The release of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, couldn’t be more timely. Hitting stores this week, it will be eyed by hot-headed customers who have just endured record high temperatures in the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.
And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising account of impending climate catastrophe, we have—for too long—ignored the stark warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. We will now pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heat waves that will easily surpass current extremes.
The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of avoiding a dangerous, pervasive climate collapse. We have passed the point of no return and can look forward to a future where deadly heat waves and temperatures above 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers in temperate latitudes will invariably be hot and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a much more hostile world than their grandparents,” insists McGuire.
Bill McGuire is Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London and has also served as an adviser to the UK Government.
In this regard, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazards Taskforce, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still say we have time, though not much, to achieve meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Rushing to net zero and stopping global warming is still in our hands, they say.
Such claims are rejected by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but quite another in private. Privately they are all much more scared of the future we face, but they won’t admit it publicly. I call this climate appeasement, and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to begin to deal with the crisis.
McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth in late 2021. It features many of the record high temperatures that had just hit the planet, including extremes that hit the UK. A few months after he finished his manuscript and as publication loomed, he found that many of these records had already been broken. “That’s the problem with writing a book about climate collapse,” says McGuire. “By the time it’s published, it’s already out of date. That’s how fast things move.”
Among the records broken during the editing of the book was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in East Anglia on July 19, the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The previous hottest temperature in the country, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)
The London Fire Service also had to deal with fires in the capital, with one blaze destroying 16 houses in Wennington, east London. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. “Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost destroyed by bushfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a wake-up call, then surely this is it.”
Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity also swept through Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the Midwest led to devastating floods in Yellowstone National Park in the US. “And as we head into 2022, the world outside is already different,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognizable to any of us.”
Kurdish farmers battle a fire in a wheat field in Syria’s northeastern Hasakah province, a breadbasket for the region. Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images
These changes highlight one of the most startling aspects of climate collapse: the rate at which the average global temperature is rising, becoming extreme weather.
“Just look at what’s already happening to a world that’s only warmed a little over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out that the climate is changing for the worse much faster than predicted by early climate models. This is something that was never expected.”
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit this rise to 1.5C, although to meet such a target it was estimated that global carbon emissions would have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.
“In the real world, that’s not going to happen,” McGuire says. “Instead, we’re on track for nearly a 14% increase in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us break the 1.5C barrier in less than a decade.”
And we should not doubt the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. A rise of 2C and more would seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argued. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful projections of emissions reduction pledges made at Cop26, the world is on track to warm by between 2.4C and 3C.
From this perspective, it is clear that there is little we can do to avoid the coming climate collapse. Instead, we need to adapt to the greenhouse world ahead and start taking action to try to stop the grim situation from getting any worse, says McGuire.
Fox Glacier in New Zealand in winter. In a decade, he retreated by 900 meters. Photo: Gabor Kovacs/Alamy
Of course, as it stands, Britain – while relatively well placed to weather the worst effects of the coming climate crash – faces major headaches. Heat waves will become more frequent, hotter and last longer. A huge number of modern, small, poorly insulated homes in the UK will become heat traps responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.
“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these unsuitable homes continue to be built each year,” adds McGuire.
As for the cause of the world’s tragically delayed response, McGuire blames “a conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, mismanagement and confusion and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured we’ve been sleepwalking in less than half a degree from the dangerous 1.5 C climate change barrier. Soon, barring some miracle, we’ll crash through it.
The future is bleak from this perspective, although McGuire emphasizes that if carbon emissions can be significantly reduced in the near future, and if we start adapting to a much hotter world today, a truly catastrophic and unsustainable future can be avoided. The coming days will be darker, but not catastrophic. We may not be able to get rid of climate collapse, but we can prevent further contributions that would look like a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilization.
“It’s a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to stick to a highway or block an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or better yet use public transport, walk or bike. Switch to a green energy tariff; Eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives locally and nationally; and use your voice wisely to put a government in power that leads the conversation on the climate emergency.”
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99
The Gulf Stream, which starts in the Gulf of Mexico and flows through the Atlantic Ocean, has been weakened by climate change. Photo: NOAA
Tail pricks
Five unexpected threats posed by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
Beneath Our Feet As huge, thick ice sheets disappear from high mountains and from the poles, crusts of rock that were previously compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are about to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically stable one,” says Bill McGuire.
New Battlegrounds As crops burn and famine spreads, communities come into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who will promise the Land to their people – is likely to become commonplace. Most worrisome are tensions over dwindling water supplies that are rising between India, Pakistan and China, all of which possess nuclear weapons. “The last thing we need is a heated water war between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” notes McGuire.
Methane Bombs Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane is 86 times more powerful in its power to heat the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, although fortunately it lingers for much less time. The problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in layers of Arctic permafrost. As they melt, more methane will be released and our world will become even hotter.
Loss of the Gulf Stream As the ice caps melt, the resulting cold water pouring in from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf Stream, which carries a huge amount of heat from the tropics to the seas around Europe. Signs are that the Gulf Stream is already weakening and may stop completely before the end of the century, causing powerful winter storms over Europe.
Calorie crisis Four-fifths of all calories consumed worldwide come from just 10 crops, including wheat, corn and rice. Many of these staples will not grow well in the warmer temperatures that will soon become the norm, pointing to a huge reduction in food availability,…
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