Is the world being destroyed?

On a Saturday last summer, I kayaked up a Connecticut river from the coast, buoyed by the rising tide, to pick up trash with a group of locals. Blue herons and white egrets hunted in the shallows. Ospreys soared overhead hauling freshly caught fish. The wind combed the water into fields of ripples, refracting the afternoon sun into a million diamonds. From our distance, the wetlands looked wild and pristine.

Further inland, we left the main river channel and paddled into the muddy heart of the marsh—and began to notice all manner of plastic waste. Big things appeared first: empty bags of chips tangled in the reeds, grocery bags just beneath the surface, Styrofoam trays covered in mud, plastic bottles mixed in with other debris.

As we traveled through the marsh, we kept seeing more, and increasingly tiny, bits of plastic. Not just straws, lighters, combs, and fishing line, but unidentifiable and seemingly never-ending small pieces, ranging in size from as big as my hand to as small as grains of sand. You could stay in the hinterlands plucking trash and never leave. Even in one of the less-polluted parts of the East Coast, outside a city with organized waste management and a recycling system, the land and water are awash in plastic waste.

Plastic, and the profusion of waste it creates, can hide in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation can be shocking.

Indeed, the scale of the problem is hard to internalize. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.

Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.

A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually, concludes a report by McKinsey. (Just over a quarter of all plastics are used for packaging.) One-third of this packaging is not collected, becoming pollution that generates “significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean.” This causes at least $40 billion in damages, the report states, which exceeds the “profit pool” of the packaging industry.

These numbers are understandably hard to make concrete sense of, even at the scale of specific companies, such as Coca-Cola, which produced 3 million tons of plastic packaging in 2017. That’s the equivalent of making 200,000 bottles per minute.

Notably, what doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics, pieces smaller than five millimeters in diameter. In the past few years, scientists have found significant quantities of microplastics in the further reaches of the ocean; in snow and rainfall in seemingly pristine places worldwide; in the air we breathe; and in human blood, colons, lungs, veins, breast milk, placentas, and fetuses.

One paper estimated that the average person consumes five grams of plastic every week—mostly from water. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated. Microplastics are also widely found in beer, salt, shellfish, and other human foods. Significant quantities of these plastic bits have turned up in common fruits and vegetables, as one recent study in Italy found.

All this meant that our journey in the kayaks, picking up plastic waste along the way, looking after our local environment, was—while a genuinely helpful service to our fellow humans—only fixing a symptom of a larger problem.

The solution to that problem lies further upstream: to address plastic pollution, those who produce plastics need to pay for the damage it causes, and the world will also have to make less of it. We’ll have to develop better, more recyclable products. We’ll also have to find sustainable alternatives and increase what ecologists call circularity—keeping those products in use as long as possible and finding ways to reuse their materials after that.

While these are not exactly new ideas, they’ve received renewed attention from global policymakers, innovators, and companies looking to make a sustainable future profitable.

Making less is the most important goal—and the most politically charged one, given the immense profits and political power of plastic producers. “What’s the best way to manage waste?” says Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia. “To not produce it in the first place.”

Because consider this: most of the plastic we make, 72%, ends up in landfills or the environment, according to a 2022 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled, and 19% has been incinerated. Some of it reaches the sea; estimates suggest that between 8 million and 11 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year. According to the National Academy of Sciences, that’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute.

“A scourge on a planetary scale”

Plastic production has grown dramatically in recent years; in fact, half of all plastics in existence have been produced in just the last two decades. Production is projected to continue growing, at about 5% annually. If current trends continue, humans will have produced 34 billion tons of plastics by 2050—three times the current total.

Plastic pollution—“a scourge on a planetary scale,” as French president Emmanuel Macron has put it—most affects those least able to deal with its consequences. Noting that the plastic industry generates upward of $700 billion a year in revenues, the UN Environment Programme also concluded that the industry “inflicts a heavy burden on human health and environmental degradation, with the poorest in society facing the highest impacts whilst contributing the least to plastic over-consumption and waste.”

This is true at every stage of plastic’s life cycle. Manufacturing plants are concentrated in communities of color—such as in Louisiana, in an area along the Mississippi River often called “Cancer Alley,” which is home to nearly 150 oil refineries, plastics plants, and chemical facilities. Such plants emit air pollution that raises risks of cancer and other diseases. A panel of UN human rights experts said the situation amounts to a “form of environmental racism [that] poses serious and disproportionate threats to the … human rights of its largely African American residents.”

This pollution also disproportionately harms poor and developing countries that produce little or no plastic, such as those in Africa, the Pacific, and elsewhere.

Solutions such as recycling and reuse cannot deal with this much waste, says Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist and cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute, which studies plastic pollution. “There have to be drastic cuts in production,” he says, especially of single-use plastics.

Dozens of studies and institutional reports—from the likes of the United Nations, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—conclude that continued increases in production of virgin plastics will overwhelm actions to combat the problem.

Alarmed by such data, and animated by growing public awareness of the issue, the United Nations Environment Assembly resolved at a March 2022 meeting to begin working toward a global treaty to end plastic pollution, forming an intergovernmental negotiating committee to accomplish this goal. This group has gathered twice and will meet another three times before the treaty is finalized in late 2024. All parties agree that it will be binding and will put forth a range of mandatory and voluntary approaches. Some have likened its importance to that of the Paris accords on climate change.

Few details have yet been ironed out, but the majority of countries agree that a primary way to prevent plastic from polluting the environment is to make less of it.

Neil Tangri, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of an informal advisory group called the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, strongly agrees: “We have to dramatically reduce the amount of plastic that we make. Everything else is second order.”

At the second round of talks in Paris this summer, international leaders made this desire clear. Humanity has a duty to begin “[reducing] the production of new plastics,” said Macron, “and to ban as soon as possible the most polluting products.” Representatives from many other countries, from Ghana to Mauritius to Norway, argued the same.

Yet the countries that have not yet embraced limits on production include the biggest producers, such as China and the United States, though they are participating in the process.

Limits or levies on production are not currently being considered as a solution, according to a member of the US State Department (which coordinates the country’s delegation at the UN meetings), who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“We really need to find a way to bring everybody on board,” this person said, and such “supply side” changes might be unpalatable to certain countries. “We want the strongest and most ambitious obligations that we can get consensus around.”

The American Chemistry Council, the trade group that represents plastic producers, has also not embraced such policies. Limits or levies could “affect all sectors of the economy” and “create a lot of unintended consequences for those least able to afford it,” says Stewart Harris, the group’s senior director of global plastics policy.

Inspiration from nature

How can we make less plastic, and deal with the pollution that already exists? Circularity may be the most promising answer. Circularity can mean reusing or recycling plastics, or employing alternatives that can be reused or recycled as well. Proponents often describe the concept as an attempt to imitate the natural world, where there is no waste; everything has a use.

Ghana and several other countries worldwide are currently working to establish a country-level circular economy for plastic, says Oliver Boachie, who chairs the African Group of Negotiators for the UN treaty-making process and is an advisor to the Ghanaian government. This will involve gradually banning single-use plastics that have little reuse value, such as thin plastic films used in food packaging, as well as instituting robust collection, reuse, and recycling efforts.

Many existing waste management techniques have already been shown to reduce plastic pollution and demand for plastic in the first place. But they are energy and time intensive.

In Tanzania, for instance, a group called Nipe Fagio (“give me the broom” in Swahili) runs waste management and recycling systems that have reduced landfill waste by 75% to 80% in neighborhoods in several cities. Waste collectors visit households once a week to gather four different varieties of trash before transporting it to a collection center. There, workers further sort the recyclable materials for sale, turn organic waste into compost and chicken feed, and send the rest to the landfill.

To help fund programs like Nipe Fagio, and to help them grow on a much larger scale, many countries are looking to extended producer responsibility (EPR) plans, policies requiring producers of plastic bottles, packaging, and the like to provide some funding to support management of these materials after their initial use. Just about every country in Europe has an EPR scheme, and Ghana too is working to create a national program.

Currently, however, EPR schemes are limited in their impact, since those that have done the most to embrace and pay for them are bottlers and manufacturers of products like beverages, known as “midstream” producers.

To make a bigger difference, the programs need to bring in the “upstream” producers—those that create virgin plastics and polymers, like Exxon, Dow, Sinopec, and Saudi Aramco. An overwhelming 98% of plastics come from fossil fuels, and plastic production and use accounts for 3.4% of humanity’s carbon emissions. Many big plastic producers—such as the world’s biggest, ExxonMobil—are highly entangled with Big Oil or representatives of it. “Beyond a physical pollution crisis, it’s becoming an energy crisis,” says Katrina Knauer, a polymer scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “The amount of plastic on our planet—it’s like one big oil spill.”

Nevertheless, these companies do not currently pay for the consequences of plastic pollution, Boachie says, adding: “We believe that those who are [most] heavily responsible for the proliferation of plastics around the world are the polymer and virgin plastics producers, and they should be responsible for providing funds for countries to manage the plastic waste that they create.”

Ghana has introduced a proposal to the UN to extend the “polluter pays” principle to these polymer producers, and Boachie says he believes elements of it will find their way into the final UN agreement. That would “allow us to mobilize a significant amount of resources to provide all countries the means to manage their plastics.”

But Ana Lê Rocha, the executive director of Nipe Fagio in Tanzania, argues that waste management is not actually a solution to the pollution crisis but merely a way to deal with a symptom. “We need to remember that the main issue—the main goal of the UN treaty—must be to reduce production,” she says.

Obstacles to circularity

Reuse is the most energy-efficient version of circularity. Collecting, cleaning, and refilling glass bottles was once common and widespread, and it remains a small but significant part of the economy in many countries. It’s also the norm in many places to buy foods in bulk and transport them in reusable bags.

But one of the biggest obstacles to circularity is a lack of infrastructure, says Ellie Moss, CEO of a company called Perpetual, which is “looking to stand up a whole reuse ecosystem [at] the scale of a small city” to change that. Four cities, to be exact—Galveston, Texas; Hilo, Hawaii; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Savannah, Georgia. In Galveston, where Perpetual is furthest along, it is working to create a system whereby metal beverage containers can be reused by many restaurants in the city, saving large amounts of plastic and creating new green jobs. It hopes to hire companies that will have the program up and running there by the middle of 2024.

“If we want reuse to work, it has to happen at scale, and the community has to have a voice in how the system is set up,” Moss says.

Other companies are also exploring refill and reuse schemes. One Chilean company, Algramo, founded in 2013, allows customers to buy various liquid products such as shampoo, laundry detergent, and soaps in reusable plastic bottles, purchased from a large network of filling stations. The company has the explicit goal of eliminating the “poverty tax,” the penalty that lower-income people often have to pay for not being able to buy in bulk; it charges the same unit price for each item regardless of how much volume is sold. Algramo (which means “by the gram” in Spanish) has expanded throughout Chile and is now opening locations in the United Kingdom.

These schemes can be thought of as a type of system redesign, requiring a radical shift in infrastructure and behavior. We spent nearly a century “building out an exceptionally complex linear economy for these materials,” says Kathryn Beers, a polymer chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who leads an institute-wide program geared toward facilitating a circular economy. But we never “built the second half of the system” that would make it circular, she says. “It needs all the complexity and nuance of the front half—and that takes time.”

Awareness helps prompt such shifts—viral moments such as the video of a turtle with a straw in its nose that circulated widely in 2017 are credited with greatly increased demand for straw bans or alternatives. But for real change, policies are necessary, including bans as well as fees and taxes. Research shows that all of the above can greatly reduce plastic waste.

Redesigning products to use less plastic and to be more easily reused or recycled is also critical, said Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, at the opening of the second meeting. “Is there a good reason that businesses can’t look at refillable bottles, reusable packaging, take-back services, and so on? Of course not,” she said.

Some manufacturers have already made strides to use less plastic in their products. Such incremental changes help but will still not be enough.

To solve the pollution crisis, many “unnecessary and problematic” plastics—such as polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—will have to be eliminated and replaced with more sustainable alternatives, says Imari Walker-Franklin, a research chemist who published a book with MIT Press on plastics earlier this year. PVC, which is often used to make pipes and other materials, breaks down into toxic chlorine-­containing components and cannot be recycled.

One of the most promising replacements is a substance called PHA, or polyhydroxyalkanoate, a type of bio-polyester made by bacterial fermentation of sugars and lipids. “We’d love to see an all-PHA future,” NREL’s Knauer says, in part because the plastic can degrade into nontoxic components over the course of months.

It’s important to note, however, that producing more sustainable plastics is difficult, and most of the so-called “biodegradable” and “compostable” plastics on the market biodegrade only in industrial reactors. Industrial composters, for example, reach temperatures that cannot be achieved in people’s yards or homes. Moreover, most of these materials are not actually less toxic than conventional plastics, says Bethanie Almroth, an ecotoxicologist with Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.

“Bioplastics are plastics. And they are usually quite harmful,” Lê Rocha agrees.

For that reason, it’s vital that bio-based plastics don’t just become a replacement.

“The best alternative is reusable systems, because replacing a single-use plastic with a single-use bioplastic won’t change the problem,” says Andrea Lema, an advocate for zero-waste systems in Quito, Ecuador, who’s involved in the UN process.

Non-plastic alternatives, such as packaging made from fungi, hemp, and other environmentally friendly materials, may hold the most promise in the long term, but in the short term they are generally not economically viable given how cheap plastic is. That could change with the right set of progressive policies and economic incentives.

How much plastic is actually being recycled?

In the United States, only about 5% to 6% of plastics are being recycled each year—a paltry rate. As with reuse, increasing this rate should decrease the demand for virgin polymers. The biggest problem is a shortage of the costly infrastructure that’s required, says Kate Bailey, chief policy officer with the Association of Plastic Recyclers.

The further you get from large cities, the less recycling there is, because rural areas can’t afford it, says Knauer: “We need more state and federal incentives to build an infrastructure for collection.”

The vast majority of “recycling” involves grinding up plastic, melting it down, and re-forming it. Doing this type of mechanical recycling well involves properly sorting and cleaning materials, which can be time intensive and expensive. It’s also very difficult or impossible to recycle many types of plastic more than once without causing the material to acquire defects and contaminants. In fact, many recycled materials commonly contain significant levels of unwanted toxins, Almroth says.

Local policies can make a huge difference in encouraging recycling. In Maine and Oregon, which have invested in recycling programs, up to 80% of bottles made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are recycled, Bailey says. In some states, such as in the South, that percentage is in the single digits. The national average for these materials is 30%, which is a shame, Bailey says, because 100% of PET bottles could be recycled.

Some states, though, have instituted policies that actually hinder progress. Industry lobbyists are increasingly helping to institute state-level laws that prevent bans or limits on the use of plastics, especially plastic bags. Over a dozen states currently have preemptive laws on the books to prevent ordinances limiting plastics, though some of the same states are also trying to pass anti-preemption laws.

One way to improve recycling—and prevent unwanted health effects and environmental problems—would be to simplify and standardize the process of plastic production, Walker-Franklin says. Currently, more than 10,000 chemicals are used in the production of plastics, and upward of 3,200 have “one or more hazardous properties of concern,” with the potential to harm humans and wildlife, according to UNEP. Very little or nothing is known about the health effects or basic properties of thousands more.

Another way to improve recycling would be to find a way to process mixed polymers into useful materials instead of having to sort everything first. One promising technique, described in an October 2020 study coauthored by Julie Rorrer, then a researcher at MIT, can process polypropylene and polyethylene into propane. Another process, described in a study published in Science the same month, can break down mixtures of common consumer plastics and re-form them into a bioplastic, in part by using an engineered soil bacterium.

Others dream of a day when microbes could be used to recycle or clean up all this waste. One French biotechnology company, Carbios, opened a pilot plant in September 2021 to break down and recycle PET using an engineered form of an enzyme first discovered in compost; it’s currently building a full-scale facility due to open in 2025. In theory, this type of recycling could be truly circular, as it wouldn’t require the high heat that normally causes much of the degradation seen with recycled plastics.

A microbe discovered in Japan in 2016, called Ideonella sakaiensis, produces two other enzymes that can break down PET. This microbe is especially intriguing because it is the first one identified that can live solely upon plastic as a food source. MIT researcher Linda Zhong-Johnson is working to create more efficient versions of the enzymes by tinkering with microbial genes. So far, one mutation she has identified creates an enzyme that appears to be up to 30% more efficient than its original wild form.

Reducing demand

Fundamentally, to solve the plastic pollution crisis, society must address the root problem: plastics are shockingly profitable and cheap because polymer producers do not pay for the abundant harm they cause. Any solution will require policy and behavioral changes small and large.

As an example of the former, policymakers in Washington, DC, instituted a five-cent charge on plastic bags that began in 2010. Estimates suggest that the number of bags used quickly dropped—by more than half in the months after it was instituted—and the quantity found in local waterways dropped between 30% and 70% thereafter. Seemingly tiny changes like this can add up to reduce demand and decrease pollution. Meanwhile, a global EPR scheme would be an example of a major shift, and the UN process is seeking other big changes to the status quo.

Of course, such changes will be difficult, but they can be instituted in gradual ways that don’t hurt businesses, Boachie says: “My hope emanates from the fact that what we are talking about is not something that will impede the growth and success of any company.” On the contrary, he adds, creating incentives for alternatives will spur innovation and create new jobs.

A lot of such innovation will doubtless be needed to reverse situations like what I saw in the Connecticut salt marsh. At one point we came upon a couple of osprey nests from which plastic strands billowed, unwittingly collected by the birds as they built their nests. Later, we found a vinyl firehose lodged intractably in the muck between oysters. I couldn’t pull it out, nor could I cut into it with a small pocketknife. We reluctantly left it behind.

When does a crisis not feel like one? A crisis doesn’t feel like a crisis when there is barely any mention of the crisis in the news. It doesn’t like a crisis when the electricity still works, or when hot water still streams from the shower. It doesn’t feel like a crisis when the transportation system is working or when supermarket shelves are full of food. While all of the evidence shows we’re hurtling towards a crisis of unimaginable proportions, at the moment the climate crisis just doesn’t feel like a crisis, and people are responding (by essentially doing nothing) based on that fact.

The issue is that when it does feel like a crisis, the impacts will be ferocious. So what exactly will the crisis look like when it does feel like a crisis? Here are six climate megatrends that are set to overwhelm humanity in the not-too-distant future.

1. Water scarcity

Record heatwaves are turning the world’s rivers, canals, and reservoirs to dust. As droughts become more severe, water scarcity will become all too common. In the early to mid-2010s, 1.9 billion people, lived in areas at risk from severe water scarcity. By 2050, this number will soar to between 2.7 to 3.2 billion people. The World Bank’s report, High and Dry, shows how water scarcity, exacerbated by climate change, could impact economic growth, increase migration, and spark conflict.

2. Climate refugees

Droughts are just one of a myriad of ecological threats on the horizon. As weather extremes become more aggressive these ecological threats are set to increase. The major risk is that “ecological threats are correlated with high levels of violence. This is due to systemic dynamics, whereby the depletion of resources and violent disputes reinforce one another, forming a vicious cycle.” In that climate, people will be forced to leave their homes. It’s estimated there will be one billion climate refugees by 2050, creating a humanitarian crisis that is set to create instability across the globe. Climate refugees will naturally migrate to habitable areas. It seems unlikely they’ll be welcomed with open arms. In fact, with a threat to their own living standards, it’s more likely this flood of people will be welcomed with violence as countries focus on securing critical resources for their own civilians.

3. Food shortages

Perhaps the most debilitating impact of a changing climate will be on food production. With 2°C of global warming, total production in the top four maize-exporting countries is projected to decline by 53 million tons, equivalent to 43 percent of global maize exports. 4°C of warming will see production decline by 139 million tons, which is 14 percent of global production and exceeds present-day exports.

Shortages are set to create massive instability in grain markets. Currently, the probability of a greater than 10 percent crop failure hitting each of the top four maize-exporting countries simultaneously is currently near zero, but “the probability of a synchronous crop failure of this order during the decade of the 2040s is just less than 50 per cent.” The 2006–2008 global food crisis illustrates the potential consequences of synchronous crop failures. Price spikes can lead to urban unrest and make governments vulnerable to collapse, particularly in developing countries. Due to this risk, many large exporting countries, including Brazil and Argentina, imposed export bans on maize during the food crisis, decreasing global supply. At the same time, maize-importing countries introduced trade incentives to lower the price of imported grain, increasing import demand. The combination of less supply and more demand led to maize prices spiking by 83 percent. It was a similar story for other staple grains like rice and wheat.

The FAO predicts food production must increase by at least 60 percent to meet the demands of a population that is predicted to hit nearly ten billion people by 2050. With yields declining at a time when demand for food is increasing it becomes apparent how seismic the consequences of mass crop failures will be.

4. Dramatic reductions in living standards

Globalisation can only work if every country is willing to sell on the open market, but as the impacts of the climate crisis become more aggressive, shortages could mean the benefits of selling products and produce at higher prices in the market are outweighed by the need to maintain law and order at home. Should countries become more protectionist, it would lead to a breakdown of the mechanisms needed for free trade. With chronic shortages, “a societal consensus could emerge that the free market economic model is unsustainable, and governments could move towards constraining people’s consumption…this could lead to macro-economic discontinuities with far-reaching consequences for inflation rates, asset prices, jobs and livelihoods.”

The idea that our consumption habits would need to be constrained will feel like a draconian measure, particularly when having more money and possessions than others is considered the epitome of social success. Governments will be aware such extreme measures will be deeply unpopular and are likely to trigger social unrest, but they’ll be faced with no other choice. Even if people want to continue ‘living their best lives’, as the venerable saying of our time goes, they won’t be able to.

5. Increased risk of war

The combined impacts of environmental changes are set to increase “the level of stress within national and international society, thus increasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflict and impeding the development of cooperative solutions.” In a world of scarcity, the risk of war, including nuclear war, will increase as countries seek to gain control of critical resources.

6. Increased radicalisation

In Why Men Rebel, the political scientist Ted Robert Gurr argues people become discontent when they perceive a discrepancy between their expectations and society’s ability to maintain the standards of living they believe they are entitled to. When economic shocks, inflation and shortages are the order of the day, and crucially, when it becomes apparent a return to a period of stability is unfeasible, even to the most optimistic members of society, people will feel poor compared to a previous state of comfort. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022 argues that as more people begin to suffer the consequences of environmental changes, government failure to respond appropriately will lead to large sections of society becoming increasingly marginalised. As they do, there is a risk of radicalisation.

Make sacrifices now to save millions later

We know we’re hurtling towards a future of unimaginable chaos, suffering and instability, but how do we stop the crisis from feeling like a crisis? That all comes down to the actions taken now. The issue is that our approach to the crisis reflects the fact it still doesn’t feel like one. That’s why in the West there remains an unwavering belief that should we achieve net zero by 2050, everything will be okay. Underlying this belief is the hope that Western living standards can be maintained. The reality is that warming that will lead to catastrophic social unrest is already locked in. But time lags between emissions and real-world impacts create an illusion that there remains a window of opportunity to reverse the effects of a changing climate. That narrative dispels the idea that radical change is required to overcome the problem.

But radical transformation is precisely what’s needed to give us the best chance of preparing for a hostile future. That transformation must revolve around people being willing to make sacrifices to living standards. But it’s unfeasible that anyone would accept the need to do so. People are self-serving, it’s easy to forget about global problems when your lifestyle appears to be isolated from them. And so we’ll all continue to crack on until the world around us puts an end to the party. We’re going to learn in the most brutal fashion that you can’t have your cake and eat it.

Abstract

In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a stochastic growth process driven by a continuous time random walk, which depicts the technological evolution of human kind, in conjunction with a deterministic generalised logistic model for humans-forest interaction and we evaluate the probability of avoiding the self-destruction of our civilisation. Based on the current resource consumption rates and best estimate of technological rate growth our study shows that we have very low probability, less than 10% in most optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse.

Introduction

In the last few decades, the debate on climate change has assumed global importance with consequences on national and global policies. Many factors due to human activity are considered as possible responsible of the observed changes: among these water and air contamination (mostly greenhouse effect) and deforestation are the mostly cited. While the extent of human contribution to the greenhouse effect and temperature changes is still a matter of discussion, the deforestation is an undeniable fact. Indeed before the development of human civilisations, our planet was covered by 60 million square kilometres of forest1. As a result of deforestation, less than 40 million square kilometres currently remain2. In this paper, we focus on the consequence of indiscriminate deforestation.

Trees’ services to our planet range from carbon storage, oxygen production to soil conservation and water cycle regulation. They support natural and human food systems and provide homes for countless species, including us, through building materials. Trees and forests are our best atmosphere cleaners and, due to the key role they play in the terrestrial ecosystem, it is highly unlikely to imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on Earth without them. In this sense, the debate on climate change will be almost obsolete in case of a global deforestation of the planet. Starting from this almost obvious observation, we investigate the problem of the survival of humanity from a statistical point of view. We model the interaction between forests and humans based on a deterministic logistic-like dynamics, while we assume a stochastic model for the technological development of the human civilisation. The former model has already been applied in similar contexts3,4 while the latter is based on data and model of global energy consumption5,6 used as a proxy for the technological development of a society. This gives solidity to our discussion and we show that, keeping the current rate of deforestation, statistically the probability to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse, is very low. We connect such probability to survive to the capability of humankind to spread and exploit the resources of the full solar system. According to Kardashev scale7,8, which measures a civilisation’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy they are able to use, in order to spread through the solar system we need to be able to harness the energy radiated by the Sun at a rate of ≈4 × 1026 Watt. Our current energy consumption rate is estimated in ≈1013 Watt9. As showed in the subsections “Statistical Model of technological development” and “Numerical results” of the following section, a successful outcome has a well defined threshold and we conclude that the probability of avoiding a catastrophic collapse is very low, less than 10% in the most optimistic estimate.

[...]

Conclusions

In conclusion our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of the dynamical evolution based on current parameters. Adopting a combined deterministic and stochastic model we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilisation survives itself is less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation (see Fig. 5). Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time. Admittedly, in our analysis, we assume parameters such as population growth and deforestation rate in our model as constant. This is a rough approximation which allows us to predict future scenarios based on current conditions. Nonetheless the resulting mean-times for a catastrophic outcome to occur, which are of the order of 2–4 decades (see Fig. 5), make this approximation acceptable, as it is hard to imagine, in absence of very strong collective efforts, big changes of these parameters to occur in such time scale. This interval of time seems to be out of our reach and incompatible with the actual rate of the resource consumption on Earth, although some fluctuations around this trend are possible35 not only due to unforeseen effects of climate change but also to desirable human-driven reforestation. This scenario offers as well a plausible additional explanation to the fact that no signals from other civilisations are detected. In fact according to Eq. (16) the mean time to reach Dyson sphere depends on the ratio of the technological level T and therefore, assuming energy consumption (which scales with the size of the planet) as a proxy for T, such ratio is approximately independent of the size of the planet. Based on this observation and on the mediocrity principle, one could extend the results shown in this paper, and conclude that a generic civilisation has approximatively two centuries starting from its fully developed industrial age to reach the capability to spread through its own solar system. In fact, giving a very broad meaning to the concept of cultural civilisation as a civilisation not strongly ruled by economy, we suggest that only civilisations capable of a switch from an economical society to a sort of “cultural” society in a timely manner, may survive.

Pittsburgh — Waste from the oil and gas industry contains toxic and radioactive substances. Disposal of this waste is supposed to be carefully tracked, but 800,000 tons of oil and gas waste from Pennsylvania oil and gas wells is unaccounted for, according to a recent study.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University initially set out to investigate whether sediment in rivers and streams near landfills accepting higher volumes of oil and gas waste contained higher levels of radioactivity. But they discovered significant problems with the records meant to track this waste.

“We set out to write a different paper,” Daniel Bain, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the authors of the study, told Environmental Health News (EHN), “but once we got into the records, we realized there was no hope of being able to meaningfully do this kind of assessment.”

The study, published in the journal Ecological Indicators, compared records on Pennsylvania’s oil and gas waste from 2010-2020, and uncovered significant gaps between what oil and gas operators reported they’d sent to landfills and what the landfills reported receiving. The records were so different, the researchers couldn’t find a single case where the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Oil & Gas Report figures on this hazardous waste matched reports from the landfills receiving it.

This type of waste often contains toxic chemicals and carcinogens, including high levels of heavy metals like arsenic, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and radioactive materials. Previous research has shown that radioactive contaminants from fracking waste can linger in local waterways and wildlife for decades.

“You assume the people regulating hazardous waste would be double-checking these records,” Bain said. “We thought they could be off by maybe 10% — we didn’t expect anything like this.”

What’s Going On With These Records?

The oil and gas waste evaluated in the study originated at wells in Pennsylvania and was sent to landfills in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York.

The industry self-reports how much waste it sends to landfills, and the DEP collects that data in its annual oil and gas reports. Landfills that receive the waste weigh it and keep their own records. In some cases, the differences between these two sets of records were vast.

For example, the 2019 oil and gas report said that 29,221 tons of waste were sent to the Arden landfill in Washington County, Pennsylvania, but the landfill’s records showed that it received 269,480 tons of waste that year — a difference of 240,259 tons. In total, the study found that around 800,000 tons of hazardous oil and gas waste was unaccounted for in official records.

“Everything is self-reported and the [Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection] is understaffed and doesn’t have the resources to double-check,” John Stolz, coauthor of the study and director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, told EHN.

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection told EHN the agency was looking into these discrepancies, but did not respond to numerous follow-up requests for additional information sent over several months.

Carl Spadaro is an environmental manager for MAX Environmental Technologies, Inc., which accepts oil and gas waste at its Yukon facility, about 29 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Spadaro, who previously worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said accurate records are important, but that differences in reporting formats could explain the gaps.

“We report the volume of waste we receive and also the volume of landfill airspace consumed each year,” Spadaro told EHN. “I don’t think this is cause for any environmental concern. Inconsistency in reporting is more of a regulatory management issue.”

Radioactive Hazards in Rivers and Streams

Despite the hurdles with the landfill records, the authors of the study did detect higher levels of radioactive materials in waterways near municipal wastewater treatment plants that processed liquid runoff from landfills accepting oil and gas waste.

This landfill runoff, called leachate, often goes to municipal sewage treatment plants, but when it comes from landfills accepting oil and gas waste, it can become radioactive. That’s because materials dredged up from deep in the Earth during oil and gas extraction — particularly during fracking, which requires more drilling — contain radium.

Exposure to radioactive radium increases cancer risk, particularly for lung and bone cancers.

“This waste is getting into our surface waters and streams,” Stolz said. “We found evidence that there’s up to four times as much radiation downstream from discharges from the municipal sewage treatment plants as upstream.”

Bain said better record-keeping would allow them to better assess whether the quantity of oil and gas waste accepted at a landfill predicts the level of radioactivity in leachate and nearby waterways, but that better record-keeping isn’t a solution to the larger hazards posed by these practices.

“This type of waste should not be going to municipal landfills or sewage treatment plants,” he said. “If there’s all this wealth being generated by this industry, they should be able to spend a little money to make sure they’re not exposing people to hazardous materials that can cause cancer.”

Scientists are warning that we are now in “uncharted territory” as a result of human-driven climate change in a new “state of the climate” report that was signed by 15,000 researchers from 163 countries.

Researchers emphasized the current suffering caused by record-breaking climate extremes and raised alarms about the possibility of widespread societal and ecological collapse in the future, while also decrying recent increases in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, which is the primary driver of climate change.

The 2023 report, published on Tuesday in the journal BioScience, is the latest update in an annual series called World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency. Since 2019, scientists have been tracking escalating threats that warming global temperatures present to humans and ecosystems around the world.

The new report, led by Oregon State University ecologist William Ripple, warns that 2023 was a particularly devastating year of extreme wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and other natural disasters that are amplified by climate change. The authors suggest that temperatures this past July may well have been the warmest on Earth over the past 100,000 years, which they called “a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.”

“As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms,” Ripple and his colleagues wrote in the report. “The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered.”

“Global daily mean temperatures never exceeded 1.5-degree Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels prior to 2000 and have only occasionally exceeded that number since then,” the researchers noted. “However, 2023 has already seen 38 days with global average temperatures above 1.5°C by 12 September—more than any other year—and the total may continue to rise.”

The authors have spent years monitoring 35 of Earth’s “vital signs,” such as global tree cover, greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean temperatures, and populations of humans and livestock. The new report cautions that 20 of those signs are now at record extremes, which is up from 16 in 2022.

Ripple’s team noted that natural effects, such as the El Niño weather pattern and the 2022 eruption of an underwater volcano, were a factor in the record-smashing climate extremes this year. However, the researchers stressed that human-driven climate change is exacerbating many of these natural processes in ways that will generate more frequent and catastrophic anomalies in the coming decades.

The report includes a section entitled “Untold Human Suffering in Pictures” that offers a powerful visual accounting of people experiencing climate-related disasters over the past several years. The people who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change tend to live in less wealthy nations that have contributed the least to global greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting the need for environmental justice movements.

“In 2023, climate change likely contributed to a number of major extreme weather events and disasters,” the researchers wrote, referencing deadly floods in China and India, a devastating storm in Libya that killed thousands of people, and heat-waves around the world. “As these impacts continue to accelerate, more funding to compensate for climate-related loss and damage in developing countries is urgently needed.”

“The effects of global warming are progressively more severe, and possibilities such as a worldwide societal breakdown are feasible and dangerously underexplored,” the team warned. “By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals—approximately one-third to one-half of the global population—might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change.”

“We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems in such a world where we will face unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict,” the researchers said.

It’s natural to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge presented by climate change, but Ripple and his colleagues offer several solutions to avoid the worst possible outcomes. Of course, the team urged the global community to rapidly transition from the use of fossil fuels, even in the face of major geopolitical obstacles, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The researchers also advocated that more resources be allocated to fight climate-related food insecurity and to promote gender equality, as these efforts will reduce the lopsided exposure of more vulnerable communities to climate disasters around the world. The team also argued that key climate tipping points require constant attention due to the “the possible but less likely scenario of runaway or apocalyptic climate change,” according to the report.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, the report said that human societies will also need to undergo a mindset shift from the traditional focus on economic growth over all other metrics.

“To address the overexploitation of our planet, we challenge the prevailing notion of endless growth and overconsumption by rich countries and individuals as unsustainable and unjust,” the team wrote. “Instead, we advocate for reducing resource overconsumption; reducing, reusing, and recycling waste in a more circular economy; and prioritizing human flourishing and sustainability.”

“As we will soon bear witness to failing to meet the Paris agreement’s aspirational 1.5°C goal, the significance of immediately curbing fossil fuel use and preventing every further 0.1°C increase in future global heating cannot be overstated,” the researchers concluded. “Rather than focusing only on carbon reduction and climate change, addressing the underlying issue of ecological overshoot will give us our best shot at surviving these challenges in the long run. This is our moment to make a profound difference for all life on Earth, and we must embrace it with unwavering courage and determination to create a legacy of change that will stand the test of time.”

India is close to reaching its groundwater depletion tipping point, a new report published by United Nations University — Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) — has warned.

The report ‘Interconnected Disaster Risks Report 2023’, which looks at six environmental tipping points — accelerating extinctions, groundwater depletion, mountain glacier melting, space debris, unbearable heat and an uninsurable future — has also found that 27 of the world’s 31 major aquifers are depleting faster than they can be replenished.

According to the report, 78% of wells in Punjab are considered overexploited, and the north-western region as a whole is predicted to experience critically low groundwater availability by 2025.

Environmental tipping points are critical thresholds in the Earth’s systems beyond which abrupt and often irreversible changes occur, leading to profound and sometimes catastrophic shifts in ecosystems, climate patterns and the overall environment, the report states.

Groundwater is an essential freshwater resource stored in underground reservoirs called “aquifers”. “These aquifers supply drinking water to over two billion people, and around 70% of withdrawals are used for agriculture. However, more than half of the world’s major aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be naturally replenished. As groundwater accumulates over thousands of years, it is essentially a non-renewable resource,” the report said.

The tipping point in this case is reached when the water table falls below a level that existing wells can access. Once crossed, farmers will no longer have access to groundwater to irrigate their crops. “This not only puts farmers at risk of losing their livelihood, but can also lead to food insecurity and put entire food production systems at risk of failure,” it added.

Around 30% of the world’s fresh water is stored as groundwater and occasionally brought to the surface through springs, lakes or streams, or is extracted from wells drilled into the aquifer.

Groundwater depletion rates worldwide have accelerated since the mid-20th century, the report said, to the extent that “groundwater is a non-trivial contributor to sea level rise”.

“The excessive pumping of groundwater has also caused the Earth’s axis to tilt 4.36 cm per year. The regions where groundwater depletion is most severe include parts of India, north-eastern China, western United States, Mexico, Iran, Saudi Arabia and parts of northern Africa,’’it said.

“Some regions, like Saudi Arabia, have already surpassed this groundwater risk tipping point… Other countries, like India, are not far from approaching this risk tipping point, too,’’it added.

Agricultural intensification is a major factor pushing us towards a groundwater depletion risk tipping point with groundwater irrigation sustaining the production of approximately 40 per cent of the world’s crops, including a large portion of staple crops like rice and wheat.

Access to groundwater has driven the expansion of irrigated agricultural land worldwide. The 20th century alone has seen a dramatic increase, from 63 million hectares in 1900 to 306 million hectares in 2005.

India is the world’s largest user of groundwater, exceeding the use of the United States and China combined. “The north-western region of India serves as the breadbasket for the nation’s growing 1.4 billion people, with the states of Punjab and Haryana producing 50% of the country’s rice supply and 85% of its wheat stocks. However, 78% of wells in Punjab are considered overexploited, and the north-western region as a whole is predicted to experience critically low groundwater availability by 2025,” it said.

A strong relationship between groundwater and international food supply chains is also driving groundwater depletion. Many of the products grown in countries that overdraft their groundwater resources are sold and consumed in places far away. For instance, the USA exports 42% of its crops grown from depleted groundwater, mostly corn, to other places like Mexico, China and Japan.

The negative impacts of hydraulic fracturing on public health, the environment, and the climate are “intractable and not fixable,” according to a newly published report.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process used by oil and gas drillers that involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals underground at extreme pressure to extract oil and gas trapped in shale rock.

Fracking, along with advances in horizontal drilling, ushered in an enormous oil and gas production boom beginning about 15 years ago, leading to the U.S. becoming the largest oil and gas producer in the world.

But the scientific literature on its impacts has grown larger with each passing year, shedding light on the vast human and environmental toll left in the industry’s wake.

The fracking boom really began to take off in Pennsylvania in the late 2000s and early 2010s. At the time, New York had a moratorium on the practice, but with shale gas production soaring in neighbouring Pennsylvania, there was growing pressure on the New York state government to lift the ban.

Sandra Steingraber, a scientist and co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, a group of health professionals and scientists concerned about fracking, began scouring the scientific literature on the drilling practice. Fracking involves the use and release of toxic chemicals and contaminants into the air and water, through multiple stages of the drilling process. That pollution finds its way to people who live nearby. In addition, vast quantities of carbon and methane pollution are released into the atmosphere.

In those early days, the science was playing catchup to a fracking boom that was already advancing at full speed. “At the time, there were really 65 studies in the peer-reviewed literature. I remember there was a time where I had them all sort of memorized,” Steingraber told Gas Outlook.

Concerned Health Professionals of New York compiled all the literature into a “fracking compendium,” as they called it. Steingraber travelled around to speak to rural New York communities who were slated to be targeted by gas companies if the state moratorium was lifted.

But in late 2014, New York announced that it was permanently banning fracking, with state officials citing “significant public health risks.”

“It was like hearing our own study read back to us,” Steingraber told Gas Outlook. “They did in fact look at a lot of the same research we did, and came to the same conclusions.”

But even then, the scientific evidence on the dangers of fracking was only beginning to be understood. The evidence began as a trickle, but quickly turned into an avalanche as scientists began to study the industry.

“The second edition of the compendium had 150 studies and then it went to 400 studies for the third edition in 2014,” Steingraber said. “2014 was a year of just so many publications that I could hardly keep track anymore.”

The latest version, the 9th edition, released in October, has nearly 2,500 studies showing evidence of harm from fracking. In the past decade, the science has been used by researchers, scientists and activists from all over the world. Steingraber has been in touch and worked with people in Ireland, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, and Scotland, among other places.

Taken together, the report finds that the health, environmental, and climate impacts of fracking are so profound, that there is “no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.”

At a press conference on November 8, discussing the findings, Steingraber said that the problems with fracking are “intractable and are not fixable through any regulatory framework.”

“Fracking resembles lead paint or indoor smoking — no rules or regulations can make these practices safe.”

The latest findings

A decade ago, there was enough science to raise serious red flags about fracking. But as time has passed, the negative health impacts have become increasingly clear and the evidence unequivocal.

“Living near unconventional oil and gas development increases risks of adverse health outcomes across the lifespan, including preterm birth, reduced birth weight, birth defects, increases in asthma attacks and other respiratory diseases, various kinds of cancer, heart attacks and heart failure, and premature death, among other outcomes,” said Dr. Ted Schettler, science director with Science & Environmental Health Network, which advocates for health and environmental protections.

One 2022 study in Pennsylvania found that children living within two kilometres of a fracking well were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of blood cancer, compared to similar children who were not living near drilling sites.

A 2020 study found that pregnant women living in close proximity to gas flaring had a 50 percent increased chance of a preterm birth.

Another March 2023 study compared older residents in northeastern Pennsylvania, a state that embraced fracking wholeheartedly, with residents across the border in New York, which had banned fracking. Between 2002 and 2008 both populations exhibited similar hospitalization trends. But after 2009, after which the fracking boom really took off, the Pennsylvania sample saw a sharp increase in heart attacks and heart failure.

“It was a really clear trend. And that’s the closest we have to a controlled human experiment,” Steingraber said. “It’s sort of a twins separated at birth kind of study.”

She added that the literature is so solid at this point, that there is no reason for governments not to act.

“Compared to other public health data I’ve looked at, it’s astonishing actually,” Steingraber said.

As is the case with any public health issue, finding causation within a long list of potentially confounding variables is difficult. “It’s messy. And yet, we have to make public health decisions based on messy data,” she said.

She pointed to the issue of second-hand smoke. “At one point there were 30 studies in the peer-reviewed literature, of which nine showed an increase in lung cancer in people who were exposed to second-hand smoke,” Steingraber said. “And it was on that basis that we banned smoking inside work places and other public places.”

“We now have 120 studies showing harm to health from fracking. Almost every study that’s ever looked at health harms related to fracking has found them,” she said. “The only difference is that you can easily ask individual people to stop smoking where they work. It’s much harder politically to ask the whole oil and gas industry to go away.”

Methane worse than previously thought

The health harms of fracking are becoming increasingly understood by the public, and some opinion polls show that fracking is unpopular, even in Pennsylvania.

However, one narrative that has still not sunk in with the public, or with government officials and investors, is the impact on the climate. Gas and LNG are often positioned by the industry as climate solutions because of the perceived lower greenhouse gas footprint when compared to coal. But research continues to show that, after accounting for methane, gas is no better than coal. Indeed, it is likely worse.

Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist at Cornell University in New York, has studied shale gas for more than a decade, and his research has focused on the methane emissions from the gas industry. Howarth coauthored a 2011 peer-reviewed paper that found that after the leaky methane was accounted for, shale gas was actually worse for the climate than coal.

Those findings were largely dismissed by the industry and gas-friendly politicians at both the state and federal level. But his findings have held up.

“In the 12 years since our paper, there have now been more than 1,800 papers published in the peer reviewed literature on this topic alone,” Howarth said at the fracking compendium press conference. “And the overwhelming conclusion from these is that methane emissions are in fact real and they’re significant.”

He said methane leaks are “baked into the basic framework” by which shale gas is developed and processed. “There are leaks for sure, some of it’s accidental — it’s hard to prevent leaks. But a lot of them are purposeful emissions that are just inherent in the safety and maintenance operations of the industry.”

His latest research focuses on LNG. Howarth recently submitted a paper for peer review that finds that LNG is dramatically worse for the climate than coal. LNG has all of the same problems that shale gas has with leaky methane, but LNG also has extra climate penalties — in order to make one unit of LNG, roughly 10 percent of the energy is burned in the liquefaction process. In addition, Howarth estimates that some LNG ships lose as much as 20 percent of their cargo because the LNG is used for fuel, is evaporated off, or otherwise escapes into the atmosphere.

“The bottom line is that the science is quite clear: liquefied natural gas is a terrible idea from a climate standpoint,” Howarth said. “I think LNG has no place in the world given this need we should be building no new LNG infrastructure whatsoever.”

He pointed to the narrative that has taken hold in the U.S. and Europe that LNG is needed to replace lost Russian gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I would contend that for a short term and an emergency basis, Europeans are better off reopening some of their shuttered coal plants than to build out this LNG infrastructure, which has a 40 to 50 year time period and in fact is worse for the climate than coal,” Howarth said.

Many European countries have embraced LNG, and the Biden administration has also encouraged more gas exports. Along the U.S. Gulf Coast, there is a building spree underway for LNG export terminals.

But once in place, that infrastructure may operate through the middle of the century — at least, that is what LNG operators and their investors intend.

“It just locks in fracking for decades to come at a time when we’re supposed to be winding things down,” Steingraber said.

Top scientists say the world’s ice sheets are melting more rapidly than expected and that world leaders must ramp up their climate ambitions to avoid a catastrophic rise in sea levels.

A report released Thursday from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, a network of policy experts and researchers, pleads with world leaders to heed their warnings as they gather for the United Nations’ COP28 climate conference later this month. The report says if global average temperatures settle at 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline, the planet could be committed to more than 40 feet of sea-level rise — a melt that would take centuries and reshape societies across the globe.

The collapse of ice sheets and ice shelves has been a major point of uncertainty within the climate science community. But a flurry of new research suggests that dangerous tipping points are nearer than once thought and that there is likely less room in Earth’s carbon budget than expected.

“We might be reaching these temperature thresholds that we’ve been talking about for a long time sooner than we were thinking about years ago,” said Rob DeConto, the director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Earth & Sustainability and an author of the report. “And it may be that the thresholds for some of these processes that can drive really rapid ice loss are lower than we were thinking just a few years ago.”

Without a dramatic turn in the pace of climate action, those factors could leave humanity “facing rates of sea-level rise way outside the range of adaptability,” DeConto said.

In the report, the scientists argue a rise in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius would force many to flee coastal communities.

“We’re displacing millions of people with the decisions being made now,” said report author Julie Brigham-Grette, a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

More than 60 scientists contributed to the report. Many are experts in their specialties, and some have worked on past reports for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading body on assessing the climate crisis.

In the IPCC’s 2021 report, scientists estimated that sea level will rise about 0.9 to 3.3 feet (0.28 to 1.01 meters) by 2100, but also said those numbers didn’t factor in uncertainties around ice sheets like the ones scientists have been probing more deeply in the past few years.

New studies suggest that melting ice sheets are a greater cause for concern than the IPCC had considered.

“Many ice sheet scientists now believe that by 2°C, nearly all of Greenland, much of West Antarctica, and even vulnerable portions of East Antarctica will be triggered to very long-term, inexorable sea-level rise, even if air temperatures later decrease,” the new ICCI report says.

The new report also outlines how the declining mass of mountain glaciers threatens hydropower supplies and endangers drinking water sources, how permafrost could intensify warming by releasing massive amounts of methane, and how polar waters are becoming increasingly acidified, which threatens the survival of shell-building creatures like krill and crab.

World leaders in 2015 agreed to limit warming to well below 2 degrees C and also to aim for 1.5 degrees. But many countries are struggling to cut fossil fuels from their economies, and efforts remain off pace to limit warming. A 2022 U.N. report found the planet was on track to warm about 2.8 C above preindustrial times by 2100.

A recent United Nations Environment Programme report found that world leaders plan to extract and produce twice the amount of fossil fuels needed to keep global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees C.

This year, scientists have observed a slew of concerning signs for the world’s ice.

Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest-ever maximum since scientists began measuring in 1979, a possible sign that climate change could be making an impact in what has been a more resilient region for sea ice.

Swiss glaciers lost about 10% of their remaining mass in the past two years, the report says. And Greenland experienced the second-highest surface melt in recorded history.

Meanwhile, scientists revealed new research that suggests the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might already be inevitable and that Greenland’s glaciers are melting at five times the rate they were 20 years ago. And another group of scientists found that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming was far smaller than once thought. At the current pace, the scientists believe global average temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in about six years.

The authors hope the new ICCI report will influence negotiations at COP28, the climate discussions among world leaders that are slated to take place in Dubai from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.

“We’re committing today’s kindergartners to a very different future,” Brigham-Grette said, adding that policymakers’ “selective hearing is the problem.”

Added DeConto: “While some change has already been set in motion, the truly dire impacts of cryosphere loss can be avoided with immediate reductions in carbon emissions.”

When the moon hangs large and round above the Amazon, the dolphins climb out of the river and transform into handsome young men. Such is the legend that has been passed down for centuries in villages nestled in the river basin. It is the best known of the many legends told about the pink river dolphin – which is, says Miriam Marmontel, "the face of the Amazon."

For over 30 years, the 65-year-old marine biologist has been conducting research into the Amazon river dolphin. Fishermen have told her that the animals sometimes chase fish into their nets, apparently just for the fun of it. She has dived with them on many occasions, affixing transponders to the animals to see how far they swim. She has accompanied them by boat countless times. The walls of her office at the Mamirauá Institute in the jungle city of Tefé are covered with photos from her excursions into the dolphins' habitat.

But for the last several weeks, Marmontel has mostly been counting cadavers. At least 154 river dolphins died in a two-week period starting at the end of September in Lake Tefé – around 10 percent of the population, Marmontel estimates. "The animals swam in circles before they died," she says. "Many of them were no longer able to dive. They had completely lost their orientation."
Marine biologist Miriam Marmontel: "They had completely lost their orientation." Marine biologist Miriam Marmontel: "They had completely lost their orientation."

From Lake to Deathtrap

There is now a large vat on the grass behind Marmontel's laboratory. When she opens the lid, an appalling odor wafts out. It is full of dolphin heads. Because the researcher didn't have enough room for so many dolphin corpses, they cut the heads of the dead animals to examine them.

The lake has always been something of a paradise for the river dolphins. The giant body of water fed by Rio Solimões – which joins Rio Negro some 500 kilometers further to the east near Manaus to form the Amazon River – is full of fish. "The lake is like a nursery for the dolphins," says Marmontel. But in recent weeks, it apparently turned into a deathtrap.

Together with her colleagues, Marmontel set out to learn what caused the mysterious die-off. They dissected the cadavers, took water samples, analyzed weather and climate conditions and interviewed fishermen and locals. Was it a virus? Were they killed by an organic poison used by indigenous tribes for fishing? Was the lake polluted by pesticides? Could the dolphins have starved to death?

Ultimately, only one possible explanation remained, says Marmontel: "The animals were victims of climate change."
Examining the cadaver of a river dolphin. Examining the cadaver of a river dolphin.

The Collapse Can Still Be Stopped

For months, the Amazon region has been suffering from an extreme drought. Water in the rivers and lakes is lower than it has ever been, and many have dried up completely. The unusual heat has also led to a rapid rise in water temperatures. Lago de Tefé is normally between 26 and 32 degrees Celsius, but in late September, the water heated up to 40 degrees (104 degrees Fahrenheit). "Fresh water dolphins can stand temperatures of up to 38 degrees," says Marmontel. In contrast to humans, dolphins are not able to regulate their body temperatures through sweating. "They died of overheating."

The death of the dolphins alarmed scientists around the world. With their pointy snouts and long, flexible necks, pink river dolphins are perfectly adapted to the rainforest ecosystem. "They are agile and can effortlessly move between submerged trees," says Marmontel.

But they apparently aren't equipped to deal with climate change. Is the mass death of dolphins in Lake Tefé a sign that the feared "tipping point" has been reached, the moment when the rain forest can no longer be saved from slowly transforming into a savanna? Mass dolphin deaths have also been reported in other bodies of water in the Amazon region. Is it the beginning of a massive die-off of plants and animals?

Luciana Gatti, a scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, which is one of South America's top climate research institutes, believes that the collapse can still be stopped. "But we are approaching more and more rapidly the point at which the process will be irreversible."
A stranded ferry on the Negro River in the Amazon region. Numerous villages lack food and drinking water because the waterways have dried up. A stranded ferry on the Negro River in the Amazon region. Numerous villages lack food and drinking water because the waterways have dried up.

Gatti believes a combination of three factors is responsible for the unusual drought in the rainforest. The surface of the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of South America has warmed especially strongly this year. This regularly recurring weather phenomenon, known as El Niño, leads to more rain and possible flooding in the southern part of the continent, but produces heat and dryness in the north. At the same time, the surface of the North Atlantic has warmed unusually strongly. That has meant that warm masses of air have pushed into the Amazon region from both directions, lying over the basin like a dome. "It is raining less because less moisture is coming in from the ocean," says Gatti.

But the largest effect comes from logging. "Evaporation has decreased because the forest cover has shrunk." In the southern and southeastern part of the Amazon region, where cattle ranchers and soybean farmers have been particularly aggressive in their clearcutting activities, some 30 percent of the original forest has been destroyed since the 1970s.

"The remaining trees are extremely stressed," says Gatti. In an article for the scientific journal Nature, a contribution that attracted global attention, she demonstrated that parts of the Amazon region now emit more CO2 than they absorb. That means that one of the rainforest's most important contributions to the global climate has been destroyed. "Nature is in complete disarray," Gatti says.

The Chainsaw Lobby

The scientist blames the destruction of the rainforest on Brazil's booming agricultural industry. Illegal clearcutting essentially went unpunished during the four-year presidency of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, who even encouraged the chainsaw lobby to steal yet more land. Since the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on January 1, illegal logging has slowed down, and plans call for it to be stopped entirely by 2030. But experts are doubtful that will happen. "The agricultural lobby dominates Congress in Brasília," says Gatti. She is demanding that an environmental emergency be declared for the entire Amazon region. "Big farmers who clearcut should be punished by no longer receiving loans."

What the scientist finds particularly disturbing is that the environmental destruction is now taking place in areas of the Amazon that used to be considered sacrosanct – such as the gigantic state of Amazonas, where Lake Tefé is located. Because road construction in the region is difficult due to the numerous rivers that run through it, most villages are only accessible by boat or airplane. But that might soon change. Lobbyists from the agricultural industry have joined local politicians in demanding that the central government build a road from the state capital of Manaus to Porto Velho, 900 kilometers away. That would create an overland link between the metropolis of Manaus, with its 2 million inhabitants, and the agriculturally developed regions to the south – and likely attract tens of thousands of people in search of grazing and farmland into the once largely unspoiled forest.
Air pollution in Manaus in October: A taste of the future dystopia. Air pollution in Manaus in October: A taste of the future dystopia.

Already, the authorities are reporting a dramatic increase in the amount of slashing and burning going on in the state. In October, they counted almost 4,000 fires – compared to 1,500 in the same month last year. In recent weeks, the residents of Manaus got a taste of the dystopian future facing the Amazon region if the clearing of the forest isn't stopped: For weeks, the city lay under a thick blanket of smoke and dust, making it difficult to breathe. A dust storm developed in the middle of the city. The smoke was from neighboring states, where residents were burning the vegetation to make room for farmland or construction.

On top of that are the consequences of the drought: Water levels in the Port of Manaus fell in October to an historic low of 13.5 meters, more than four meters lower than October 2022. Instead of oceangoing freighters and passenger ships, the port is now home to sandbanks. In the factories located in the city's free-trade zone, where industrial goods can be produced at a lower tax rate, workers are being laid off because the products can no longer be transported. A number of factories have temporarily suspended production.

Numerous cities and villages further inland, which are normally supplied by ship, are currently suffering from food and drinking water shortages because the waterways have dried up. Homes on the riverbanks have collapsed because the ground has grown unstable.

"Our River Has Simply Disappeared"

In Tefé, a city of 60,000 people, the army is arranging the transportation of drinking water and basic food supplies to residents of the surrounding communities. The lake has shrunk so much that it is possible to cross it at some points on foot or with a car. "I've never experienced such a drought," says Erivan dos Santos, who runs a small farm. He lives together with his wife, three children and two grandchildren at the mouth of an Igarapé, as the water arterials of the jungle are called. Today, it is a desert-like landscape. "Our river has simply disappeared," Santos complains. The family used to get its drinking water from a well, but now, they have to buy it in the city. "Because of the drought, all products have become more expensive," he says.

A large number of dolphins died in a cove not far from his house. "It was a place where dolphin mothers would raise their young," says Marmontel, the marine biologist. In a hushed voice, she describes how the animals sought shelter in the shallow water.

When the mass die off began, Marmontel assembled a rapid-reaction force to try to save the dolphins. "We thought about moving them to the Rio Solimões, where the water is deeper and cooler," she says. But at the time, it seemed risky. "We didn't yet know why the dolphins were dying. If they were dying because of a virus, they would have infected healthy animals and spread the disease further."

Nevertheless, they decided to lead the animals to deeper water, a move that saved the lives of a number of dolphins. "But some of them swam back. We don't know why."

Currently, researchers and members of environmental protection organizations are receiving training in capturing and moving individual dolphins. Specialists who have amassed experience in saving marine mammals on Brazil's southwestern coast are demonstrating how to lay the animals on a mattress in the boat and keep them calm until they can be released elsewhere. Because the dolphins are extremely susceptible to stress, the saviors-in-training are practicing with inflatable plastic models.

Marmontel is hoping that it won't actually become necessary to put the training into use. Water levels have begun rising again at the Colombian border, 500 kilometers upriver, according to officials there. And even though it has hardly rained at all, temperatures in Lake Tefé have dropped in recent weeks to between 32 and 37 degrees Celsius because of cloudy skies. But it's unclear if it will remain that way. "Three sunny days in a row would drive the temperature back up to 40 degrees," says Marmontel – which would result in more dolphin deaths.

Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell.

All around was a desert devoid of life, aside from scrubby saxaul trees. Dust swirled in 110-degree Fahrenheit heat under a throbbing red sun. I reached the edge of one of the scattered lakes which are all that remain of this once-great body of water. I took off my shoes and waded in. The water was so full of salt that it felt viscous, not quite liquid.

In the nearby town of Muynak, black and white newsreels in the local museum, and pictures in the family photo albums of residents, tell of better times. During the Soviet era, fishing communities like Muynak ringed the sea, thriving off its bounty: sturgeon, flounder, caviar and other staples of Soviet dinner tables. In the town I met Oktyabr Dospanov, a local archaeologist who grew up along the Aral’s shores and recalls a “happy life” in his youth, when fishing boats, passenger ships and cargo trawlers plied the sea’s waves around the clock.

But over the decades, Soviet authorities diverted rivers that flowed into the sea to irrigate cotton and other crops. The world’s fourth largest inland body of water — which covered an area about 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan — gradually shrank, triggering a domino effect of ecological, economic and community collapse, the kind of catastrophe that could befall other environmentally fragile parts of the world unless we change our ways.

By 2007, the sea’s surface area had shrunk by around 90 percent, leaving Muynak a landlocked way station for tourists who come to marvel at this ecological disaster, where they take selfies near rusting ship hulks that are perched high and dry in the endless sand.

Although restoration efforts in recent years have led to small improvements in some areas, the former expanse of the Aral Sea is a blighted realm, where a scattering of far smaller, brackish lakes lie like puddles in a vast dry basin. The Aral Sea is now the Aralkum Desert. Over the decades, soil and water were contaminated by pesticides and other pollutants, which are suspected of causing birth defects and other chronic health problems in the area.

As the Aral Sea died, the region’s once-rich pastures and forests began to degrade, according to Mr. Dospanov. Birds, insects and other wildlife that depend on the sea and its wider environment disappeared. It was as if, without the sea, biodiversity went into freefall.


The hulks of boats that once plied the Aral Sea are now stranded more than 75 miles from water.

Salty dust blown from the parched seabed has severely impacted crops. Other livelihoods tied to the sea have also suffered, and over the decades local incomes fell and unemployment rose. The population of the region dropped as locals migrated to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent or to Moscow, where many work in construction or other low-paying jobs and often face discrimination. An entire natural and human ecosystem was destroyed. Worse, the Soviets authorities knew what was happening, but priorities like economic growth seemed more important. By the 1980s, authorities even considered compounding the folly by diverting water from Lake Baikal in Siberia, more than 2,000 miles away, to the Aral region. The Soviet Union collapsed before that scheme could be carried out.

Last year, protests broke out in Karakalpakstan, the region where the Aral Sea was located, after a proposal by the government of Uzbekistan that would have reduced the region’s autonomy. Many observers have noted that economic and environmental hardship related to the sea’s demise have added to the region’s volatility.

The really scary thing about the Aral Sea is that environmental catastrophes like it are being replicated across the world. We see refugees fleeing from uninhabitable homelands; bitter conflicts over scarce resources and land; cities threatened by rising sea levels.

In the United States, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are shrinking, and cities like Los Angeles are racing to balance their water needs with a changing climate. Agriculture, fracking, lawn maintenance and other activities are rapidly depleting groundwater aquifers across America. Can we live with the possibility that other places are headed for a fate similar to the Aral Sea? The human race is using up its water and other resources like there’s no tomorrow, but as the residents of Muynak found out, there was a tomorrow, just not the one they were hoping for.

For Mr. Dospanov, the sea was a microcosm of humanity’s deep economic and social connection to the environment. A culture and a way of life blossomed around the Aral Sea, in symbiosis with it, dependent upon it. But the sea’s destruction caused everything else to collapse along with it, he said.

I left for Tashkent to catch a flight back to China where I live, eager to leave Karakalpakstan behind. But I would have to wait: Beijing had been hit by the heaviest rains in years (prompting discussion of whether climate change was partly to blame), stranding me for a while in Tashkent.

The Aral Sea stands as a grim parable, a warning of what can come from humanity’s environmental hubris. If we continue this way, waiting for somebody else to do something, or letting short-term economic interests stand in the way, we may find ourselves like Mr. Dospanov, telling visitors about how beautiful our home once was.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of extinction due to global heating, overfishing and pollution, according to an expert assessment.

From the large-toothed Lake Turkana robber in Kenya to the Mekong giant catfish in south-east Asia, many of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of disappearing, the first International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list assessment of the category has found.

Nearly a fifth of all threatened freshwater species are affected by climate change, from impacts such as falling water levels, shifting seasons and seawater moving up rivers. Of the assessed species, 3,086 out of 14,898 were at risk of vanishing.

The latest assessment also found that mahogany, Atlantic salmon and green turtles were increasingly threatened, according to scientific assessments, but there was good news about the saiga antelope, which has moved up from the critically endangered category to near threatened after the population increased by 1,100% in just seven years, mainly in Kazakhstan.

The reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx in Chad is another success story. The world’s fourth largest mammal was once common across the Sahel but disappeared in the 1990s after it was overhunted. Reintroduction efforts from captivity have led to the population growing to 140 mature animals in the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim faunal reserve in Chad. It is classified as vulnerable to extinction and scientists say it is threatened by the climate crisis.

“Today’s update to the IUCN red list shows the power of coordinated local, national and international conservation efforts. Success stories such as that of the scimitar horned oryx show that conversation works. To ensure the results of conservation action are durable, we need to decisively tackle the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises,” said the IUCN president, Razan Al Mubarak.

Big leaf mahogany, among the most commercially sought-after plants on the planet, is now classified as endangered after its numbers fell by 60% over the past 180 years due to unsustainable harvesting. Mahogany wood remains valuable for furniture, musical instruments and decorations, which has driven illegal logging of the tree across central and South America.

The Atlantic salmon, previously common and classified as a species of least concern, is now near threatened on the IUCN red list after its global population fell by 23%, having vanished from many rivers in the UK. The fish, which lives in both fresh and saltwater, has been affected by widespread habitat loss, global heating and dams that block access to breeding sites. Breeding with farmed salmon has also weakened their ability to adapt from global heating while invasive Pacific pink salmon is spreading across northern Europe.

“Freshwater fishes make up more than half of the world’s known fish species, an incomprehensible diversity given that freshwater ecosystems comprise only 1% of aquatic habitat. These diverse species are integral to the ecosystem, and vital to its resilience. This is essential to the billions of people who rely upon freshwater ecosystems, and the millions of people who rely on their fisheries,” said Kathy Hughes, co-chair of the IUCN species survival commission freshwater fish specialist group.

“Ensuring freshwater ecosystems are well managed, remain free-flowing with sufficient water, and good water quality is essential to stop species declines and maintain food security, livelihoods and economies in a climate resilient world,” she said.

Central south Pacific and east Pacific green turtles are also at risk of vanishing, according to scientists. They are a major bycatch in industrial and artisanal fishing while their eggs are a delicacy in some countries. Rising global temperatures are also affecting their hatching success and rising sea temperatures are flooding nests.

Wind turbines gently slice through the air, generating the energy that powers our lives. A majestic sunrise creeps over the horizon. A glistening vibrant green meadow awaits a flock of grazing sheep. Ahhhh, bliss. A picture of sustainability. A future that’s increasingly becoming a reality, or so it would appear. Only, just like the darkest of comedies, this picture is a facade. An aberration. A myth.

In stark contrast to that picture of sustainability and the never-ending fight to ‘solve’ the climate crisis, 2022 was marked by an unwanted record. Carbon emissions reached a new all-time high of 36.8 billion tonnes. So what’s going on? The contrast is an outcome of some rather inconvenient truths that lie under the surface of the battle to solve the climate crisis. Here are eight such inconveniences.

1. COP meetings are a sham

Seeing as it just took place it feels fitting to begin with the Climate Change Conference (COP).

COP 28 ended with a historical back-slapping achievement. For the first time, fossil fuels have been referred to as the driver of climate change. Yeah, that’s the historical achievement, stating the blind obvious. It tells you everything you need to know about this rambling circus.

There’s hope this historical achievement could spell the beginning of the end for fossil fuels. Do you know what we can be confident of? It won’t be the end for fossil fuels. Why so much confidence? Look what happened after the previous ‘historical achievement’ of striking a climate deal at COP 21 in 2015.

The Paris Agreement has been a disaster, with emissions continuing to increase ever since.

After 28 conferences you might be thinking surely the UN would accept that maybe, just maybe, this approach isn’t working. And it’s an approach that will never work because the delegates can never question the cause of increasing emissions.

That cause centres on a global economy that has become gigantic in scale. The global economy is so big that it has led to ecological overshoot. Essentially we use way more energy and resources in a year than the Earth can renew. And it’s been that way since the 1970s.

Overshoot is the reason why atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are increasing every year. But the global economy will continue to grow because the critical belief that holds modern society together is economic growth. And as long as economies are compelled to grow, emissions will be an outcome. You can’t have one without the other.

That’s why COP meetings are a waste of time. They can’t question economic growth. It would be a bit like the Council of Cardinals questioning a belief in God.

So we’re left with a circus that ducks and dives, desperately avoiding that which must not be questioned.

2. It’s not a climate crisis, it’s an ecological crisis

Moving swiftly on, what makes COP meetings and the whole climate crisis agenda so questionable is that we’re not facing a climate crisis at all. We’re facing an ecological one.

The interconnected nature of the environmental problem was powerfully revealed by the planetary boundaries framework in 2009. The study identified nine processes that are critical to maintaining the stability and resilience of the Earth system as a whole.

You wouldn’t think it though, would you? Apparently, a changing climate is the one and only problem, which explains why institutional changes and the strategies and actions that feed from them are focused on ensuring the global average temperature remains below 1.5°C. Actions to reach the goal revolve around achieving net zero by 2050.

Creating an achievable objective makes it appear that rather than radical transformative change, we only need to decarbonise economies; rather than questioning the sustainability of high living standards fed by consumerism, we need to reduce individual impacts by reducing waste or recycling more or driving electric cars.

Each assumption feeds into a rather palatable conclusion, current lifestyles can be maintained, we just need to make a few tweaks to how we do things, and everything will be okay.

3. High living standards are unsustainable

Living standards are really what this is all about. There is an unwavering belief that we can reduce emissions while maintaining, and even increasing, prosperity.

But the high and rising living standards that have accompanied modern society have a gigantic ecological footprint, hence why we’re in a state of overshoot.

Our footprint on the Earth is why we produce over two billion tonnes of waste, every year. Global waste is expected to grow to 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050. Waste is just one element of that massive footprint.

Individual footprints are correlated with incomes. The higher the income, the bigger the footprint. More people with higher incomes means that the footprint will get larger. A larger footprint just means overshoot will get worse, which translates into increasing emissions, increasing phosphorus loading, increasing habitat destruction — you get the idea.

The inconvenient truth is that high and rising living standards are incompatible with forming sustainable societies. And that’s one inconvenient truth.

4. This is not a fight to ‘solve’ anything

The strangest truth has to be the narrative that we’re in some grand battle of the ages.

Who exactly are we fighting against? The Earth? The climate? Emissions? Ourselves? This isn’t the final boss in a game.

So often the narrative revolves around a fight to solve the climate crisis. The assumption is that we’re faced with a technical problem that can be overcome through technological innovation.

Underlying this assumption is yet another — we still have time to maintain the environmental conditions we depend on. But this is a lie. Whether we like it or not, changes to the climate are locked in. Things are never going to be the same again.

It’s not about fighting some enemy, it’s about adapting to a future that is still unknown. That doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

5. Changes to the climate are locked in

On the topic of the future, we know we’re hurtling towards a bleak one due to climate models. It’s models that have led to the IPCC’s 1.5°C target. A target that has become biblical in its importance.

Because global average temperatures haven’t quite hit the target yet you’ll often hear the well-versed narrative — we still have time!

But the Earth isn’t some static benevolent system. Naturally, the 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 emissions we’ve released since the start of the industrial revolution are bound to have an impact on the world around us.

The cold hard truth is that positive feedbacks have become self-reinforcing.

So even if we stopped emissions today emissions would still be released through natural sources like melting permafrost.

If we stopped emissions today warming would continue due to impacts like the continued melting of the highly reflective polar ice caps.

If we stopped emissions today “sea levels would continue to rise for centuries, due to the time-lags associated with climate processes and feedbacks.”

In other words, we are locked into a planetary emergency. The idea we still have until (add a date a few years into the future) to win the ‘fight’ against climate change feeds into the myth that we don’t need to make adaptations to lifestyles.

If only that were true.

6. We have no idea what the future holds — we just know it will be really bad

Talking of that sacred 1.5°C target.

The preeminent climate scientist James Hansen has written extensively on this subject arguing that “global warming of more than 1°C…would likely constitute “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with climate.”

But, 1.5°C is the threshold, isn’t it? The target is 1.5°C. We just need to keep temperatures below 1.5°C.

The really inconvenient truth is that models can only tell us so much. Ed Lorenz’s metaphor of the butterfly effect, where the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Peking can set in motion a chain of events leading to rain rather than sunshine in New York, illustrates the complexity in non-linear systems like Earth.

He argues that even if we could forecast how every flap of every butterfly wing impacts the weather, it would only improve the accuracy of forecasts by a few minutes because forecasts are limited by a two-week threshold.

If the earth system is too complex to predict weather forecasts accurately beyond that two-week limit, then we can’t say with a high level of confidence what the climate will look like in the decades to come. While useful in giving us the foresight to know our actions are destabilising the climate, models are limited in their accuracy.

Even if Hansen is proven correct (a fact he readily hopes not to be the case, given the consequences), it no longer matters. The IPCC can hardly turn around and say whoops, we’ve made a mistake; actually, we have to keep global warming below 1°C. The goal has been set, and now it’s locked in stone.

And even if you’re clinging onto that 1.5°C target, the reality is that “1.5°C will be reached around 2030 regardless of the emissions path.”

7. It could be catastrophic when we stop burning fossil fuels

Everyone bangs on about decarbonisation as if it’s our ticket to sustainability, but what’s often neglected is that decarbonisation could come with its own risks.

Burning fossil fuels releases aerosols alongside those greenhouse gases. Unlike greenhouse gases that absorb the sun’s heat, aerosols reflect heat back into the atmosphere (in a similar way to clouds).

There are fears that an aggressive phase-out of fossil fuels will lead to a ‘climate penalty’. This is where the aerosols that were being consistently released from burning fossil fuels dissipate in a few years, leading to a sharp spike in global warming by as much as 1°C in as little as ten years.

A recent paper has disputed this fear arguing “global average temperatures…do not show a near-term spike in warming.” But herein lies the problem when you start meddling with such a complex system like Earth.

As soon as we turned on the engines of industry we unlocked a host of wickedly complex unintended consequences that no one could have foreseen at the time.

8. We‘re relying on technology that doesn’t exist

A very inconvenient truth about the battle to solve the climate crisis is that goals like net zero aren’t possible without technology that either doesn’t exist or is in its infancy.

Take Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The IPCC considers CCS vital in reducing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The idea is that carbon dioxide is captured and then stored deep in the Earth’s crust, essentially creating an artificial carbon sink.

​​The technology sounds promising but with 27 fully operational CCS facilities worldwide the industry is in its infancy. To have any tangible impact CCS would need to be scaled enormously.

To gauge the scale required, since Shell’s Quest CCS facility opened in Alberta, Canada, in 2015, it has captured just over 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year. If CCS were to play a role in achieving net zero it would need to capture a large percentage of emissions. For argument’s sake, 4,000 such facilities would be needed to capture four billion tonnes of CO2 per year (10 percent of global CO2 emissions).

An obstacle to scaling is the vast cost. Shell received $865 million from the governments of Canada and Alberta to build and operate Quest. CCS isn’t designed to create any value outside of capturing CO2 so the only incentive to build and maintain such a facility seems to be for ulterior motives. In the case of Quest, it’s not coincidental that the facility is in the same state as the Alberta Tar Sands, the world’s most destructive oil operation.

The Canadian government has much to gain in investing in such a facility which feeds a perception that any continued operations at the Tar Sands can be offset by Quest.

Critics aren’t so convinced, with some arguing Quest emits more CO2 than it captures.

The horrifying reality

It can be awfully comforting to bury your head in the sand — that’s what climate myths are designed to do. They inspire positivity, hope, optimism. They also serve a vital purpose.

Myths are being weaponised into truths to help justify the status quo. They present an illusion of change. They feed into the idea that sure, we have a problem, but nothing technology can’t handle.

The inconvenient truths tell a different story. They reveal a bitter, ghastly reality that no one dares admit. Whether we like it or not, we are facing a crisis where the opportunity to escape has long since passed. That crisis will translate into unparalleled suffering, unrest, and chaos. No amount of back-slapping will prevent it.

The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.

As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said.

“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

After what was probably the hottest July in 120,000 years, Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years.

Now director of the climate programme at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope was for a generational shift of leadership.

“The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.

Scientists are still processing data from this blistering year. The latest to state it will be a record was the Japanese meteorological agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 at 0.53C above the global average between 1991 and 2020.

This was far above the previous record set in 2016, when temperatures were 0.35C above that average. Over the longer term, the world is about 1.2C hotter than in preindustrial times.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously calculated that there was a “greater than 99% chance” that 2023 would be the hottest year in its 174-year dataset. This followed six record warm months in a row, including the northern hemisphere’s warmest summer and autumn.

Driven by human-caused global heating and El Niño, the heat refused to relent. In November, there was an even greater anomaly, with two days warmer than 2C above the preindustrial average, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

It too has already confirmed the annual record, as has the World Meteorological Organization. In December, many parts of the world sweltered through the hottest-ever Christmas. With the new year approaching, monthly temperature records were still being beaten in central Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.

Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will almost certainly prove to have been 1.5C higher than preindustrial levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual measurements, many scientists say it is probably only a matter of time before the world overshoots the most ambitious of the Paris agreement targets.

Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.

He said these new developments indicated the Earth was in uncharted territory ​​and under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be seeing a shift in Earth’s response to 250 years of escalated human pressures … to a situation of ‘payback’ where Earth starts sending invoices back to the thin layer on Earth where humans live, in the form of off the charts extremes.”

Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests could tilt the planet into a state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.

Five years on, he said that what disturbed him most in 2023 was the sharp increase in sea surface temperatures, which have been abrupt even for an El Niño year.

“We do not understand why the ocean heat increase is so dramatic, and we do not know what the consequences are in the future,” he said. “Are we seeing the first signs of a state shift? Or is it [a] freak outlier?”

In the Antarctic, scientists have also been perplexed and worried by the pace of change. The new Brazilian scientific module Criosfera 2, a solar and wind-powered laboratory that collects meteorological information, measured the lowest extent of sea ice in the region both for summer and winter.

“This environmental alert is a sign of ongoing global environmental changes and poses a daunting challenge for polar scientists to explain,” said Francisco Eliseu Aquino, a professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the deputy director of Brazil’s polar and climatic centre.

West Antarctica was affected by several winter heatwaves associated with the landfall of atmospheric rivers. In early July, a Chilean team on King George Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, registered an unprecedented event of rainfall in the middle of the austral winter when only snowfalls are expected.

In January, a massive iceberg, measuring about 1,500 sq km, broke off from the Brunt ice shelf in the Weddell Sea. It was the third colossal calving in the same region in three years.

Aquino said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with similarly devastating force in mid-November.

Aquino said this “record record” was a taste of what wa to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards, we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5C [of heating] in the global average temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.

This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.

Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in US history, which happened in August. For those who prefer to calculate catastrophe in economic terms, the US broke its annual record of billion-dollar disasters by August, by which time there had already been 23.

Raul Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said the effects of this year’s heat were being felt across South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in Uruguay, record-breaking fires in Chile, the most severe drought in the Amazon basin in 50 years, prolonged power shortages in Ecuador caused by the lack of hydropower, and increased shipping costs along the Panama canal due to low water levels.

Cordero said El Niño was forecast to weaken in the coming year, but above average or record temperatures were likely to persist for at least the next three months.

And, as science has proved beyond any doubt, global temperatures would continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests.

In the years ahead, the heat “anomaly” and catastrophes of 2023 would first become the new norm, and then be looked back on as one of the cooler, more stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warned, unless there is radical and rapid change, failure will be built into the climate system.

Consumer Reports has found that plastics retain a "widespread" presence in food despite the health risks, and called on regulators to reassess the safety of plastics that come into contact with food during production.

The non-profit consumer group said on Thursday that 84 out of 85 supermarket foods and fast foods it recently tested contained "plasticizers" known as phthalates, a chemical used to make plastic more durable.

It also said 79% of food samples in its study contained bisphenol A (BPA), another chemical found in plastic, and other bisphenols, though levels were lower than in tests done in 2009.

Consumer Reports said none of the phthalate levels it found exceeded limits set by U.S. and European regulators.

It also said there was no level of phthalates that scientists confirm is safe, but that does not guarantee the safety of foods you eat.

Phthalates and bisphenols can disrupt the production and regulation of estrogen and other hormones, potentially boosting the risk of birth defects, cancer, diabetes, infertility, neurodevelopmental disorders, obesity and other health problems.

Among tested supermarket foods, Annie's Organic Cheesy Ravioli contained the most phthalates in nanograms per serving, 53,579, followed by Del Monte sliced peaches and Chicken of the Sea pink salmon.

Elevated phthalate levels were also found in products such as Cheerios, Gerber baby food and Yoplait yogurt, and several burgers, nuggets and fries from Wendy's, Burger King and McDonald's.

Consumer Reports also found variations among similar products. The 33,980 phthalates in nanograms per serving in Wendy's Crispy Chicken Nuggets, for example, was more than four times the level in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets.

"That tells us that, as widespread as these chemicals are, there are ways to reduce how much is in our foods," said James Rogers, who oversees Consumer Reports' product safety testing.

The consumer group said a reassessment by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other agencies of the risks of plasticizers is "overdue and essential."

Polar raspberry lime seltzer was the only tested product containing no phthalates.

General Mills (GIS.N), whose brands include Annie's, Cheerios and Yoplait, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Burger King (QSR.TO) and Wendy's (WEN.O) did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Chicken of the Sea (TU.BK) and Del Monte said they do not add phthalates to their food, and receive similar assurances from their suppliers. Del Monte also said that phthalates are "widespread in the environment."

Gerber and McDonald's (MCD.N) said they follow regulatory requirements, and require rigorous testing for chemicals in packaging.

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers.

Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These are particles that are less than a micron in size. There are 25,400 microns — also called micrometers because it is a millionth of a meter — in an inch. A human hair is about 83 microns wide.

Previous studies have looked at slightly bigger microplastics that range from the visible 5 millimeters, less than a quarter of an inch, to one micron. About 10 to 100 times more nanoplastics than microplastics were discovered in bottled water, the study found.

Much of the plastic seems to be coming from the bottle itself and the reverse osmosis membrane filter used to keep out other contaminants, said study lead author Naixin Qian, a Columbia physical chemist. She wouldn’t reveal the three brands because researchers want more samples before they single out a brand and want to study more brands. Still, she said they were common and bought at a WalMart.Researchers still can’t answer the big question: Are those nanoplastic pieces harmful to health?

“That’s currently under review. We don’t know if it’s dangerous or how dangerous,” said study co-author Phoebe Stapleton, a toxicologist at Rutgers. “We do know that they are getting into the tissues (of mammals, including people) … and the current research is looking at what they’re doing in the cells.”

The International Bottled Water Association said in a statement: “There currently is both a lack of standardized (measuring) methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers.”

The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics manufacturers, declined to immediately comment.

The world "is drowning under the weight of plastic pollution, with more than 430 million tonnes of plastic produced annually" and microplastics found in the world's oceans, food and drinking water with some of them coming from clothing and cigarette filters, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Efforts for a global plastics treaty continue after talks bogged down in November.

All four co-authors interviewed said they were cutting back on their bottled water use after they conduced the study.

Wei Min, the Columbia physical chemist who pioneered the dual laser microscope technology, said he has reduced his bottled water use by half. Stapleton said she now relies more on filtered water at home in New Jersey.

But study co-author Beizhan Yan, a Columbia environmental chemist who increased his tap water usage, pointed out that filters themselves can be a problem by introducing plastics.

“There’s just no win,” Stapleton said.

Outside experts, who praised the study, agreed that there’s a general unease about perils of fine plastics particles, but it’s too early to say for sure.

“The danger of the plastics themselves is still an unanswered question. For me, the additives are the most concerning,” said Duke University professor of medicine and comparative oncology group director Jason Somarelli, who wasn’t part of the research. “We and others have shown that these nanoplastics can be internalized into cells and we know that nanoplastics carry all kinds of chemical additives that could cause cell stress, DNA damage and change metabolism or cell function.”

Somarelli said his own not yet published work has found more than 100 “known cancer-causing chemicals in these plastics.”

What’s disturbing, said University of Toronto evolutionary biologist Zoie Diana, is that “small particles can appear in different organs and may cross membranes that they aren’t meant to cross, such as the blood-brain barrier.”

Diana, who was not part of the study, said the new tool researchers used makes this an exciting development in the study of plastics in the environment and body.

About 15 years ago, Min invented dual laser microscope technology that identifies specific compounds by their chemical properties and how they resonate when exposed to the lasers. Yan and Qian talked to him about using that technique to find and identify plastics that had been too small for researchers using established methods.

Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association, said “the work can be an important advance in the detection of nanoplastics” but she said she’d like to see other analytical chemists replicate the technique and results.

Denise Hardesty, an Australian government oceanographer who studies plastic waste, said context is needed. The total weight of the nanoplastic found is “roughly equivalent to the weight of a single penny in the volume of two Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

Hardesty is less concerned than others about nanoplastics in bottled water, noting that “I'm privileged to live in a place where I have access to ‘clean’ tap water and I don't have to buy drinking water in single use containers.”

Yan said he is starting to study other municipal water supplies in Boston, St. Louis, Los Angeles and elsewhere to see how much plastics are in their tap water. Previous studies looking for microplastics and some early tests indicate there may be less nanoplastic in tap water than bottled.

Even with unknowns about human health, Yan said he does have one recommendation for people who are worried: Use reusable bottles instead of single-use plastics. msn