Climate Crisis Deepens
John Clarke is a longtime organizer in Toronto, as well as an active instructor with the Leo Panitch School for Socialist Education. He will be leading classes on the poor, activism, community/labour organizing, and how to build fighting movements in the Fall of 2026. Check leopanitchschool.ca regularly for these and other event announcements throughout the summer.
As ever more evidence emerges about the devastating and intensifying impacts of global heating, climate scientists are suggesting that the world could experience far more disastrous consequences than previously anticipated if pre-industrial temperatures increase by even 2°C. With increases well beyond this level during this century entirely possible, these findings are enormously worrying, with dire implications for humanity.
World Weather Attribution reports that from “mid April and advancing into May, India and Pakistan experienced extremely high temperatures, including daily maximum temperatures above 46°C in many cities in India.” With such conditions impacting one of the most densely populated parts of the earth, this meant “exposing hundreds of millions of people to dangerous conditions.”
Such brutal heatwaves on the sub-continent are “no longer rare, with a return period of approximately 5 years. In other words, there is a 20% chance in any given April of experiencing temperatures comparable to the hottest 15-day period observed in April 2026.” As recently as 2022, the heat that was experienced this spring would have been considered entirely exceptional.
The article also contends that “climate change approximately tripled the probability of an event like the 2026 heatwave.” Moreover, as to future trends, given “an additional 1.3°C of warming, such events will become more than twice as likely again and another 1.2°C hotter.”
Cascading Impacts
A University of Oxford study that was published in January found that “almost half the world’s population (3.79 billion) will be living with extreme heat by 2050 if the world reaches 2.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels – a scenario that climate scientists see as increasingly likely.” This would be a huge increase in exposure to such conditions, given that only 23% of the population faced extreme heat as recently as 2010. Dr. Jesus Lizana, the lead author of the study, stressed that the “study shows most of the changes in cooling- and-heating-demand occur before reaching the 1.5°C threshold, which will require significant adaptation measures to be implemented early on.”
Evidence of the rapid worsening of the climate crisis continues to pile up. This month, the Independent reported on some alarming scientific research that the University of Southampton has conducted into the melting of Antarctic sea ice, which “has plummeted to unprecedented lows.” The researchers found “that vast areas of ice equivalent to the size of Greenland have melted.” They conclude that this “massive loss of sea ice destabilises the world’s ocean current systems, warming the planet ‘far quicker than expected’.”
Perhaps the worst element of these findings, however, is the stark picture of cascading climate impacts that emerges. The researchers point to “three distinct events that disrupted the equilibrium of the surrounding Southern Ocean, triggering rapid ice melt.”
From around 2013, “climate-change intensified winds … began drawing warm, saline water from the deep ocean closer to the surface.” Following this, “in 2015, intense wind mixed the deeper heat directly into the surface layer, rapidly melting sea ice.” Finally, since 2018, “the ice-ocean system has been trapped in a cycle where – with less ice to melt – the surface remains salty and warm so that ice cannot recover.”
This process demonstrates very clearly just how numerous, complex and interwoven the climate effects we face actually are. Global heating creates a vast web of causality in which largely unanticipated effects become the causes of further climate disruption. It is easy to see why, though the general nature of climate disruption has long been understood, the speed and severity of the unfolding planetary disaster have often been underestimated.
Some seven years ago, the Guardian noted that a “four-degree-warmer world is the stuff of nightmares and yet that’s where we’re heading in just decades.” At the same time, it also concluded that “it’s highly unlikely that we will stay below 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) by the end of the century, let alone 1.5°C.” Developments since this was written only reinforce this conclusion.
In this situation, it now becomes clear as the heating process continues to unfold that projections that have been made with regard to the impacts of even a 2°C increase have failed to consider the range of possibilities adequately.
In March, an article in Carbon Brief pointed to a study that found that limiting warming “to 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures may not be enough to prevent ‘extreme global climate outcomes’.” Crucially, it was determined “that the “worst-case” model projections in a 2°C warmer world are often more severe than the ‘average’ scenarios in a 3°C or 4°C warmer world.”
Up until now, most scientific researchers and influential international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have used a “multimodel mean” approach under which they “run simulations using multiple models, then take the average of these results.”
Such an approach, however, may generate a “misleading picture” that fails to take into account the likelihood that “the changes that specific regions may see could be ‘much, much higher’ than the global average.” Moreover, given the crop of findings that consistently point to a widespread underestimation of the severity of climate impacts, we are driven back to the conclusion that “worst-case climate outcomes” are far more likely than had previously been estimated. To continue to operate with unduly optimistic predictions is folly, and it can only undermine effective preparedness and planning.
Disastrous Course
Yet, if those who study and prepare recommendations on climate change may be seriously underestimating the scale and intensity of the unfolding disaster, the harsh reality is that those in positions of economic and political power are charting a disastrous course that simply disregards the readily available evidence.
Donald Trump’s crude brand of climate denial is all too well known. It was he who stood before the United Nations General Assembly last September and, as PBS reported, declared that: “this climate change, it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”
No doubt, Trump’s display of wilful ignorance on climate issues has emboldened fossil-fuel capitalists to abandon green pretences and to take an even more reckless and destructive path. However, a look at the political trajectory of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former advocate of environmentally friendly capitalism, is highly instructive.
When he was a UN climate envoy, in 2020, Carney appeared confident that responsible environmental stewardship and the profit motive were entirely reconcilable. He declared: “Companies are recognising that they are not islands, independent of the social system, political system, economic system or climatic system … That’s a very positive development because it can point companies toward making climate and other needed investments.”
Just a few years later, Carney now heads the Canadian government at a time when profits are being squeezed by the impacts of Trump’s trade war measures, and he has certainly outgrown his green phase. His government is forging ahead with unprecedented efforts to grease the wheels of a veritable feeding frenzy of investment in fossil-fuel and mining projects. It is doing so with a shocking disregard for environmental consequences and climate impacts.
West Coast Environmental Law has roundly condemned Carney for advancing “major project deregulation that includes proposals to eviscerate our main tools for making sure that major projects don’t harm the water, nature and climate we rely upon.” It goes on to accuse the government of engaging in “by far the worst evisceration of environmental law in Canadian history.”
There are, of course, significant political differences between Trump and Carney, but they are not fundamental in nature. Drawn from the conservative and liberal wings of their respective political establishments, they share an assumption that the profit needs of the system they represent must be the primary consideration.
With every passing month, the dire nature of the climate crisis becomes clearer and ever more compelling evidence of this emerges. Yet, the fossil-fuel capitalists and their political enablers remain obdurate and continue, very literally, to pour oil on the fire. We can only conclude that the struggle for climate justice must be waged with an anti-capitalist political perspective. •
This article first published on the Counterfire website.
