The Great Disruption Has Begun

By Paul Gilding

We’re living through a virtual tsunami of terrifying climate news. Extreme fire, flood and heat events are smashing records across the globe. Simultaneously, monitoring of various natural processes that regulate our climate indicates unprecedented system changes are underway.

As a result, I argue here we have hit a multi-system tipping point – the “crash” that I have long argued would trigger “the great disruption”. We can now expect a destabilisation of the global climate system at a scale that is so chaotic, unpredictable and costly, it will trigger cascading disruptive change in the global economy, national politics, investment markets and geopolitical security. The implications are profound.

Spoiler alerts:

• The future is terrifying, but paradoxically exciting because of the pace and scale of positive change that is now inevitable. We have everything we need to fix this, if we choose to.
• It will be a wild ride, on a tight rope between transformation and spiralling chaos.
• There should be no surprise in any of this, it was always the most likely outcome.
• This is not the apocalypse. The human species is here to stay.

Was 2023 The Year It All Changed?

You’ve all seen the news. The hottest day in 120,000 years; 50% of the US living under extreme heat warnings. China hitting a record high of 52°C, just 6 months after its lowest of minus 53°C. Extreme glacial melt and torrential rains causing massive floods in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. “Off the chart” record breaking cyclones  and sea surface temperatures – some as warm as bath water. Unprecedented wildfires in Hawaii with “urban infernos” ripping through suburban areas. The list goes on.

As UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain recently said:

“There is now so much going on that it is difficult even to digest it all. There’s just too much. It’s everything everywhere all at once.”

These extreme events are significant indicators given their global spread, but they are not evidence of a climate tipping point. There are many potential reasons they could be ‘just’ extreme weather coming on top of the climate warming trend that is happening largely as expected. El Nino is perhaps the largest, but also changes in aerosols, volcanoes, dust flow and others. This means we could see less extremes in the coming years. Or perhaps not. David Wallace-Wells in the NYT provides an excellent summary of the complexity in analysing the science on these short term variations.

Of more concern to me than this year’s extremes, are signs of system changes happening faster and more chaotically than expected. I suspect they are connected – science will tell us later – but it is these system changes that are key to my conclusion.

For example:

• Major ocean currents which are responsible for stabilising global temperatures, rain patterns and growing seasons are showing disturbing signs of destabilisation. The Antarctic ocean circulation has slowed decades ahead of schedule while recent research warns that the AMOC, which was assumed to stay stable until 2100, could now collapse mid-century – or as early as 2025.
• The consequences of this could include rapid sea level rise in North America, sudden and severe drops in temperatures across northern Europe, serious disruption to tropical rain patterns and food shortages throughout India, South America and West Africa impacting billions of people.
• Greenland and the Antarctic are losing ice six times faster than expected, tracking with the IPCCs ‘worst case’ climate warming scenario. In March 2022, temperatures up to 38.5°C higher than normal were seen in the interior of East Antarctica, shocking scientific experts.
• The Thwaites Glacier (aka “the Doomsday Glacier” with enough ice to raise global sea levels 2 feet) is of particular concern, showing the potential for chaotic, unpredictable change. It’s melting slower than forecast but retreating faster inland, indicating destabilisation at lower temperatures than expected.
• Sea surface temperatures in some regions have been literally ‘off the charts’, not in one region but in most. Increased sea temperatures drive droughts and wildfires and damage marine ecosystems, causing coral bleaching – further risking food supply. They also accelerate ice melt in polar regions worsening the system risks above.
• The Sahara Desert, whose sand and dust has global climate impacts, is greening as the monsoon rains shift North due to the warmer climate. This greening directly reduces albedo but also lessens the volume of dust delivered to the atmosphere. This dust has a cooling effect on the atmosphere, as well as helping to break down methane and fertilise the Amazon. It’s decline has global impacts.
• The Amazon Rainforest is showing unexpected signs that it’s releasing more carbon than it can drawdown, due to deforestation and water stress. It is “effectively dying more than growing”. This has potential to set off cascading tipping points across the globe as the “Amazon feeds back to everything”.

Whether these system indicators, taken together with this year’s extreme events, indicate the type of runaway warming the late Prof Will Steffen called Hothouse Earth is not yet clear. Science is cautious. It will take years to analyse and draw consensus conclusions.

However, knowing the science community has long underestimated climate impacts, it is my judgement that the climate system has crossed a critical threshold. I believe its destabilisation will now trigger cascading and chaotic changes and disruption to human social and economic systems – and do so globally.

As a result, the assumptions we’ve been making, about steadily worsening climate impacts from a steadily warming climate, no longer apply. Rather than a boiling frog scenario, it’s more like we’ve taken a blow torch to the climate.

Science cannot tell us what happens next. It can produce hypothesis and explain risks but that’s all. Nor can we know what will happen economically and socially, with those global human systems being similarly complex and interconnected.

However, we can make judgements. Here are mine – based on 20 years of analysing and writing on this question – on what the next decade holds.

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