling atmospheric CO2 will cause ~3°C of warming1.
The other source of uncertainty concerns the amount of future GHG emissions. We do not know what politics, society, the economy and technology will look like in the future. As a result, those looking to model future warming create ‘scenarios’. Each scenario assumes a certain amount of GHG emissions. Typically these scenarios range from optimistic (with rapid, immediate and deep cuts to emissions) to pessimistic (where emissions continue to rise throughout the century). The most relevant scenarios concern ‘current policies’ (also known as ‘business as usual’), which try and predict emissions based on decisions and policies that have been implemented today.
These ‘current policies’ scenarios have become massively more optimistic in the last 20 years. In the 2001 IPCC2 report, the baseline assumption was that the world would warm 6°C by 2100, an apocalyptic amount of warming. The most recent IPCC report sees current policies leading to 2.4°C to 3.5°C of warming by the end of the century3. 2.4°C of warming would still be devastating, and 3.5°C catastrophic. But these are no longer ‘humanity’s last survivors pick through the rubble’ type scenarios.
Three other pathways are worth considering: the International Energy Agency, Climate Action Tracker, and the UN Emissions Gap Report. Each uses slightly different models (while the IPCC presents the aggregation of multiple climate models), but their predictions are coherent with the IPCC: they see current policies leading to median end of century warming of 2.4°C, 2.7°C and 2.9°C respectively. The optimistic IEA estimate is driven by its view that renewables will replace fossil fuels more rapidly than projected by others4. It is worth noting however that in all of these scenarios the planet continues to warm past 2100, as current policies are not sufficient to bring global emissions to net zero by 2100 (warming will probably stop once net zero is reached).
Climate Action Tracker pathways:
There are two related reasons that ‘business as usual’ forecasts have come down so much in the last 20 years. The first is that the world has taken meaningful action against global warming. Emissions have been consistently falling year-on-year in most of Europe, even with continuing economic growth, due to its implementation of a robust carbon price and support for renewable energy5. Coal is being phased out across the world. Other countries including China and the US have made real and material investments in clean energy (although China continues to expand coal-fired power).
The second reason forecasts have fallen so much is because of a fluke of physics and engineering. Solar power and batteries have become startlingly cheap6:
Solar is now the cheapest new electricity source in most of the world. As a result there has been a solar boom in places as disparate as Germany, China and Pakistan. China’s decision to become dominant in the green economy has resulted in it exporting clean energy equipment across the world at bargain-bin prices. While this boom in solar is enormous and noteworthy, it is not sufficient on its own, as seen by estimates of a still-awful 2.4-3.5°C of warming. Instead of reducing global emissions, the boom is expected to prevent them from continuing to rise7.
We should not be mistaken by those on the left who claim that ‘no energy transition is happening’. It is happening, rapidly, globally, and deeply. But not nearly rapidly, globally or deeply enough. At the same time as the worst cases have improved, the best cases have deteriorated – creeping up from 1°C of warming, to 1.5°C, to now just below 2°C.
What about feedback loops, runaway warming and the ‘hothouse earth’?
Some of the impacts of global warming cause more warming in turn, so-called ‘positive feedback loops’. Ice reflects more heat back into space than darker water or earth, so as ice melts the rate of warming is accelerated. Changes in cloud cover, desertification, and the release of methane trapped underneath permafrost are all examples of positive feedbacks. There is concern that past a certain threshold, warming could become independent of human emissions and, through a self-reinforcing loop, lead us to a ‘hothouse earth’8.
This is a real concern that should be taken seriously. One of the most-cited climate papers in recent years9, with legendary late Australian climate scientist Will Steffen as lead author, suggested that the impact of these feedback loops could take us from 2°C to as much as 5°C all on their own over the course of coming millenia. In which case we’re back to visions of survivors picking through rubble.
A note of caution is warranted: hothouse earth represents the worst case, and over the timescale of millenia, not decades or centuries. 5°C is an upper estimate. But the point remains that each additional increment of warming increases the risk of feedback loops causing a tipping-point cascade and a hothouse earth.
Despite the common myth, the climate models used by the IPCC do incorporate positive feedbacks. They also incorporate negative feedbacks, such as increased vegetation resulting from higher atmospheric CO2. The models suggesting between 2.4°C and 3.5°C of warming are the best scientists’ best guesses of the most likely outcome, including the effects of positive feedback loops. The tail risk of a hothouse earth is another reason to fight to reduce emissions, but apocalyptic extremes at or above 5°C remain unlikely given our current understanding of the earth system.
What about geoengineering?
After a volcano erupts, it ejects enormous amounts of fine particles including sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the upper atmosphere, partially blocking out the sun. Large eruptions, such as Krakatoa, can cool down the earth substantially. It would be very easy for humanity to replicate this effect. Pumping enough SO2 into the stratosphere to counteract global warming would cost billions or low tens of billions of dollars a year (this is a form of proposed geoengineering known as ‘solar radiation management’).
This idea is objectively insane. Blocking out the sun no more undoes the greenhouse effect than drinking coffee makes you sober. The unintended consequences would be massive, and it raises all sorts of unanswerable questions, such as who gets to decide or who controls the planetary thermostat.
But solar radiation management would work at its stated goal: reducing planetary temperatures. And it would be doable for a medium-sized nation or even a rogue billionaire. It is easy to imagine a nation like India or Indonesia suffering an appalling heatwave that kills millions, and responding with solar radiation management10. Who would stop them?
This leads to the final point about trying to understand our planetary trajectory. Some form of geoengineering or other is very likely, including solar radiation management. As the truly horrifying impacts of global warming are felt, sooner or later someone will try drastic measures to make it go away. Whether its a good idea or not is irrelevant. The desperation of a warming world makes it all but inevitable. In this case we will be confronting climate catastrophe of an entirely different kind. Not necessarily a warmer world, but still one much-changed from the stable climate of the last 10,000 years.
What does this mean for working class militants?
The alarmism around climate that has crept into the left needs to be put into perspective. We do not have ‘5 years to avert the apocalypse’. If we lose in this decade, all is not lost. If we lose in the next decade, all is not lost. Warming will almost certainly not stay below 1.5°C, but that does not mean the fight is over. We are fucked, but we can still fight over how fucked. We will never stop fighting over how fucked. Every molecule of carbon counts.
So there are no shortcuts. No ‘one weird trick’, whether electoral opportunism, Leninist putschism or insurrectionary individualism. The crackpots building bunkers in the hills will be waiting a long time with their beans. The environmental struggle is much like any other struggle. Reforms can be won and progress made11, but there can never be a green capitalism, and final safety for the planet requires the victory of our class over capitalism.
We need to focus on building power, with discipline and care, taking wins along the way while we can, but never forgetting the goal of socialism. The faster we win, and the deeper the changes we make, the more lives we save, and the lower the risk of a hothouse earth.
However, just because the struggle continues does not mean it continues everywhere. Some parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Some already have. Climate change summons the spectres of drought, famine and war, and we can see the conflict belt in the Sahel as a warning for what is to come12. But while poorer and more unstable places slip into chaos, other parts of the world will remain relatively calm13. People will inevitably seek to flee, and the struggle to fight the nativist right and welcome refugees to safety will be critical.
The possibility of geoengineering drives two points home. The first is that the future is profoundly unpredictable. A rising far right, great power competition, nuclear weapons, inequality, AI, environmental collapse14 and things we have yet to imagine will shape the future in radical ways, blindsiding everyone.
The second point is that the future is open. Climate models can give the impression of inevitability, but nothing is inevitable. The history of the 21st century is not yet written. We have a world to win.
Endnotes
1. ‘Median’ here means that in the model, there is a 50% chance of warming above that level and a 50% chance of warming below it. As will be discussed, focusing on the median can sometimes hide less likely but extreme outcomes. Unlikely extremes matter – you wouldn’t drink a coffee with a 1% chance of killing you.
2. The IPCC or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the UN climate research body. Its reports are written by consensus and as a result are the gold standard of climate research, and its reports are a great place to start for those looking to learn more. Each report includes a summary for policymakers, a technical summary and the full report. The summary for policymakers suffers from political interference from fossil-fuel states, however the technical summary does not. For those interested in reading more, start with the technical summaries (or for the synthesis report, the ‘longer report’).
3. IPCC AR6 WGIII technical summary, 2022, page 70
4. Fossil fuel companies look to the IEA, as the most respected energy body in the world, in order to make investment decisions. The IEA predicting a faster phase-out of fossil fuels may fulfil its own prediction by discouraging investment. Under its executive director Fatih Birol, the IEA has earned both criticism and applause for its focus on (and some suspect advocacy for) the energy transition. See: The IEA’s divisive mission to decide the future of oil, 2024, Financial Times
5. It is sometimes claimed that growth necessarily causes higher emissions. This is untrue. Europe has seen falling emissions, even when accounting for the emissions it ‘imports’ (e.g. the emissions required to build cars imported into europe). See: Many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions, even if we take offshored production into account, Hannah Ritchie, 2021, published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling’
6. IPCC AR6 Synthesis Longer Report, 2023, Page 54
7. Although this is unequal across the world. Emissions in the rich world are falling, but are rising rapidly in the developing world (while in China they appear to be plateauing). In the rich world we see renewables replacing fossil fuels, while in the developing world we see simultaneous expansion in renewables and fossil fuels. Although per-capita emissions are much higher in the west and the historic and moral burden falls greatest there, it is indisputable that the planetary thermostat will be defined far more by decisions made in Asia and Africa than in Australia, Europe or the US
8. ‘Runaway warming’ is another phrase commonly used, although technically this refers to a planet shifting into a Venus-like state with no liquid water, which will not happen as a result of global warming.
9. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, Steffen et al, 2018, PNAS. The article itself is a must-read for all interested in our planetary future. It contains this excellent paragraph:
“The present dominant socioeconomic system, however, is based on high-carbon economic growth and exploitative resource use (9). Attempts to modify this system have met with some success locally but little success globally in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or building more effective stewardship of the biosphere. Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway; these include changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values”
10. As Kim Stanley Robinson imagines in his excellent cli-fi novel ‘Ministry of the Future’
11. We should focus on the reforms that we know work. Closing fossil fuel facilities, building renewables, and most of all, carbon pricing. Direct interventions here and there can reduce emissions, but only carbon pricing gets into the corners of the fossil fuel economy. See Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades, Stechemesser et. al., 2024, Science, for an analysis of the varied effectiveness of 1500 climate policies. Of the 1500, only 63 were found to have a substantial impact, with carbon pricing the most effective intervention of all.
12. Countries including Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have experienced drought and desertification, driving conflict between farmers and herders. This in turn has driven conflict between ethnic separatists, islamists, and fragile states, with a bonus proxy conflict between Russian and Western forces. Climate catastrophe always plays in terms defined by existing political and social factors. These political and social factors are terrains of class struggle and places where militants can and must intervene.
13. Most of the rich world is in temperate zones that will be less directly affected by warming. Australia and Southern Europe are interesting as they are rich but hot. Wealth will likely provide some protection from climate disaster, but time will tell how much.
14. This discussion has ignored the other massive environmental crisis bearing down on us: biodiversity collapse. It is hard to speak of biodiversity collapse in planetary terms, as its drivers and impacts are more localised. Biodiversity collapse is mostly driven by land clearing, not global warming, although this may change as warming intensifies. Its impacts are also much more poorly understood. Nevertheless, biodiversity provides ‘ecosystem services’ that are necessary for agriculture, so its collapse directly threatens human civilisation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was formed as the ‘IPCC of biodiversity’. Its reports can be read here: https://www.ipbes.net/global-assessment
Featured image credit: Credit: Raphael Pouget / Climate Visuals Countdown
