Climate: what must be done now

I WAS reading an article about the current wildfires written in a reputable paper by a recognized ‘environmental journalist’, but I stumbled to a halt when I read the following sentence: “While the skies over North America and Europe will eventually clear, this climate change-driven era of wildfire will exact a lengthy toll.”

What? Does he expect the skies to “eventually clear” of their own accord? We already know with high confidence (85 to 92 per cent) that next year will be even hotter than this year. What natural event or human action is going to return us to the old ‘normal’? Here’s a market tip: invest in companies making water-bombers.

Some people seek solace in the belief that this is just another El Niño event, a nine-to-12-month weather phenomenon that starts in the tropical eastern Pacific but affects the entire global system. It repeats every two to seven years. This time it is coming back in three years so, technically, it could be just another El Niño — but there are strong reasons to doubt that.

A normal El Niño temporarily adds only about 0.2 C to average global temperature, whereas the 2023-24 El Niño added more than 0.3 C. Much more importantly, that extra heat never went away again. It acted like a ratchet, taking us up past some invisible of no return, and we seem to be stuck there.

But not for much longer, because the returning El Niño is forecast to bring us another 0.3 C of extra warming. If that also stays behind when the 2026-27 El Niño is finished, then the average global temperature will soon be within shouting distance of the +2.0 C that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said we must never exceed.

Sorry about the numbers, but it’s hard to talk about these matters without them. In plain words, we should probably already be in emergency mode (although there is little chance that we will be until the damage and deaths at least double and double again).

It seems likely that our current estimates of the speed of global warming have been overtaken by events. They were driven by computer models working with historical data about climate and they worked well for a while. Now they are playing catch-up with new realities and hypotheses, but they are still all we have.

Cutting our carbon dioxide and methane emissions, while it is still vital, cannot act fast enough to slow the warming back down to the old rate. Nor can high-tech solutions like removing greenhouse gases from the air or the sea work fast enough to make much difference: the volumes involved are just too great.

What can act fast enough is solar radiation management (SRM, for short). That includes any technique that reflects some incoming sunlight back into space and cools the planet, but the most promising one involves putting some reflective substance into the stratosphere.

Climate Scientist Jim Haywood of Exeter University doesn’t love the idea, but he is seduced by it: “What keeps me coming back to SRM is that the extremes for things like droughts, temperatures, flooding, hurricanes, sea ice — all the sorts of extremes that we see in the climate models — all of those extremes go away when you apply geoengineering.

“When we think about weather and climate, mostly we worry about the extremes. You’ll be worried if a hurricane is going to flatten your house or if you’re not going to get any rain for five years … All of those things are ameliorated in our climate models when you reduce the global warming.”

It was once taboo in the climate science world to talk positively about geoengineering, but to me that always seemed driven more by distaste for further interference in natural processes than by hard scientific fact. No human intervention in the climate now could be as big and damaging as the greenhouse gases we have put into the atmosphere in the past 150 years.

If further intervention is the best way to protect the existing biosphere from great harm, it should be considered on its merits — and that is now actually happening. I have interviewed at least a hundred climate scientists in the past five years and I would estimate that more than half of them thought we would end up doing SRM.

Except, of course, that we haven’t actually done any SRM experiments in the open air because of that legacy of hostility to the whole idea. As usual, we will be playing catch-up all the way, but this is a technique that should be explored and developed as fast as possible. The climate won’t wait.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.