Our steady march to catastrophe

As the nations bicker, squabble and fight among themselves, their ultimate disintegration becomes more certain and more imminent with each passing day.

Enthralled by the spectacle of leaders of paralysing stupidity disgorging lies, bombs and bombast ad lib, many people seem to have forgotten or chosen to overlook the real monster that is creeping up on them, whetting its claws to bring down the entire civilisation.

In a new paper “Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024” a global team of fifty of the world’s leading climate scientists warn that human climate emissions are achieving new records, dumping 56 billion tonnes (+/-5bt) of greenhouse gases (CO2 equivalent) into the atmosphere in 2024.

Here are a few of their key points:

· Fossil fuels and industry contributed 38bt of greenhouse emissions in 2024

· Land use changes (eg deforestation) caused 4bt in emissions (+/- 3bt) in 2024

· Methane release contributed 9bt (+/-3bt) in 2023, much of it attributed to forest fires, drying wetlands and melting tundra

· NO2 contributed 3bt

· Fluorinated gases contributed 2bt.

· There are 52 different gases known to cause global heating which are now mixing into the atmosphere.

· Collectively these man-made sources now add 2.97 watts of heat energy to every square metre of the Earth’s surface. This creates an Earth Energy Imbalance of about 1 watt per square metre,[i] which is what drives global heating and climate perturbation.

In 2023, the scientists say, average global temperatures hit a record 1.44 degrees above their pre-industrial (1850) level. Last year they set a new record of 1.52 degrees. These high temperatures were a result of human-caused warming combined with natural events such as El Nino.

While warming overall continues to set new records each year, the encouraging news is that the rate of warming appears to be easing, the researchers add.

However, the grim news is that the Earth’s remaining carbon budget, to keep average temperatures at or below +1.5 degrees Celsius – the Paris target – is only 130 billion tonnes. At our present rates of emissions that could be gobbled up by 2028. Even allowing for natural fluctuations in the planet’s climate, the target will be dead and gone by 2030, the scientists warn. More seriously, land temperatures – always hotter than global temperatures – will be close to +2 degrees.

Since 2019, global sea levels have risen by 26mm – about an inch – due to land ice melting and thermal expansion. The rate is accelerating. It may not sound much but, by the end of the century, the seas will have risen by between 0.5 and 1.9 metres, displacing anything from 200 million to half a billion people and inundating 136 major cities.

Searing heat, hurricanes, droughts and flooding coastlines will create havoc with a world food supply already on a knife-edge due to acute water scarcity, devastating loss of topsoil, ecosystem decline and the spread of toxic chemistry. In a climate-menaced world, simultaneous crop failures in several of the Earth’s main breadbaskets are now seen as unavoidable. Because the food chain is global, this means that every person on Earth now faces food scarcity and/or soaring prices when the crisis hits. History shows that one of the first things people do en masse when starving is tear down their governments.

Underlying this ruin is the selfishness of nations, each focussed on its own perceived wants and needs at the expense of all, led by psychopathically-damaged, male-dominated regimes. Leaders such as Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Al Salman, Khamenei are committed - whether they grasp it or not - to the ultimate destruction of their own people by ruining the Earth’s ability to support them.

Regardless of what people choose to believe, nations are only a temporary phase in human affairs, a temporary form of self-organisation that is past its use-by date. Emerging only since the Napoleonic wars nations are a form of ultra-tribalism that pits ever-larger groups of humans against another without regard to the universal consequences. Nationalism, patriotism and their tawdry symbols are the justification for slaughter on a global scale in wars that have, since the 1850s, claimed over 200 million lives. Nations are entities that, as a rule, place their own immediate wishes above the good of humanity, to the detriment of all.

The pathological character of modern political leadership – its lust for conquest, self-aggrandisement and dominion at the expense of human life, has side-tracked the world’s attention from the issues which genuinely affect our common future and which require global solutions. It has diverted us from our own survival, as a civilisation – and maybe as a species. The media, the commentariat, the political machinery, the technology explosion and global corporate greed feed this lust for distraction daily, contributing to a humanity, as Darwin might have described it, “less fit to survive”.

Many great thinkers have recognised that, unless we agree to work together globally, humans will not last. Innumerable organisations have been founded to try to achieve a common human purpose. All have so far failed - in the face of the overwhelming urge for diversion to the petty spites and ambitions of the nations.

Only when humans decide to act together, as a single species on one planet, will our chances of survival begin to improve. The Earth System Treaty offers one pathway to this. The Earth Charter is another and the Sustainable Development Goals a third. The Planetary Boundaries explain just how close to self-destruction we truly are – and how rapidly we are approaching it.

There are solutions aplenty to our plight. But they are not on the agenda of the ruling elites of most nations or corporations, who care only for themselves and the short-term. These are the true foes of humanity. The ones who will sacrifice all our children, theirs included, to gratify their own immediate lust for power.

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[i] The Earth’s surface area is about 510 trillion square metres. That indicates how much surplus heat the planet is now trapping.