Climate threat eclipsed by global conflicts, says analyst

By Gwynne Dyer
International Columnist

The United States president, Donald J. (for Jesus) Trump, is a showman, and he knows how to keep the world’s attention by offering journalists shockingly good copy.

He threatens a genocide: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” He writes “F**kin’ Strait” on a presidential post. (Note the tastefully dropped “g” in “F**kin’” to show that he’s a man of the people.)

But now that I have your attention, I’d like to draw it elsewhere. Specifically, to the fact that the perpetual melodrama of Trump’s wars and other blunders blots out practically everything else on the news horizon. However, he’s not the most important or dangerous phenomenon we must deal with today.

Trump’s wars are quite small affairs: 2,200 dead Iranians, 100 dead Venezuelans and Cubans, 13 dead Americans. There has never been any risk of a nuclear war. Iran has no nukes and has never been close to getting them. The U.S. has thousands, of course, but as long as the Iranians let Trump withdraw without losing face, he won’t be tempted to use one.

There are only two other big wars at the moment, in Ukraine (four years old) and in Sudan (three years old). Each has killed about half a million people, but neither shows any signs of spreading more widely. On a planet with almost 200 countries and eight billion people, this scale of violence is not failure.

There is reason for concern, in the sense that two of the three greatest powers, Russia and the United States, have abandoned the international rule of law and are shamelessly waging aggressive wars. But they have not yet dragged everybody else in. Indeed, the Europeans, the Chinese and most developing countries are trying quite hard to protect and preserve that principle.

There’s probably also a big recession on the way because of the U.S. attack on Iran and Tehran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz. It would be only the fifth recession since 1980, but it could be the deepest if the strait stays closed to normal traffic for a few more months.

It seems like a long list of troubles, but compared to most other decades of the past 2,000 years, it’s average to good. The Mongol invasions and the Black Death were definitely bad decades, but even the sum of all this doesn’t remotely compare with the threat of climate change. That is completely off the scale, and I hardly see it in the news feeds at all.

This is particularly unfortunate because we are entering a period where some major changes in climate policy will need to happen quite fast — a decade or two — if we are to avoid ending up in a full “Hothouse Earth” scenario by the end of the century.

“Hothouse Earth,” according to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, is a climate scenario where self-reinforcing feedback loops push global temperatures 4–5 C above pre-industrial levels and raise sea levels by 10–60 metres, rendering parts of the planet uninhabitable. It is the point of no return, after which we can’t reverse the changes, and it’s not that far away.

Climate scientists are ultra-cautious about making statements on when they think these things will happen, for fear of being accused of panic-mongering. However, I’ve interviewed most of the well-known ones (two books on the subject, in 2008 and 2024), and off the record, they are even more frightened.

The problem is that the warming is not just linear. There is a smooth curve of warming driven mostly by human emissions, but the real danger lies in the sudden upward lurches triggered by that same warming. These “feedbacks” or “tipping points” are activated by events like thawing permafrost, Amazon dieback or the loss of Arctic sea ice, and there are many of them.

We already crossed one in 2023. That’s when the average global temperature reached 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels and did not come back down. There are about a dozen more of these climate tripwires, and if they all trigger as predicted, they could push the world to 3.0 C as soon as 2050.

That’s 25 years from now, so if you’re under 60 — tag, you’re it. Beyond 3.0 C, the climate is trapped on an upward escalator that doesn’t require further human emissions to reach 4.0 C, 5.0 C or even 6.0 C.

This sort of thing has happened several times in the past half-billion years, usually caused by massive volcanic eruptions lasting thousands of years. It always involves mass diebacks.

That is the hell-bound train we’re on at the moment, and we urgently need to get off. Do worry about the third Gulf War, and Ukraine, and Lebanon and Gaza too, but keep a sense of proportion.

This is what really matters.