Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid.
Massive climate discontinuity means we no longer live in a world that can solve its most pressing problems in an orderly way.
It’s clear: the Last Decade has become the Lost Decade.
All through the climate, sustainability and clean energy debates, we find people coming to the same conclusion: we missed the chance to limit this crisis to simply the biggest challenge humanity faces, and we are now moving into the era where this crisis defines humanity’s future and is the context for all its choices. We did not win the fight.
Our societal debates have not caught up. We view the planetary crisis with old, foggy lenses. Our assumptions about climate action, adaptation and equity were all born in a now-past era when we thought we would limit climate chaos to a level to which we could effectively and equitably adapt.
An “orderly transition,” though, is no longer available to us. We’ve burned our way past it.
That’s been true for several years. Last week’s failed COP-30 climate summit — where Russia, India, China and Saudi Arabia (with other members of the “Arab Group”) leveraged their power to block any language explicitly referring to the need to phase out fossil fuels — was just the formal burial of the hope for orderliness.
Consider the 2025 U.N. Emissions Gap Report. It rings the death knell on the 1.5ºC goal, and warns of much worse to come. “Given the size of the cuts needed, the short time available to deliver them and a challenging political climate, a higher exceedance of 1.5°C will happen, very likely within the next decade.”
As the New York Times summarized the report,
“Based on policies that countries have put in place and current technology trends, Earth is expected to warm by roughly 2.8 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, compared with preindustrial levels. If countries followed through on all of their official promises to cut near-term emissions, warming could be limited to 2.3 degrees Celsius, though many nations are struggling to meet those pledges.”
Some major figures find even these forecasts overly-hopeful. Many point out that there’s now no guarantee that we won’t delay our way into a three-degree future.
In a recent essay, Our Almost-Apocalyptic Climate Future, the always-excellent Peter Brannen reminds us that even if we mustered almost inconceivably rapid action now, we wouldn’t be headed for a soft landing. The civilization-level discontinuity of a three-degree world would render most of our assumptions about how things work (and how they change, and at what pace) wrong:
“Even if all other emissions from fossil fuels halted tomorrow, CO2 emissions from the global food system alone could eventually push us past 2 degrees Celsius in warming, half a degree higher than the always-aspirational 1.5 degrees Celsius goal set forth in the 2016 Paris Agreement. At this point, reaching that goal would require an impossible slashing of global emissions by a quarter every year for the next four years until they reach zero. As things stand, the UN projects that current policies will result in almost 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Unfortunately, that 1.5-degree benchmark wasn’t selected at random. As one landmark paper puts it, the ‘Earth may have left a safe climate state beyond 1°C global warming,’ and even 1.5 degrees would possibly invite inexorable ice-sheet collapse, coral-reef die-off, and permafrost thaw.
“If warming the planet beyond 1 degree Celsius isn’t safe, then 3 degrees is madness. Forget coral reefs: This collapse would cascade into the broader ocean as the sea succumbs to merciless heat waves, oxygen loss, and acidification, and entire ecosystems—seagrass beds, kelp forests, mangroves—fall away. On land, this vanishing act might extend to the Amazon rainforest, which—already relentlessly pared back by deforestation—could submit to a runaway drying. In the human world, migration could be measured in billions of people, as familiar rains that water staple crops depart for distant latitudes and unprecedented heat waves in eastern China and the Indus River Valley surpass the limits of human physiology.”
But Brannen cautions us against false certainty that the thermometer will stop rising after we cut emissions, once we’ve heated the planet so severely.
“…All of this means that, by shooting for a limit of 3 degrees Celsius, we very well may end up warming the planet by 4 degrees instead. Indeed, the same widely quoted recent UN estimate that predicts warming of 2.8 degrees Celsius under current policies also has an uncertainty range up to a perhaps unlikely but truly unthinkable 4.6 degrees Celsius. There is ‘no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible,’ as even the starchy World Bank has warned. ‘The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur.’ Humanity might not roll snake eyes with the climate in this way—2.8 degrees in theory could end up meaning 2.8 degrees in practice. Still, this is an actuarial risk you wouldn’t take with a new house, much less with the only known habitable planet in the universe.”
I have enormous respect for the scientist James Hansen. Hanson first helped me really grasp the implications of a carbon budget (and also why increasing warming means increasing discontinuity), over a chance lunch at a conference in Sweden, over 20 years ago.
He explained very clearly the carbon budget we’d need to stick to, in order to preserve anything like continuity. He emphasized how we had to use the burning of fossil fuels within that budget to deploy the systems that would decarbonize the global economy. Our last fossil fuels had to be spent ending fossil fuel use.
This is obviously not what happened over the last two decades. Instead, predatory delay has forced us to blow through the carbon budget for 2ºC and left us only part way to decarbonization. (Indeed, though innovation and investment in clean energy, efficiency and electrification are all galloping forward, emissions of greenhouse gasses were higher than ever in 2024.)
Now Hansen’s trying to raise the alarm that multiple mechanisms appear to be driving us towards a much hotter future than the politicians, donors and pundits who shape our climate debate seem ready to acknowledge. He’s calling for a sharper reckoning with that grim reality.
“Climate change is characterized by delayed response and amplifying feedbacks, which are a recipe for intergenerational injustice. So we have an obligation to clarify this and to not shirk from describing the implications. …global warming certainly will exceed 2°. The RCP 2.6 scenario, which was designed to keep warming under two degrees, is now impossible.”
Reasonable people can have uncertainties about Hansen’s warning. One thing is sure: the chaos and upheavals we’re locking in now will have serious impacts on every person on Earth. But those most exposed to the crisis will lose the most, often more quickly than our debate finds itself able to acknowledge.
As I wrote, describing the Last Decade:
“The curve we’ve been forced onto bends so steeply, that the pace of victory is part of victory itself. Winning slowly is basically the same thing as losing outright. We cannot afford to pursue past strategies, aimed at limited gains towards distant goals. In the face of both triumphant denialism and predatory delay, trying to achieve climate action by doing the same things, the same old ways, means defeat. It guarantees defeat. …
“Headlong speed, my friends, is the only way left to say yes to the world.
”Speed, you see, means everything. Speed means planetary sanity. Speed means justice. Speed means prosperity. Speed means a future for our kids. For potentially hundreds of millions of people, speed means survival itself.”
The most just form of climate action has always been simply whatever form produces the fastest emissions cuts. The destruction and loss caused by further warming will always outweigh any short-term benefits we could hope to gain by slowing progress, however those gains are distributed. On climate action, speed has always been justice. But now, bold climate action is not enough.
Indeed, one way of understanding this new moment is to understand the scope of what we must accelerate is broadening at unprecedented rates.
Not long ago, it was how we powered and made and grew things that had to be hurried into sustainability. If we acted, much about our society could remain the same.
Now it is every place, every system, every community — all must be rapidly ruggedized (or triaged down and restored to ecological use). Nothing will remain the same, no matter what we do.
The Last Decade, and its promise of an orderly-if-headlong transition, has been replaced by a Long Ruggedizing. We still have all those planetary imperatives to fulfill. Decarbonization and material sustainability, though, have now become part of a vastly larger program of discontinuity management: of climate defenses, reworked supply lines, innovations for new realities, ecological restoration into future patterns, huge movements of people and an unprecedented need to build in safer places.
Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid. This new era will demand far more of every society’s resources, putting climate discontinuity at the core of all important decisions, from governments planning to business strategies to community hopes to the most personal decisions of our lives.
It isn’t the end of everything, not by a long shot, but it is the end of the world we all grew up in.
Alex
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