I’ve studied geopolitics all my life: climate breakdown is a bigger threat than China and Russia

‘Risk’ analyses largely ignore the dangers of the climate crisis. Unless we wake up to them, they will soon outweigh all others

The Irish sea captain who in 1751 discovered the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) – closely connected with, though not identical to, the Gulf Stream – found a practical use for it: he used the frigid deeper water to cool his wine.

That may seem a rather frivolous response, but of course, Capt Henry Ellis had no idea that the oceanic pattern he had stumbled upon had been critical to the climate, the agriculture and indeed the entire development of western Europe. The same excuse can hardly be made for British and European governments today.

The latest scientific analysis based on evidence from the last ice age suggests that there is a possibility that, because of global heating and the resulting influx of fresh water from the melting Greenland ice cap, the Amoc could shut down with surprising speed, and as early as the middle of this century.

If that occurs, the consequences would be catastrophic. With the resulting hypothetical 10C to 15C fall in temperature, Britain’s climate would change to that of Newfoundland’s. Agriculture would collapse, and the entire landscape of the country would be transformed. Housing and infrastructure would have to be radically adapted to withstand the new climate.

The result would be decades, and possibly generations, of economic hardship. And as temperatures fell in western Europe, they would rise in west Africa. The population of Britain would at least survive a collapse in local agriculture, albeit in straitened and rationed circumstances reminiscent of the second world war and its aftermath. People in Africa would not.

The result would be an immense increase in the migration and the political response that is already very visibly driving the decay of liberal democracy in Europe. Fortunately, such a rapid collapse of Amoc remains, for the moment and on balance, improbable. It is not a negligible risk, however, and if the climate crisis continues to gather pace, the chance of it occurring will only increase with time.

This being so, an observer would expect that the entire external policy of the UK (and other western European states) would be devoted to fostering international cooperation and action to limit the climate breakdown and mitigate its consequences. However, nothing of the sort has occurred, despite repeated statements that the climate crisis is an “existential” threat. Nor is anything of the sort to be expected from the new Labour government.

Climate breakdown in general is visibly proceeding even faster than most models predicted, and some of its worst probable consequences are already clear. July marked the 14th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. Arctic and Antarctic temperatures are rising much faster than global ones, increasing the risk of a disastrous tipping point. In south Asia, if this summer’s record temperatures become the regular pattern and extend over several months, agricultural production will be severely damaged, threatening hundreds of millions with famine. In Europe, central Spain appears to be in the early stages of desertification, even as central Europe is devastated by floods caused in part by a collision of cool northern air with exceptionally warm air moving up from the Mediterranean.

None of this should be in the slightest bit complicated or mysterious. The inability of our security elites – and the political elites who gobble up their “analysis” – to perform their core duty of the objective assessment of risk is, however, not due to some particular intellectual failing. It stems from layer upon layer of ancient inherited culture and immensely powerful institutional and economic interests.

It is not, of course, that the climate crisis is ignored altogether; but it is placed in a separate compartment from security – which means that it is continually being eclipsed by the latest “security threat”, which is invariably talked up by a range of interested parties, as well as journalists simply looking for a good story.

It was all too miserably apparent that in the years-long run-up to the Ukraine war, no western government, security institution or indeed leading newspaper made the disastrous consequences of war for action against climate breakdown part of their calculations or saw this as a key reason to seek compromise with Russia.

Tragically, most of the progressive left has also failed to put climate at the centre of its thinking, instead placing it in a compartment of its own, alongside issues of the day that are extremely unlikely to be seen by future generations as of remotely similar gravity.

To move to a different mindset, several recognitions are necessary. The first is that if we fail to adequately limit climate breakdown, then very few of the other causes that progressives care about will survive in the world that will result. In a world of starvation and societal collapse, there would be little chance of human rights, let alone gender rights.

The second is that the climate crisis largely erases the distinction between democratic and authoritarian systems. That is true of action against climate breakdown today, and will be true of resilience against it in future. Today, apart from the super-wealthy oil-producing countries of the Gulf and elsewhere, three of the worst carbon emitters per capita are “Anglosphere” liberal democracies: the US, Canada and Australia. For the future, we have no idea which systems will best cope with the effects of global heating.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to realise that to concentrate on action against the climate crisis will mean making some hard and painful choices. At present, the mainstream left in Europe and North America appears to believe that it is possible to reshape economies to limit carbon emissions and to increase spending on health and social welfare and to radically increase military spending to confront Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere.

It isn’t possible. The money simply isn’t there. The result of pursuing all three goals simultaneously would be to fail at all of them; as demonstrated by the latest political developments in France and Germany, where a populist backlash is undermining support for Ukraine and climate action.

A critical step in the struggle to limit the climate crisis therefore has to be the pursuit of detente with Russia and China, and disengagement from conflicts in the Middle East, including the war in Gaza. This will require some very difficult and painful changes in existing policy and attitudes – but then again, nobody ever said that tackling climate breakdown was going to be easy.

Cover photo: Flooding in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri this month has claimed at least 30 lives and forced 400,000 people from their homes. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images