Climate change is not an illness you can treat - it’s a limb you must amputate

The last eight years since the Paris Agreement was signed have been heartbreaking. The world’s leaders have gone from being clear-eyed visionaries, united in their efforts to save our planet, to more like sad ostriches, heads buried deeply in the sand. Or worse, modern Nero’s, playing the violin to pretend all can still be well while our planet burns. 

This weekend’s Lunch with the FT with Celeste Saulo, the head of the United Nations’ Weather Service, is the perfect example of how much global leaders have lost their way.  Rather than talking openly about the challenges we face, and accept that we will never reach the goals outlined in Paris, she speaks as if the last eight years had been a roaring success. When asked about her response to the climate “doomers”, people who argue that the climate change threat is too difficult, too costly or too late to tackle, she answers with a damning analogy. She says, “If you were diagnosed with an illness, you would do everything to survive. So why wouldn’t you do the same in this case?”

The right analogy for climate change is not a long term illness, but rather a limb that is gangrenous and beyond salvaging.  We’re long past the point where some exercise and diet changes can fix what ails us, and are instead looking at a limb that has long gone black and is oozing pus. 

Let me explain. Our greenhouse gas emissions have increased every year since 2019 (minus the 2020 COVID blip). If we wanted a shot at keeping global warming below the 1.5°C increase, our emissions would have to fall 43% (!) below our 2019 levels to even make this possible. Sit on that improbable statistic for a minute - we would have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by more than half. Instead, the 2023 Annual Emissions Gap report estimates we’re on track to hit 3°C. 

Ms. Saule knows this. When she’s asked directly if the world can still limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C, she circumvents the question, answering, “we should keep the ambition… Although it may look difficult, we should move in that direction.” This is the typical evasion from global leaders, who are helping to keep us on track for a disastrous future, by emphasizing the continuation of an approach that has not, and will not, work.  We should stop trying to fix the gangrene and instead accept the fact that we’re going to have to amputate the leg -  and start preparing for a life without it.  The world needs to move away from investing our time and limited capital on empty promises made at silly summits (hello COP29!) and instead start focusing on how we can adapt to a world that is at least 3°C higher. 

What does that adaptation look like? First, we need to start preparing for a future with greater climate volatility, more natural disasters, and far more food insecurity.  At Helios, what we see is a world that isn’t just hotter - but one where the “extremes” (e.g., more frosts, colder temperatures during shorter winters, hotter maximum temperatures, unpredictable precipitation) become normalized.  For the world’s governments and farmers, this means starting to identify the places where climate has changed too dramatically to grow the crops that have flourished there historically. It means helping those farmers transition from the old crops that worked into the new crops that could one day thrive in these new climate conditions. It means spending our limited capital supporting farmers willing to make that years long transition. 

Look at Florida, for example. The state used to pack over 200M boxes of citrus every year. Today, in large part due to climate change, it’s down to 20M a year. Drinking “Florida’s Natural” means drinking the juice of Brazilian oranges. The state and federal government, instead of subsidizing these farmers to grow crops that could thrive in these new conditions (pomegranate, passion fruit, even mango) instead pay farmers not to sell their land to real estate developers and insure them when they inevitably have crop failures. 

This is exactly the wrong kind of policy - one that is focused on mitigating the impacts of climate change, and pretending it’s a temporary aberration, instead of facing the world as it is and helping people adapt to it. Our world doesn’t need more ostriches with their heads in the sand, it needs courageous leaders that can help us prepare to live without that limb.