The climate centre is barking mad

The climate movement will fail if it doesn't respect both political and physical realities

Indicators of climate change 2024, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/2641/2025/essd-17-2641-2025.pdf

This is our current moment: climate change by almost every single measure is getting worse while action on phasing out fossil fuels is slowing down or even stalling.

I need to lead with this because the level of obfuscation, and outright denial I am experiencing at the moment is mind boggling. The rapid phase out of fossil fuels is absolutely central to our efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change. If we do not do this then we are toast. I am not going to entertain any version of overshoot at this time because it is an utterly fatuous notion that we can shoot past any amount of warming and then drag temperatures down with geoengineering.

I wrote about geoengineering – the deliberate interference in the climate system in order to try to reduce the impacts of human-caused climate change – earlier in the week. This has predictably produced responses along the lines of “but we need it!”. That is to say, we aren’t rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and so we will need geoengineering to avert catastrophe. This is not a fringe position. Pretty much every government that has signed up to the Paris Agreement is either explicitly or implicitly adopting this position. Not only that, some of the smartest scientists I know say essentially the same thing. On this point an important clarification. I include large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as an example of geoengineering, while some people will assume that geoengineering is limited to solar radiation management (SRM) such as sulphate injection.

It feels like the only contribution I am making to this issue is to point out that saying you need something does not have any meaningful impact on the likelihood on that thing materialising. Typically, my very smart scientist colleagues will accept this point and then essentially raise their hands and shrug; well what else are we going to do?

If you only have a hammer, the world is full of nails. If you only think of climate change in terms of sources and sinks of carbon then you are going to be looking to increase the sinks if the sources are not turned off. That’s a crude and unfair caricature, but my point here is that the inherent stay-in-your-lane culture of natural scientists means that they will limit their analysis of not just problem but solution. Natural scientists have been far too naïve about how their equivocal comments about large-scale CDR and other geoengineering approaches will be used by policy makers to argue against the rapid phase out of fossil fuels.

Let me give you an example from an event I was at this week. It’s Chatham House rules again so no names or details. The attendees were largely from the climate policy space. There was some (extremely capable) social science representation and me as the natural scientists. I was going to say ‘token natural scientist’ but that would have been unnecessary snark because the event was genuinely motivated to better understand the climate science, and so wanted to begin with latest Earth system science. I have done this enough times now to know that such information will often be politely listened to and then put on the back burner while the grown ups discuss political realities.

So I was under no illusion that what I was saying would have any dramatic impact: that we have less than two years of current emissions before the 1.5°C budget is blown, or that global warming is accelerating, that some tipping elements in the climate may have already been passed, that the collapse of ocean currents that have the potential to produce catastrophic environment change may now be odds on, oh and by the way we are entering one of the greatest extinction events in life’s 3.8billion year history on Earth.

Even then there were a number of moments when I tried to remind myself that wisdom is often about knowing when to shut up. Because one of the messages I was getting was that more work needs to be done to connect this science to not just policy but the centre of mass of the climate movement. On face value, yes, absolutely. The climate science community has made many mistakes when it comes to the communication of climate science. It took them a long time to realise that their science hammers can’t just be used to beat facts into people’s heads. People response to stories not statistics. But what I found astonishing was the apparent complete inflexibility of some of this climate centre when it comes to some of the simple facts.

Warming is on course to significantly exceed 1.5°C. Climate-related loss and damage is going to increase. We don’t get to debate that. There are currently zero large-scale engineered carbon removal facilities operating. The saviour technology that emerged out of the Paris Agreement – BECC (Bio Energy Carbon Capture) is going to play a very limited (potentially no-existent) role in efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C as it has serious limitations. There are currently no credible plans for how any amount of warming could be reversed.

Meanwhile, global emissions are increasing. Yes, the rate of increase has slowed, and yes perhaps in the very near future they will stabilise and may even decrease. But for any hopes of below 2°C they would need to be coming down at a rate observed in the middle of Covid lockdowns. Hundreds of billions of dollars continues to flow into the financing of new oil and gas – which if you took the Paris Agreement seriously could never be extracted and used.

I appreciate that drafting climate policy is difficult, and getting it implemented near-impossible in many instances. From my position of ignorance about such matters, there seem to be structural reasons for this. For example, to be deemed ‘policy relevant’ proposed climate action needs to underpin continual economic growth. Simply put, you need to demonstrate how responding to the climate crisis will generate profits. You need to emphasise the role of innovation and so opportunities for new products and services.

It is the case that solar power is continuing its exponential increase and in many places is having a transformative effect. But if that is not accompanied with an equally fast powering down of fossil fuel infrastructure, then we are continuing to head deeper and deeper into dangerous climate change. That is something that the climate centre appears to find not only hard to argue for but to even accept. Because it would directly challenge the primacy of growth-based policies and so I think they cannot even begin to see how this could work politically.

When I talk about such structural reasons – e.g. if there are systemic limitations to the pace of fossil fuel phase out, then we need to look at changing such systems - I am sometimes met with an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps it’s my insecurities about such matters, but people seem to be embarrassed for me. I’ve said something transgressive in a uninformed and naïve way. Don’t I realise that we have to work with the political systems we have got?

But you can’t claim to solve an intractable political problem by invoking imaginary scientific solutions. Humans have demonstrated amazing ingenuity and creativity in solving problems in the past, but there are real physical limits as to what we can do to the Earth system. If you genuinely believe that our current political and economic systems cannot deliver the required policies, then you need to accept warming is heading far north of 1.5°C. Perhaps societies are OK with that. Perhaps they really would prioritise increased consumption (along with vast inequalities of consumption driven by vast inequality of wealth) over a safe climate. A new smart phone every six months over tropical coral reefs. Regular steaks and SUVs over low-lying island nation states. Private jets and fast fashion over food systems that feed hundreds of millions of people.

My plea to the climate centrists is put that to society. Ditch the delusions around overshoot. Get real about what’s at stake. Let’s have an actual debate about what people value and what they want to protect rather some n-dimensional game of political chess. The tail doesn’t get to wag the dog: politics doesn’t get to trump the physics.

If a dog is barking at you because you are poking it with a stick, the way to not get bit is to stop poking it. Trying to put a muzzle on it while continuing the abuse demonstrates not just cruelty but a failure to understand basic cause and effect.

The climate has been barking at us for decades. It’s now beginning to sink its teeth into humanity. Every single way of avoiding further harm involves the rapid phase out of fossil fuels. Denying that is madness.