Halfway to the Fire Age: How Ice Age temperatures reveal our children's bleak future

Twenty-thousand years ago, Scotland was covered by a vast sheet of ice about a kilometre thick. So, if you were, for example, standing on the riverfront in Dundee looking up at the Law Hill, you would need to imagine something more than five times as high to understand just how much ice we’re talking about.

It has been estimated that the world’s average temperature during the last Ice Age was about 8 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, it got warmer and, for much of the period in which human civilisation has flourished, global temperatures averaged at about 13.5C.

One of our greatest inventions, the internal combustion engine, has been a great driver of human progress. But this extraordinary machine – used in 1.3 billion cars in the world today – does not just move us from A to B, it also operates as a planetary engineer, throwing so much carbon into the atmosphere that it has been transforming our hitherto fairly stable climate at an astonishing speed. Over Earth’s long history, the planet has warmed and cooled naturally. However, humans have already achieved in a century or so what would have taken nature millennia.

30 years of talk, emission still rising

Last year was the warmest on record, with the average global temperature of 14.98C nearly 1.5C warmer than the historic average; 2024 is expected to be even hotter and to become the first calendar year to go above 1.5C of warming.

To most humans, this does not sound like a lot. However, that 5.5C gap between the Ice Age and the post-Ice Age world helps put it into context. We have already shifted the world’s climate more than a quarter of the way towards whatever the opposite of the Ice Age is. Prioritising a snappy phrase over the nuances of climate science, I’m going to call it ‘the Fire Age’.

A local man on Evia island in Greece appeals for help after the water he's using to fight a wildfire near his home in 2021 stops flowing (Picture: Angelos Tzortzinis) | AFP via Getty Images

According to a United Nations report last month, the world is set to experience about 3.1C of warming by 2100 if governments do not take stronger action to cut greenhouse gas emissions which, despite nearly 30 years of the international COP climate summits – the latest of which has just ended after much squabbling about money – are still rising.

Children born today who live into their 70s are, therefore, on track to experience a world that is more than halfway to the Fire Age and those born in that unhappy time may live to see its full fury.

‘Almost game over’

In Our Final Warning, Six Degrees of Climate Emergency – the Royal Society’s science book of the year in 2008 and updated in 2020 – author Mark Lynas sought to explain what each degree of warming would mean for the world.

His description of 5C is bleak: “At five degrees, humanity has lost control of global temperatures, which are now spiralling relentlessly upwards. Food production is decimated, and large areas of the planet are too hot for humans to inhabit. All ice sheets are doomed to vanish, and vast quantities of additional carbon are pouring into the atmosphere from thawed Arctic permafrost and burning forests.

“Unless something can be done to reverse the upwards spiral, runaway global warming could transform our planet into a wasteland of lifeless rocky continents surrounded by stagnant oceans. It is almost game over.”

It would be reasonable to assume that, with scientists having firmly established the dangers of global warming in the 1980s, steps taken by governments and companies to reduce carbon emissions would have had an impact. However, what progress that has been made has been surpassed by our urge to produce more.

The average rate of warming since 1850, on land and sea, is 0.06C every ten years. However, since 1982, the rate has been more than three times as fast at 0.2C per decade, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And, with carbon emissions continuing to rise, the process is speeding up, not slowing down.

Bloody-mindedness

Meanwhile, the world is forced to deal with wars of aggression launched by bloodthirsty dictators, sudden shocks like the Covid pandemic, and pressing economic concerns that continually distract from the need to act on climate change.

And of those people who do think about it, many can’t help but add their weight to a ‘culture war’ that’s more about demonising others than making genuine, tangible progress. The hard-left is trying to use climate change to promote their ridiculous economic theories, while equally ridiculous climate science denial, mainly by the hard-right, is based on nothing but bloody-mindedness with no credible counter arguments.

These are attitudes that are increasingly leaching into mainstream public discourse as billions of ordinary people understandably go about their business in the much same way that they have for decades. It’s much easier to cope with an enormous problem if you can either pretend it doesn’t exist or insist it’s someone else’s fault. And so fossil fuel companies that lack a sense of irony have been gleefully moving in to drill for previously inaccessible oil and gas supplies in the Arctic, while the super-rich have apparently taken to using private jets like taxis.

A world of ‘quiddlers’

While I was thinking about this article last week, I noticed two unconnected things. The first was a report about someone spending nearly £5 million on a banana duct-taped to a wall, which apparently is art when it comes with a certificate. The second was a word of the day by etymologist Susie Dent – quiddler.

From the 19th century, it means “one who pays great attention to trivial matters as a way of avoiding the important ones”. As we continue careening towards a world in which the climate upon which we depend is increasingly dangerous, a £5m banana seems like some top-quality quiddling to me.

With the polar opposite of a one-kilometre thick ice sheet heading straight for us, we’re choosing to avert our eyes and play, squabble and fight as usual, instead of actually confronting the true scale of the desperately serious challenge we face.