“We now have to adapt to a much warmer world”

Scorching heat waves are just the beginning. According to a leading British scientist, we must first accept how bad it is before we can prevent a global catastrophe.

Bill McGuire's latest book Hothouse Earth could not have appeared at a more perfect time, with the peak temperatures and the continuous dry summer in our parts. And that's just the beginning, emphasizes McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. We have ignored — for far too long — clear warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously warming the Earth, he explains in his uncompromising outline of the coming climate catastrophe. For our complacency, we will now pay the price, in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heat waves, which will effortlessly exceed current extremes.

The HothouseEarth scenario — an existential crisis in which fundamental climate systems and the ecosystems that depend on them are irreversibly altered — is not only possible, but also likely, if current trajectories persist. We are then entering a new geological era, maybe we can call it the Idiocene!

TippingPoints lead to TippingCascades and the resulting failure of intertwined systems leads to systemic collapse. Although it is already too late to completely reverse the impact of humanity's anthropocene folly and greed, the current geological era marked by human activity, it is still possible to change the climate trajectory to a newly stabilized Earth system “guide”. But the chance to achieve this goal is fast approaching. To achieve this, massive and proactive changes are needed in the human economy, culture and politics.

The future sounds ominous. Yet he stresses that we can avoid a disastrous and unsustainable future, if carbon emissions can be significantly reduced in the near future and we begin to adapt to a much warmer world today. It will be difficult days, but they will not be disastrous. We may not be able to overcome the climate disaster, but we can prevent it from getting bigger so that it does not end up in a climate catastrophe so bad that it jeopardizes the survival of human civilization. “This is a call to action,” says McGuire.

The pressing question now is: how long will it take? Once the quarter has to fall and that we are a kind of eating and boozing Roman empire in the afterdays and we go under it on holidays, the car, meat, alcohol, sugar, gas and whatever else they.