A globe, largely covered with reddish brown, showing areas where temperatures are warmer than 20-30 years ago

The Quadra Project: Uninhabitable – Part 1

A global temperature review of 2024 confirms the trend that has been so concerning to climatologists. The last 10 years have been the warmest on record, and 2024 has been the warmest yet. The European Copernicus calculation measured 2024 as 1.6°C above the pre-industrial temperature, with most days being above the 1.5°C aspirational target set by the Paris Agreement (COP21) in 2015. Other organizations measured a slightly different temperature for 2024: NASA at 1.47°C, NOAA at 1.46°C, and Berkley Earth at 1.62°C. The differences are technical but the trend is the same. Global temperatures are rising in concert with our greenhouse gas emissions.

Our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2024 were 37.4 billion tonnes, up 0.8% from 2023—coal consumption increased 1.6%, oil 2.0%, and natural gas 2.5%. So called “land use” contributions from factors such as deforestation contributed another 4.2 billion tonnes, bringing the total to 41.6 billion tonnes in 2024, the second time since 2023 that it exceeded 40 billion tonnes. Electricity from renewable energy sources increased by 13% in 2023, but the statistics indicate that it was added to the global energy supply rather than replacing fossil fuels. The optimistic expectation is that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will peak in 2025, a symbolic but ineffectual accomplishment since any CO2 emissions above net zero will still continue to heat the planet and exacerbate climate change.

In reality, however, we are already experiencing climate change, and it will continue regardless of what we do now. The weather anomalies we are presently experiencing will now continue indefinitely. Like it or not, the new abnormal will become the new normal. It’s too late to be changed. We have set the climate dial at the highest temperature in at least 800,000 years, and the temperature will continue to rise until our emissions reach net zero. But even then, the processes that we have initiated will have to complete themselves, providing us with uncomfortable surprises.

In actual terms, the aspirational target of 1.5°C has been breached—by the United Nations’ rather unhelpful standard, the 1.5°C breach has to take place over an unspecified number of consecutive years. But temperatures are on their way up, and if the past is prologue to the future, the likelihood of reducing greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough and significantly enough to avoid even breaching the UN’s impractical target now seems unlikely. To confirm this, according to a study by the United Nations Environment Programme (New Scientist, November 2, 2024), the current pledges by all nations, even given the unlikely prospect that they will be met, will increase temperatures between 2.6°C and 2.8°C. Someone who has attempted to explore the dire prospects that await us in this hotter world is David Wallace-Wells in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.

Wallace-Well’s book was published in 2019 when the temperature increase was 1.1°C. In a rapidly changing world, five years could have rendered this book obsolete. However, he avoids this problem by exploring the ramifications of temperature increases of 1.5°C and 2.0°C, of 2.5°C and 3.0°C, and even of temperatures of 4.0°C and above to 6.0°C. This is not an unreasonable assumption given our poor record of reducing emissions, and our scant knowledge about the climate effects of positive feedback loops such as methane from a melting tundra and the unusual weather resulting from changing ocean currents.

These are temperatures that are entirely foreign to human experience as a species. Other life has existed during previous times of a warmer planet with higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but we do not know how we and our civilizations will adapt, manage or even survive at such temperatures. In the geological history that predated us, four of the previous five major extinction events were caused by elevated CO2 concentrations—the one exception was the asteroid strike of 66 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs and about three quarters of other animal and plant life, too.

So, as we measure the continual rise of atmospheric concentrations as a result of our burning of fossil fuels, we cannot claim innocence of what the eventual outcome will be if this activity persists. Not all the details are clear, but the generalities are predictable. David Wallace-Wells attempts to give us an idea of our future in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.

Part 2 to follow in the next edition.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra

Links of Interest:

Top image credit: Map of global average surface temperature in 2024 compared to the 1991-2020 average, with places that were warmer than average colored red, and places that were cooler than average coloured blue – From NOAA Climate.gov, using NOAA NCEI data

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