The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science

Even in the grip of collapse, there is a very real race between natural and social tipping points.

The tragedy is likely to play out in two phases: around 2050 to 2060 (depending on the rate of warming), river flows will surge as ice rapidly disintegrates, dramatically increasing the risk of flooding. After the floods subside, droughts will hit hard. The glaciers will finally disappear and, during the summer, rivers will shrivel.

The emissions from flying are roughly equivalent to 120 kg per hour per person. Imagine carrying six 20 kg bags along with you on your flight, in addition to your own suitcase. That’s what the impact of your short-haul flight is.

The truly hopeful (realizable) vision is of a world with such cheap and plentiful renewables that we can manage other ailments by treating them with this energy. This includes drawing down carbon with machines, recycling, producing energy-intensive ‘printed meat’ where meat cells are grown in a lab instead of rearing cows, and building large-scale

Economist Mariana Mazzucato provides another good example in Apple’s iPhone, a product that almost entirely depends on technologies that were initially developed by the public sector (including GPS, touchscreens, the internet, etc.).94 The US government also shelters Apple from competition nationally and overseas. After all this, Apple is able to a

Despite all the noise surrounding climate targets and budgets, the world is heading for well over 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming108 – a level that would drastically reduce the carrying capacity of the planet and probably consign billions of people to suffering and death.

Manufacturing a smartphone requires about seventy-five of the 118 elements in the periodic table (the human body needs only thirty), with metals and plastics sourced from so many places in such complex supply chains that it’s difficult for companies themselves to know where their components come from. These materials are then refined into microcomp

Why change our habits when we don’t have to pay for the damage caused by air pollution, water use, energy wars and climate change? Why bother… when the bill gets sent to other people?

This does not bode well for the quantity of water available around the world. And because it never rains but it pours, the quality of water is also deteriorating. Algal blooms provoked by fertilizer and manure run-off have resulted in vast ocean dead zones covering thousands of square kilometres. On top of this, pesticide concentrations are buildin