16.01.2025

Decade of disaster

Last year was the hottest ever recorded and deadly heat looks like our future, writes Eddie Ford - even if we overcome capitalism

We now know that 2024 was officially the hottest year on record and the first in which average global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial times (roughly speaking, before 1850) - with much worse to come. Data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows that the average temperature last year was 1.6°C - a jump of 0.1°C from 2023.

Of course, as pointed out often by this publication and very many others, technically this does not mean that the 2017 Paris Accords target has been breached, as it is measured over a decade - not a single year. But the direction of travel is ominously clear. Every year in the past decade has been one of the 10 hottest and the C3S statistics also reveals that a record 44% of the planet was affected by strong to extreme heat stress on July 10 2024, and that the hottest day in recorded history struck on July 22.

The World Meteorological Organisation came to the same conclusion last week in a comprehensive report incorporating the findings of several regional climate monitoring institutes in Britain, China, the EU and the US, with four of the six international datasets crunched by the organisation indicating a higher than 1.5°C global average increase for the whole of last year (two did not).¹ The WMO further found that climate change added 41 days of “dangerous heat” in 2024, harming human health and ecosystems and, according to the World Weather Attribution - a body dedicated to studying extreme weather - climate change last year also “intensified” 26 of the 29 events that killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions.

As Weekly Worker readers know, every added fraction of a degree in temperature brings more serious harm to people and ecosystems - and as every year seems warmer than the previous one, we are confronted with the frightening possibility that 2024 could turn out to be one of the coolest years of the century. No wonder that in his New Year’s message UN secretary general, António Guterres, described this as “climate breakdown in real time” that humanity must somehow tackle to avoid complete disaster. He stressed that there is no time to lose, given the general picture of record-breaking rainfall, catastrophic flooding, scorching heat waves with temperatures exceeding 50°C and now the apocalyptic wildfires still burning in Los Angeles with untold consequences environmentally and economically.

Los Angeles

By the way, this is not simply due to global warming. Los Angeles has for long been a catastrophe waiting to happen. Back in 1998 Mike Davis published his Ecology of fear. Comrade Davis was, of course, a leading figure in the International Socialist Organisation, the now exploded Cliffite group in the US. Anyway, his book shows that uncontrolled expansion of “firebelt suburbs”, a “notoriously inefficient water system” and a volatile environment made the city particularly vulnerable.² There were, for example, 13 firestorms in Malibu alone between 1930 and 1996. He wryly quotes the Los Angeles Times of 1934: “No place on earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than southern California.” Davis also pours freezing cold water - pun intended - on the latest technological fix of his day: the CL-415 ‘Super-Scooper’ amphibious aircraft capable of skimming the surface of lakes and loading up 14,000 gallons of water per fire drop. We have seen them in operation this month. To state the obvious, they have not solved the problem.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate residents of another US city, Phoenix, Arizona, have had to endure 113 consecutive days with a temperature hovering at or above 37.78°C. Indeed, the year 2024 in the US was marked by 24 weather/climate disasters, including tropical cyclones and two storms, causing billions of dollars in damages and at least 418 deaths.

Things are the same but different in the UK. The Met Office has recently released statistics showing that the country is heading outside of the “envelope of historical weather observations” - 2024 was provisionally the fourth warmest year on record for the UK going back to 1884, equalling the previous record set in 2023.³ With a mean temperature of 9.78°C (that is, 0.64°C above the 1991-2020 average), it follows 2022, 2023 and 2014 as the fourth warmest year for the UK. All top 10 warmest years have occurred since 2000, with five in the most recent decade 2015-24, with last year having the warmest May on record, second warmest February and fifth warmest December - 19.9°C was recorded on January 28 at Sutherland in Scotland (!), a UK record for that month. Last year was also another relatively wet year, with 1,242mm recorded, 107% of average rainfall, the UK getting its 8th wettest year, although not as wet as 2023 (ranked the fourth wettest).

Showing where things are going, the UK last year was no stranger to severe weather events, such as Storm Henk in January, Storm Lilian in August, and Storm Darragh in December - leading to widespread flooding, fallen trees, power outages, transport disruption and, tragically, fatalities.

Now, when it comes to global warming and record temperatures, we are obviously not talking about prehistoric times. We all know about the Neoproterozoic, the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, the Mesozoic Era and all the rest of it - it was a lot hotter back then! But the point is that the planet has been slowly warming up since about 1850, and from around 1970 the pace of change has increased markedly - a phenomenon, as we have just seen above, that most scientists expect to carry on, whatever various countries decide to do or not do.

Will not stop

So, even if they shut down the entire car industry tomorrow and go over to 100% renewables, global warming will not stop. We are dealing with something like our favourite metaphor, the oil tanker - it cannot be quickly turned around, as heat continues to generate momentum in terms of global warming and the ice caps will keep melting throughout the 21st century.

The critical question confronting us now is not how to stop the planet warming up, but how much that warming can be limited, especially given that average temperatures will continue to rise more and more. You could console yourself with the thought that last year’s temperatures were a freak occurrence because of the undeniable El Niño effect that is adding to global warming, and other contributing factors, such as a fall in pollution from shipping and in low-level clouds, both of which reflect sunlight. But the general expectation, shared by scientists and non-scientists alike, is that it will get warmer and warmer, and sadly the lowest conceivable increase above preindustrial times is now 1.9°C. Yet in terms of estimates, that can go up to something like 3.8°C by the end of the 21st century - a truly frightening prospect.

Of course, we do not know for sure that this will happen, because it is all about the decisions made by human beings and governments, and about what sort of society we have - one based on production for the sake of production, or a different logic. Yes, things could be limited to 1.9°C or we could shoot towards 4.0°C. But, if the worst outcome happened, then not only would the polar ice caps continue to melt: we would also get a calamitous rise in sea levels, adding further to the heating effect and the possible inundation of a whole series of cities like Jakarta, Alexandria, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Houston, St Louis, etc, etc.

Inevitably, that would go hand in hand with the complete disruption of traditional agricultural patterns and practices, spelling disaster for millions of people. What if the wheat belt in North America disappeared, given that it is the breadbasket of much of the world? Or, if the most pessimistic estimates of global warming turn out to be correct, you could see a country like Britain becoming more like Labrador, as it is level with approximately mid-Canadian latitudes - meaning more foul weather, at least from our point of view: wetter, windier and danker. Indeed, one of the paradoxical effects of global warming on a country like Britain, famous for its mild climate, is that it could get a lot colder - especially if the Gulf Stream slowed down, or even collapsed entirely due to melting glaciers. It would no longer act as a heat transferor by taking warm waters from the Caribbean across the Atlantic to western Europe. By the same token, increased global warming could lead to untold millions of climate refugees.

This is not to say that we are talking about the end of the world, like in a Hollywood movie - the world has gone through many dramatic temperature shifts. But the threat to existing civilisation is real in terms of the mass movement of people leading to military conflict, wars and general societal collapses.

Socialism

For what it is worth, this paper has speculated for a while about the possibility of the capitalist state - looking at its own interests in terms of survival and taking draconian measures to limit CO₂ and methane emissions - severely restricting air travel, shipping, cars, and so on. But so far we have seen nothing apart from greenwashing exercises - one Cop conference after the other with plenty of fine resolutions, but very little in the way of action. Even when countries or leaders vote to limit the output of CO₂, there is an enormous gap between what they say and what they actually do - which is also true when it comes to supplying finance to the so-called underdeveloped world that often takes the form of crippling loans or onerous conditions.

Needless to say, Donald Trump’s second term can only make things worse - his administration is full of ‘climate sceptics’, putting it politely, or raving nutjobs, if you want to be less polite. Then we have Trump himself with his “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric.

Perhaps this is not immediately obvious, but the climate movement seems to have dramatically declined. It is not because people are no longer concerned with the climate. What needs to be done is broadly known. But in terms of demonstrations, pickets, high-profile stunts blocking motorways, blowing up pipelines, disrupting cultural events - none of this has worked. In fact, all we need to do is look at Britain and the vicious measures that have been taken against climate protestors in terms of legislation, but also prison sentences, which appear to have had a dampening effect on militancy. Ripert Read, a co-founder and former spokesperson of Extinction Rebellion, has completely surrendered, writing in the pages of The Guardian that “decarbonisation at the scale and speed we imagined isn’t a feasible goal within our existing political and economic frameworks”.⁴

More radical

Yes, true enough on one level, but that should spur you on to be even more radical - not less - and confront the capitalist system as a whole as responsible for runaway global warming and environmental destruction. In other words, moving beyond the politics of protest to the politics needed for coming to power. We are never going to convince the Trumps of the world, the Keir Starmers and Kemi Badenochs, the Macrons and Le Pens, which means we need to transition beyond capitalism, as socialism is the only rational answer. A big ask, but the only way forward.

Disastrously though, Read draws the opposite conclusion, thinking smaller because it is “time to stop fantasising about a decarbonised utopia and start acting on the resilience-building strategies that can protect our communities and steward a path through the rising tide of trouble that is coming our way” - which, for him, means working “at a local level by rewilding, saving water and fighting floods”. Anti-capitalism and internationalism do not get a mention.

It goes without saying that communists are not opposed to any of those individual aims: quite the opposite. For instance, we have always advocated rewilding. But if these goals are not allied to a political strategy and programme to overcome capitalism, then they are doomed to failure - sticking our fingers in the dam, as disaster overwhelms us.

1. news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158891.↩︎

2. M Davis Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster New York NY 1998, p146.↩︎

3. metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2025/2024-provisionally-the-fourth-warmest-year-on-record-for-the-uk.↩︎

4. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/01/extinction-rebellion-uk-net-zero-2025-climate.↩︎