26.06.2025

Scientists warn of peril

Heat can be a bigger killer than floods and storms. Within three years we could pass the symbolic 1.5°C limit, but we do not need technological fixes that might well make things worse, writes Eddie Ford

The UK recently experienced an ‘official’ heat wave - recording the hottest day of the year at 33.2°C on June 21 at Charlwood, Surrey. The day before, the Met Office had issued an amber heat-health warning for the first time since September 2023 covering all regions of England, when the mercury hit 32.2°C in west London - the previous hottest day of 2025 - meaning that “the expected impacts are likely to be felt across the whole health service” with “potential for the whole population to be at risk” - especially those aged 65 and over or people with health conditions.¹

This heat wave is expected to cause 600 premature deaths, particularly in London and the West Midlands.² According to the UK Health Security Agency, more than 10,000 people died before their time in summer heatwaves between 2020 and 2024, with the government being criminally negligent for failing to properly prepare people for the extreme weather. A recent study by the journal Energy Research and Social Science estimated that 80% of homes overheat in the summer, making a bad situation worse, and the study also found that the use of air conditioning soared sevenfold to 21% of homes between 2011 and 2022 - obviously increasing carbon emissions for those able to afford air conditioning.³ And a previous study by the Climate Change Committee found that converted offices pose a “potentially deadly risk” in heatwaves, as weakened planning rules have resulted in fewer checks on post-Covid urban redevelopment - the Starmer government is especially keen to slash the ‘red tape’ that causes a delay to planning applications, even hoping that an “AI breakthrough” would accelerate the process.⁴

Such deadly heat as we saw at the weekend would have been expected only once every 2,500 years and the June heatwave is about 2° to 4°C hotter than in the past. Even more to the point, scientists have calculated that this deadly weekend heat in England is 100 times more likely due to the human induced climate crisis.⁵ Temperatures in the UK rose above 40°C for the first time in 2022 and the Met Office said that the country had a 50/50 chance of temperatures soaring to that temperature again in the next 12 years, as the climate changes - perhaps even hitting 45°C, a staggering figure for a country once famed for its mild winters and cool summers.

Swiss Re, the insurance giant, published an alarming, but accurate, report on June 12, saying that extreme heat is more deadly than floods, earthquakes and hurricanes combined - with up to half a million people globally succumbing each year - pointing out it should be considered the “invisible peril”, because “the impacts are not as obvious as of other natural perils”.⁶ In its sobering words, with a clear trend to longer and hotter heatwaves, it is important to “shine a light” on the true cost to human life, our economy, infrastructure, agriculture and healthcare.

Breach

Also not unexpected, the planet could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5°C warming limit in as little as three years, according to more than 60 of the world’s leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment.⁷ Whatever the 2016 Paris agreement might say, there has been no serious attempt at implementation - quite the opposite, even if the likes of Reform UK and Donald Trump would have us believe that ‘net zero’ is ‘radical woke madness’. Countries have actually continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas - with plans for more fossil fuel emissions - and merrily chop down carbon-rich forests. We are experiencing a worsening of extreme weather events and a rapid rise in global sea levels, threatening coastal communities. Things are all moving in the wrong direction.

Emit budget

As the Earth System Science Data journal comprehensively details, at the beginning of 2020 scientists estimated that humanity could only emit 500 billion more tonnes of CO₂ for a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5°C. However, by the start of this year the so-called ‘carbon budget’ had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes, largely due, of course, to the continued emission of CO₂ and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane - but also to general improvements in the scientific estimates and technology. It is getting easier to show how bad things are. If global CO₂ emissions stay at their current highs of about 40 billion tonnes a year, states the journal, then the best we get is roughly three years until that ‘carbon budget’ is exhausted.

Last year was the first on record when global average air temperatures were more than 1.5°C over those of the late 1800s. Yes, a single 12-month period is not considered a breach of the Paris agreement, with the record heat of 2024 given an extra boost by natural weather patterns, mainly El Niño. But surely undeniably human-induced warming (or capitalism) was by far the main reason for last year’s high temperatures reaching 1.36°C above pre-industrial levels, as estimated by Earth System Science Data and others. This current rate of warming is about 0.27°C per decade - much faster than anything in the geological record - and, if emissions stay high, the planet is on track to reach 1.5°C of warming on that metric some time around 2030.

True, using carbon capture technology and suchlike, after this point long-term warming could in theory be brought back down by sucking impossibly large quantities of CO₂ back out of the atmosphere. But, even if this technology works as it should, it is no ‘Get out of jail’ card. Logically, as you exceed the 1.5°C limit by larger and larger amounts, it becomes less and less likely that removing CO₂ will reverse the warming caused by today’s emissions. It becomes a race that you can never win.

The study amply highlights the magnitude of the climate change that has already happened. A striking statistic is the rate at which extra heat is accumulating in the Earth’s climate system - or the ‘energy imbalance’, to use the jargon. Over the past decade or so, this rate of heating has been more than double that of the 1970s and 1980s, and an estimated 25% higher than the late 2000s and 2010s - a really large and disturbing number over such a short period. The recent uptick is fundamentally due to greenhouse gas emissions, but a reduction in the cooling effect from small particles called aerosols has also played a role, as this extra energy has to go somewhere - some goes into warming the land, raising air temperatures and melting the world’s ice. But about 90% of the excess heat is taken up by the oceans.

That fundamentally means a disruption to marine life, with plenty of evidence showing that the UK, for example, could see a boom in endangered species, such as sharks, rays and native oysters, moving habitats to respond to rising ocean temperatures - fishing communities have already noticed the difference, with reports of jellyfish swarming near beaches or Mediterranean octopuses hauled up in catches.⁸ But for every ‘winner’ like the Basking shark or Thornback ray, there are losers like the clam (some of which can live up to 500 years) that could struggle to adapt, as will static creatures in general like the sea pen, which helps to build reefs and could lose up to 40% of their suitable habitat by the end of the century.

Warmer ocean waters take up more space, of course, in addition to the extra water that melting glaciers are adding to our seas - hence the rate of global sea-level rise has doubled since the 1990s, raising the risks of flooding for millions, as cities become inundated. But there is some source for optimism, as the authors of the study argue that the rate of emission increases appears to be slowing down a bit, as ‘clean’ technologies are getting rolled out despite the rhetorical efforts of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump - therefore “rapid and stringent” emission cuts are absolutely critical, as it is a dangerous folly to think that keeping below 1.5°C of warming is ‘safe’ and above 1.5°C is ‘dangerous’. In reality, every extra bit of warming increases the severity of many weather extremes, ice melt and sea-level rise - and conversely every bit of cooling can result in less harm and suffering. Every fraction matters.

Danger

As it is obvious that governments are not acting fast enough to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising dangerously, if not actively making things worse, there is increased pressure to cool down the planet, using various technological and geoengineering methods - especially in university engineering departments, by offering the carrot of increased funding. But as Marxists, though we endeavour to utilise science as much as possible, we must always argue against quack solutions based on delusions of quick techno-fixes, when what is required is a fundamental political reorganisation of society from top to bottom.⁹

For example, there is still the persistent idea of injecting sulphates into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight - even though this could obviously do more harm than good, because it causes acid rain and interferes with rainfall patterns. Now researchers are experimenting with alternatives to sulphates, looking for substances that reflect sunlight, but are essentially regarded as benign - hoisting them into the stratosphere using weather balloons which are then recovered to see what changes this exposure causes. Is it harmless? Other ideas - including drilling holes in the Arctic ice in the winter and pumping seawater over existing ice floes in below freezing air temperatures to thicken them - are also being considered (that sounds like a bad science fiction film). Or how about spraying seawater to form clouds over the ocean also to reflect sunlight? Many risk the potentially disastrous blocking of the sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, but you do not have to be a genius to strongly suspect that solar radiation management (SRM) could have serious unintended consequences - maybe disastrous ones such as shifting rains vital to food production.

Harvard University had intended to launch a high-altitude balloon equipped with propellers and sensors that could release a few kilograms of calcium carbonate, sulphuric acid or other materials high above the planet - which would then turn around and fly through the plume to measure how widely the particles disperse in order to estimate how much sunlight they reflect. But last year it had to halt the long-planned experiment, as there was so much opposition.¹⁰ Such ideas will not save us, even if the more naive journalists think otherwise.

Clearly, the urge to start developing geoengineering experiments runs the danger of reducing the drive to tackle the root cause of the climate emergency - the burning of fossil fuels. That in turn means overcoming capitalism and its inner logic of production for the sake of production, accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Yet, even if we put an end to capitalism tomorrow, it would still take generations to restore the damage already done.

By repeating such warnings and emphasising the all too real dangers of the climate crisis - even if not such an imminent threat as nuclear war - we are not behaving like left Jeremiahs in order to deflate the working class movement or dispirit people. Rather, simply telling the truth - the first duty of Marxists - and striving to equip the working class with the party that is so desperately needed. There is literally no time to waste.