The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks like

This year has provided bitter evidence that even current levels of warming are disastrous, with astounding floods in Germany and China, Hades-like fires from Canada to California to Greece and rain, rather than snow, falling for the first time at the summit of a rapidly melting Greenland. “No amount of global warming can be considered safe and people are already dying from climate change,” said Amanda Maycock, an expert in climate dynamics at the University of Leeds.

A “heat dome” that pulverized previous temperature records in the US’s Pacific northwest in June, killing hundreds of people as a billion sea creatures roasted alive in their shells off the coast, would’ve been “virtually impossible” if human activity hadn’t heated the planet, scientists have calculated, while the German floods were made nine times more likely by the climate crisis. “The fingerprint of climate change on recent extreme weather is quite clear,” said Michael Wehner, who specializes in climate attribution at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “But even I am surprised by the number and scale of weather disasters in 2021.”

After a Covid-induced blip last year, greenhouse gas emissions have roared back in 2021, further dampening slim hopes that the world will keep within the 1.5C limit. “There’s a high chance we will get to 1.5C in the next decade,” said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.

For humans, a comfortably livable planet starts to spiral away the more it heats up. At 1.5C, about 14% of the world’s population will be hit by severe heatwaves once every five years. with this number jumping to more than a third of the global population at 2C.

Beyond 1.5C, the heat in tropical regions of the world will push societies to the limits, with stifling humidity preventing sweat from evaporating and making it difficult for people to cool down. Extreme heatwaves could make parts of the Middle East too hot for humans to endure, scientists have found, with rising temperatures also posing enormous risks for China and India.

A severe heatwave historically expected once a decade will happen every other year at 2C. “Something our great-grandparents maybe experienced once a lifetime will become a regular event,” said Rogelj. Globally, an extra 4.9 million people will die each year from extreme heat should the average temperature race beyond this point, scientists have estimated.

At 2C warming, 99% of the world’s coral reefs also start to dissolve away, essentially ending warm-water corals. Nearly one in 10 vertebrate animals and almost one in five plants will lose half of their habitat. Ecosystems spanning corals, wetlands, alpine areas and the Arctic “are set to die off” at this level of heating, according to Rogelj.

Across the planet, people are set to be strafed by cascading storms, heatwaves, flooding and drought. Around 216 million people, mostly from developing countries, will be forced to flee these impacts by 2050 unless radical action is taken, the World Bank has estimated. As much as $23tn is on track to be wiped from the global economy, potentially upending many more.

Some of the most dire impacts revolve around water – both the lack of it and inundation by it. Enormous floods, often fueled by abnormally heavy rainfall, have become a regular occurrence recently, not only in Germany and China but also from the US, where the Mississippi River spent most of 2019 in a state of flood, to the UK, which was hit by floods in 2020 after storms delivered the equivalent of one month of rain in 48 hours, to Sudan, where flooding wiped out more than 110,000 homes last year.

Meanwhile, in the past 20 years the aggregated level of terrestrial water available to humanity has dropped at a rate of 1cm per year, with more than five billion people expected to have an inadequate water supply within the next three decades.

At 3C of warming, sea level rise from melting glaciers and ocean heat will also provide torrents of unwelcome water to coastal cities, with places such as Miami, Shanghai and Bangladesh in danger of becoming largely marine environments. The frequency of heavy precipitation events, the sort that soaked Germany and China, will start to climb, nearly doubling the historical norm once it heats up by 2C.

Virtually all of North America and Europe will be at heightened risk of wildfires at 3C of heating, with places like California already stuck in a debilitating cycle of “heat, drought and fire”, according to scientists. The magnitude of the disastrous “Black Summer” bushfire season in Australia in 2019-20 will be four times more likely to reoccur at 2C of heating, and will be fairly commonplace at 3C.

A disquieting unknown for climate scientists is the knock-on impacts as epochal norms continue to fall. Record wildfires in California last year, for example, resulted in a million children missing a significant amount of time in school. What if permafrost melting or flooding cuts off critical roads used by supply chains? What if storms knock out the world’s leading computer chip factory? What happens once half of the world is exposed to disease-carrying mosquitos?

“We’ve never seen the climate change this fast so we don’t understand the non-linear effects,” said Hayhoe. “There are tipping points in our human-built systems that we don’t think about enough. More carbon means worse impacts which means more unpleasant surprises.”

There are few less pleasant impacts in life than famine and the climate crisis is beginning to take a toll on food production. In August, the UN said that Madagascar was on the brink of the world’s first “climate change famine”, with tens of thousands of people at risk following four years with barely any rain. Globally, extreme crop drought events that previously occurred once a decade on average will more than double in their frequency at 2C of temperature rise.

Heat the world a bit more than this and a third of all the world’s food production will be at risk by the end of the century as crops start to wilt and fail in the heat.

Many different aspects of the climate crisis will destabilize food production, such as dropping levels of groundwater and shrinking snowpacks, another critical source of irrigation, in places such as the Himalayas. Crop yields decline the hotter it gets, while more extreme floods and storms risk ruining vast tracts of farmland.