The Fox glacier in New Zealand in winter. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.įrom this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”Īnd we should be in no doubt about the consequences. “In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”Ġ2:33 2050: what happens if we ignore the climate crisis – video explainer “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park. “If this country needs a wake-up call then surely that is it.” “Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east London. (The country’s previous hottest temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.) That is how fast things are moving.”Īmong the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK.

McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.” I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private.

A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and was also an adviser to the UK government.

The meltdown