If a temperature hike of 1.5°C, 2°C or even more happened over the course of tens of thousands of years, it would barely be noticed - either by us or by the countless other species we share our world with. Ice caps would still melt, seal levels would still climb, weather patterns would evolve, but everything would happen at a pace that would leave plenty of time to adapt... What we always need to keep in mind is that the heat today is building at a rate many times faster than anything that nature - left to its own devices - has accomplished in the more than four billion years of the Earth's existence.
Embedded in this general scientific point is another. Running through McGuire's book are arguments that tackle the anti-scientific arguments of the "climate deniers". While McGuire is at times explicit, the book itself is designed to inform the general public and non-scientists with the arguments that counter those of the fossil fuel corporations, their supporters and climate change deniers. It should also serve to give confidence to non-specialists that scientists have a clear understanding of what it currently taking place and the models with which they predict the future.
What of the future? McGuire suggests that what we are facing is a return to historic conditions, including a return to what is known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a hyper-thermal (period of rapid temperature change on geological time scales), which took place about 56 million years ago. This was a period that saw rapid heating, and the release and absorption by the atmosphere and oceans of huge amounts of carbon dioxide, likely due to volcanic activity. The period also saw the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, in vast quantities from deep in the oceans. The fear for today is that the artificial release of greenhouse gas, driven by capitalist production, has the potential to release far more greenhouse gases. As McGuire explains:
While volcanologists predict no large-scale volcanic outburst in the near future, our cooler world holds far greater quantities of methane, trapped in extensive submarine gas hydrate deposits and beneath the Arctic tundra.
In the context of our current warming planet, the potential for the massive unleashing of further greenhouse gases is extremely dangerous. McGuire explains the threat that such releases could have on our contemporary Earth systems:
Times when the climate is changing especially rapidly relfect the application of some specific driving force or forces. Today, breakneck global heating is being foircd by the colossal quantities of greenhouse gases we continue to dump into the atompshere. The study of naturally occuring episodes of abrupt climate change reveals that they can result in konck-on effects that can cascade in such a way as to bring about other sudden changes in elements of the climate system... this is set to bring about nasty and unwanted shocks and surprises, which are the last things we need... The ramped-up heat is acting to accelerate melting of the polar sea ice and land-based ice sheets, incre ase methane degassing... and significantly slow the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). Via positive feedback loops and the crossing of tipping points, such domino effects can and do magnify abrupt climate change and its ramifications.
One of McGuire's case studies here is the AMOC and the impact of it slowing or stopping. The answer is terrifying. North West Europe, and particularly the British Isles, will suffer a rapid cooling of perhaps 5 to 10 degrees on average. That will destroy the climate, our agriculture and lead to millions of people fleeing to warmer parts. There's an irony here that a warming world's biggest disaster for Western Europe will be the dramatic (if temporary) cooling. But it will be enough to kill millions. In fact, all the scenarios that McGuire outlines, will kill. Writing about previous mass extinction, he argues that elevated CO2 levels are a key "kill mechanism". Human driven climate change will be no different. By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people will be "living under climatic conditions beyond anything experienced in the history of civilisation."
What then of McGuire's solutions? He is clear that the driver of climate change - the industrial emission of massive quantities of greenhouse gases is the result of our political system:
We are not the first life form to modify the planet to the detriment of all else, but we have to go back a couple of billion years to the last time this happened. Then too, it wasn't intentional but a by-product of success. Not of a political-economic system, but of the burgeoning of growth of life that was completely out of tune with what had existed previously... rampant consumer-based capitalism is not compatible with a sustainable existence on a small planet.
Later McGuire blames "our acquisitive lifestyle" and says " we cannot go on living as we are if we wish to maintain any vestige of a functioning civilisation". But then says we should "collectively hang our heads in shame that - by our selfishness, ignorance ad inaction - we have allowed this to happen".
Here I have some disgreements. Firstly I'm struck by McGuire's use of the term "consumer-based capitalism". Capitalism is a system of production. And it is production where we should be targetting our anger rather than some misplaced collective guilt. Production after-all is were fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions are concentrated, and production is driven by the need for the capitalist class to accumulate. Mcguire concludes if "we" continue to dig up and burn fossil fuels at our current rate, vast parts of the world will enter "geologically novel" climates. But who is "we" here? The digging is being done by coal, oil and gas companies. Not ordinary people. We are trapped in a system whose logic is to put profit before people and planet. Collectively however, we have the power to change things.
McGuire is pessimistic. Or at least realistic. His three future scenarios don't see the world remaining as it is now, or returning to what it might have been 20, 30 or 50 years ago in terms of climate. Rather he envisates if we are "astonishing lucky" a Pliocene climate. Realistically a "return to Miocene conditions". That will require us to act, and while McGuire doesn't make the this conclusion directly, it has to be action that will curb and stop fossil fuel extraction and use, and the transition of our economies to a more sustainable one. I would argue that would need to be one based on the rational, and democratic, planning of production.
To be fair to McGuire he has not set out to right a socialist critque of capitalism's environmental destruction. What he has done however, is remarkably useful to environmentalists and activists worried about capitalism's death drive. Reading Bill McGuire's excellent book will arm you with the knowledge you need to tell people what the heatwaves we are facing mean. If that information is used correctly it can help to build the sort of movements that will challenge fossil fuel capitalism. So read The Fate of the World today - you won't be cheered up, but you will be emboldened and informed.
Related Reviews
Lynas - Six Degrees
Linden - The Winds of Change
Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature
Crawford - Charleston: Race, water & the coming storm
Glynn & Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue
Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
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