Climate Scientist Warns of Approaching "Limits of Adaptation" to Global Warming

All the coverage this week of the wildfires happening across Western Europe, one line stood out to me. A European climate scientist said, all this heat, all these fires, are likely going to get worse in the future to the point that we will be, quote, "passing the limits of adaptation." I wondered what that looks like. What happens when climate change becomes so disruptive that humans cannot adapt fast enough? So we called that scientist to ask. Johan Rockstrom is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and he noted that 200-some years since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth has remained fairly resilient, but that is changing.

Ninety percent of the heat caused by our fossil fuel burning is not in the atmosphere causing the temperature rise, which has led us to the climate crisis we see today - it's in the ocean. Fifty percent of the carbon dioxide from the greenhouse gases we add is not in the atmosphere trapping heat. It's actually stored, half of it in the ocean and half of it on land. So a healthy planet has this extraordinary biogeophysical capacity to buffer and dampen, basically cool the planet. We're seeing, unfortunately, increasing indicators of our planet losing this capacity. Not that we've crossed the tipping point, but forest systems are getting weaker and no longer able to take up as much carbon. The ocean is warming faster than we had expected. Ice is melting faster than we had expected. This is a stress response of a planet that is trying to do everything it can to buffer and dampen change. And when we come closer to the end of this capacity, then of course, the risk is very high that the impacts hit back even harder on our societies.

And what does that look like for humans? If we reach these limits, what does it mean for people on Earth?

To begin with, what it looks like is that we will have more shocks of what we're experiencing right now in Europe. Remember that we are experiencing - in places that have never recorded it before - life-threatening temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. So that's the first thing. The second is droughts, floods, fires that risk food security and even social stability. We are at risk of triggering more disease outbreaks, even pandemics, which then spills over into less and less stable economies and therefore also less and less stable societies, moving into situations of displacement, migration, potentially even armed conflicts. And we see the first indications of this in countries like Sudan, Syria, Chad, where you cannot separate anymore the social conflicts and displacements and people suffering from these environmental changes.

There are, of course, many countries worldwide trying to make changes like emissions reductions. But to what extent do you think those attempted fixes are still enough versus humans are simply going to have to make drastic changes, like not being able to live in certain places?

The window is still open to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes. And what I mean by catastrophic is the point where fires, drought and heat waves become so difficult to handle that communities simply have to move out. And that is what worries me most today that we're allowing ourselves to look at these extreme events and continue to kick the can down the road and not acting, and that can take us into real danger.

So what should we do?

One has to recognize that the transition is challenging. I mean, we've been, for 200 years, powering the global economy with fossil fuels and unsustainable production systems. Now we need to very rapidly move away from fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas - we need to move into circular economic models and we need to have sustainable ways of managing our oceans, our forests, our wetlands, our peatlands. We know all this. We even have solutions on how to scale sustainable production and consumption practices. And still, we're not moving fast enough.

This is a very doomsday topic, but I watched a YouTube video of a lecture you gave on this, and in it, you are matter-of-fact, but you're also fairly upbeat. How do you maintain that sense of positivity and good cheer when the news you're delivering is so alarming?

Yeah, that's the advancements in science and our extraordinary ability today to measure, down to the single tree and fish in the ocean, the state of the planet is a tremendous value. And that risk assessment is not there to scare us. Risk assessment is to avoid doing the wrong things.

I assume those risk assessments are also meant to motivate us.

Absolutely. And, you know, when you think of it, in all other paths of our life, health risks, or if it is risks to our economy, or if it's risk to our house burning down, we are concerned. We buy insurance. We want information. Why aren't we, you know, seeing risk assessments as a way of ensuring that we can hand over a stable, resilient, life-supporting, livable planet to our children?

Johan Rockstrom is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Thank you, and thanks for your positivity on this issue.

Thanks for inviting me.