{"id":623372,"date":"2026-04-23T13:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T13:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/623372\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T13:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T13:42:09","slug":"a-catastrophic-climate-event-is-upon-us-here-is-why-youve-heard-so-little-about-it-george-monbiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/623372\/","title":{"rendered":"A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you\u2019ve heard so little about it | George Monbiot"},"content":{"rendered":"

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers \u2013 and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It\u2019s not an original remark<\/a>, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system \u2013 which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.<\/p>\n

They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as \u201cbillionaire brain\u201d<\/a> is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.<\/p>\n

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists<\/a>. Some now believe<\/a> that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system \u2013 known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) \u2013 delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests<\/a> that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon\u2019s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.<\/p>\n

Amoc\u2019s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise<\/a> on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures<\/a> by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes<\/a>, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold \u2013 including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically<\/a>, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible<\/a> almost everywhere in the UK.<\/p>\n

This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt<\/a>. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened<\/a> before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.<\/p>\n

The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961<\/a>. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a \u201chigh impact, low probability\u201d event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur. Research<\/a> over the past few years<\/a> prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a \u201chigh impact, high probability\u201d event. Now, in response to last week\u2019s paper<\/a>, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf \u2013 perhaps the world\u2019s leading authority on the subject \u2013 says the chances of a shutdown<\/a> look like \u201cmore than 50%\u201d. We could pass the tipping point, he says, \u201cin the middle of this century\u201d.<\/p>\n

So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests<\/a> that a \u201csocially optimal\u201d level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.<\/p>\n

As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued<\/a>, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk. The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche<\/a> (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts \u2013 that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems \u2013 releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a \u201chothouse Earth\u201d<\/a> in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.<\/p>\n

Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, \u201cit is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.\u201d Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor \u2013 but under the models, their lives are also priced down.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by \u201cspecial interests\u201d such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it\u2019s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (\u00a32.6m) to a junktank<\/a> run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus\u2019s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded<\/a> the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense \u2013 and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.<\/p>\n

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity\u2019s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been<\/a>, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It\u2019s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.<\/p>\n

This article was amended on 23 April 2026 to remove an incorrect temperature conversion, which was added during the editing process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers \u2013 and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-623372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}