Good News: Our Grandchildren Will Starve, Not Our Children
The most extreme climate scenarios are off, according to scientists in the conservative IPCC. However, the Godfather of Climate Science says otherwise.
This is a lengthy article on the news and climate science, so Robin has recorded an audio version to help you take it in. Listen here or wherever you get Roger's podcast.
Good news from The Times: our grandchildren will starve to death rather than our children. The new worst case is just 3.5C. Phew.
Firstly, let's remember what a 3.5C world actually means.
- Mass food system collapse, particularly in the Global South.
- Vast areas of Africa, South and West Asia will become uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people already born. Translation: billions will die from impending poverty and disaster.
That is what this headline is supposedly reassuring us of.
Secondly, this report is not telling the truth about the science because it is based on outdated models. Even Trump jumped on it to advance his end-times fascist agenda.
To understand why both Trump and the Times are deeply wrong about where we are heading, let's turn to the godfather of climate science, James Hansen, and look at one of his latest papers on climate sensitivity.
In May 2025, Hansen published a paper on Earth's albedo (the reflectivity of solar radiation bounced back into space). Over the past 25 years of precise satellite data, Earth's albedo has declined by 0.5%, leading to an increase of 1.7 watts per square metre of absorbed solar energy. Hansen describes this as a BFD (Big Fucking Deal), and he is right. That single number, in forcing terms, is equivalent to an additional 138 parts per million of CO2.
Clouds reflect sunlight back into space. Fewer clouds, or thinner clouds, means more solar energy reaches the surface and stays there. As the planet warms, evidence now shows that cloud cover is decreasing and, crucially, that this decrease is itself a response to warming. In other words, warming reduces clouds, which in turn cause more warming, which further reduces clouds. This is what climate scientists mean by a feedback loop, and this one is a fucking big one.
And a big cloud feedback means the planet is far more sensitive to CO2 than the IPCC's standard figures suggest. The IPCC's best estimate for climate sensitivity — the amount of warming you get from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 — is 3°C. Hansen's three independent lines of evidence (of which the albedo data is one), all point to 4.5°C. The difference between 3°C and 4.5°C is the difference between devastation and extinction.
Oliver Milman
The corporate media has barely engaged with this work, and when it has, it has often cast doubt on its truth. At the end of the climate sensitivity paper, Hansen notes:
"Criticisms of the Acceleration paper in the media did not address the physics in our three assessments of climate sensitivity. Instead, criticisms were largely ad hoc opinions, even ad hominem attacks. How can science reporting have descended to this level? Climate science is now so complex, with many sub-disciplines, that the media must rely on opinions of climate experts. Although there are thousands of capable scientists in these disciplines, the media have come to depend on a handful of scientists, a clique of climate scientists who are willing, or even eager, to be the voice of the climate science community. But are they representative of the total community, of capable scientists who focus on climate science?"
The Problem of Fragmented Science
A key problem of scientific understanding is that it requires slicing reality into manageable chunks. Take "the doubling of CO2." The slice aids understanding but paradoxically kills it too. Attending to the part deflects attention from the whole. Space. Time. The full arc of what's coming.
So when Hansen and colleagues write that climate sensitivity for doubled CO2 is 4.5°C, and that sensitivity as low as 3°C is excluded with greater than 99 percent confidence — they stop there. Slice completed. No return to the whole. No wonder the media shrugs. So what.
Here's the whole.
- Doubling CO2 means going from 280ppm to 560ppm. We're at 420ppm now. At current trajectory — roughly 40ppm additional per decade — we hit 560ppm around 2055. That's 4.5°C by roughly 2060. Not 2100. 2060. Hansen also shows Earth's albedo has already darkened by 0.5%, an extra 1.7 W/m² of absorbed solar energy. The system is already running hotter than the models admit.
- Time doesn't stop at 2060. At those temperatures, natural feedbacks (clouds, ice, permafrost) accelerate. There is no equilibrium, only continuation.
- Above 5°C, effective human extinction is locked in. We are on that path.
- Facts alone don't move humans. Emotion does. We are human, after all. So the headline that would actually communicate the whole truth? "We are all going to die, you fucking idiots."
In my recent paper with the 4 Billion Dead team, we examine what an All Systems Approach could look like to counter this fragmented thinking.
Roger Hallam
In related news, a recent "landmark" UK government report was buried in the middle of the Guardian's news section last week. The report points to the destruction of the British economy and way of life at 4C. Just your usual mid-newspaper read. Nothing to see here.
Fiona Harvey
The world's main "liberal" newspaper, that sells the idea that facts are "sacred", seems very keen on the quiet and smooth journey to the mass death being prepared for us by the business elites. They have comfortable jobs and a decent pension waiting for them, so why raise the alarm?
Journalists have to report on the outliers, not just the averages. We need to be fully aware of what could kill us. What we want to know is not that food production will go down by x% on average but that every 20 years an outlier event will destroy crops two years running. This will lead to the mass starvation of British people, from which they will not recover by the time the next outlier hits.
The unit of analysis of the "UK" is also beyond stupid. The UK does not exist in a sealed box. What happens here depends on what happens everywhere else. When outliers happen in other areas - war, famine, social breakdown- the world economy will collapse, and UK living standards will collapse. Meaning poor people will starve and revolutions will happen. This is the basics of geopolitical and systems thinking, yet seems to escape every journalist reporting on the science.
The climate is not an event. It's a vast system that surrounds all life. This journalism needs to stop pretending that it's a matter of "if we get to 4C." but look at how close we are to 2C and that the feedback loops over the next decade will send our kids to 3C and their kids to extinction at 4-6C. It's a ball rolling ever faster down the hill, not a bus stop.
Get a fucking grip!
As Bill McGuire rightly pointed out last week during the European heatwave, this is now the norm, and we can expect it to get a lot worse, fast.
Bill McGuire
But let's be honest. How many supposedly upright anti-racist Guardian readers read the description of UK life in the summer of 2052 — 40C heat, water and food shortages, economic depression — and think: oh, doesn't sound so bad, at least we won't be starving to death like all those billions of brown and black people in the global south.
Okay, let's not be honest. I take it all back. Sorry.
And obviously it would be beyond impolite to talk about 2070.
The #Europe #heatwave starts today and lasts about a week. Peak heat will be 16°C above normal. As high as 40°C/ 104°F in SW Spain. Most Widespread Heat day pictured here is Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/OKPlt8E1Hd
— Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) May 22, 2026
"16C above normal"
At present, there are only two outcomes. First, to maintain a 'highly developed' economy and society capable of deploying technologies that may mitigate the impact of climate collapse. Or the end of humanity's existence.
So, join an upcoming Revolution in the 21st Century videocall and let's get to work.
I have spent the last decade making the case that what is happening to our climate is not an accident but the predictable result of decisions made by a nihilistic elite who understood the consequences. In prison, I had the time to write up the story in my new book, Suicide: the political and legal implications of creating endless mass death, which lays out that case in full and our main options for survival. Get yours and share it around.
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