Are things quite that bad? Well, if you read the headlines, yes: we’re on course for disaster and we don’t seem to be turning. “Business as usual” will lead to a catastrophic collapse of Himalayan glaciers; and devastating heatwaves in the southern United States, according to the New York Times. What’s more, the same newspaper said last week ahead of COP26, “If we continue with business as usual, by the end of the century, it will be too hot to go outside during heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia.”

But all these stories share one thing: they are based on the IPCC’s RCP 8.5 scenario. It’s not an exciting name, but 8.5 is often described as “business as usual”. Hence the headlines.

RCP 8.5 is not business as usual, though; it’s an unlikely worst case. This means a large fraction of the public debate on climate change mitigation is driven by an increasingly implausible scenario, which was unlikely when it was proposed, and is even less so now. The more we focus on this scenario, though, the more pessimistic — and the more hopeless — the situation will seem.

Back in 2007, after the fourth IPCC report was published, climate scientists wanted to create new emissions scenarios, imagining how they might change in the coming decades and what impact they would have on the climate. But while there was a plan to make in-depth scenarios ahead of the fifth report in 2013, scientists would need to start running models for that report as soon as 2010. They needed something that could be used in the meantime.

So four “representative concentration pathways”, RCPs, were developed: RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5[1.  The numbers refer to the amount of “radiative forcing”: that is, the change to the Earth’s energy balance, in watts per metre squared. So under RCP 6.0, each square metre of the earth’s surface would absorb six more watts of energy than it would lose to space, relative to pre-industrial times.]. They were, roughly speaking, a highly optimistic scenario regarding emissions, two middling scenarios, and a highly pessimistic one. RCP 8.5 was there as a realistic worst case. Even at the time, it was viewed as unlikely. But two unfortunate things confused that picture.

First, of the four RCPs, only 8.5 imagined a world with no climate policy. And second, its authors described it as “a high-emission business as usual scenario” – meaning that it was at the high end of emissions for business as usual, but which was taken to mean in some quarters that high emissions were business as usual.

So RCP 8.5 became synonymous with “business as usual”. There are dozens of studies published every year describing it as such: this one says that “Business-as-usual will lead to super and ultra-extreme heatwaves in the Middle East and North Africa”. It is a mainstream part of climate science.

“The problem isn’t that people study these scenarios,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s that they frame them as the most likely outcome in the absence of policy. That was probably never true, but I’m sure it’s not true now.”

Most obviously, we don’t live in a world without climate policies. The Paris protocols commit signatories to goals of keeping warming below 2°C and aiming for below 1.5°C. So “business as usual” is a global effort to reduce emissions.

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Second, and most important, the world has changed its energy mix far faster than RCP 8.5 expected. Hausfather points out that “current solar prices are below what the models think they’ll be in 2050”, and coal use has dropped in recent years. In order for emissions to reach what RCP 8.5 imagined, we’d need to increase coal use per capita by about 700% from today’s levels, spectacularly reversing the recent decline.

And this means that the really devastating levels of warming envisioned by RCP 8.5 are even less likely: we’re probably looking at a situation of 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels, compared with the 4°C, 5°C or even 6°C that RCP 8.5 predicts. As Hausfather said in a Nature piece last year, 3°C is still “a catastrophic outcome”, but it’s a heck of a lot better than it used to be.

It’s worth noting that while the emissions that get the world to RCP 8.5 are highly unlikely, the outcomes that 8.5 predicts are still plausible. One of the uncertainties in the climate is the feedbacks. For instance, as the world gets hotter, ice melts. Ice reflects sunshine, while dark earth absorbs it. So the less ice there is, the faster the world warms, reducing ice. That’s a positive feedback system: it tends to accelerate changes.

On the flip side, the more CO₂ there is in the atmosphere, the faster plants grow, and the more they suck from the atmosphere. That’s a negative feedback system, and it tends to moderate changes.

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The exact magnitude of the many possible feedback systems in the atmosphere is uncertain. As the Siberian permafrost melts, will it release gigatonnes of CO₂? It is possible that even under more optimistic emissions scenarios, the feedback systems will push more carbon into the atmosphere, so we end up with the same CO₂ concentrations as we would have done under RCP 8.5. And there’s another layer of uncertainty, which is “climate sensitivity”. It’s not precisely known how much warming a given increase in CO₂ concentrations will cause; perhaps even if the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is relatively low, the warming will be greater (although that now looks less likely).

So really bad outcomes are possible even without RCP 8.5-level emissions. We’d have to get “incredibly unlucky” with feedbacks for the world to end up warming that much, says Hausfather, but we can’t eliminate the possibility.

As a result, there’s an ongoing row among academics about whether RCP 8.5 (and its equally pessimistic successor[2.  In the latest IPCC report, the RCPs have been replaced with something else, called SSPs. Only one of the new SSPs, SSP5, is compatible with RCP 8.5. Research using both is combined into a scenario called SSP5-8.5. I’m going to refer to RCPs throughout, for simplicity.]) should be used at all. Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of public policy and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that it essentially has no place: that it’s based on an implausible scenario, even if you could end up somewhere similar because of uncertainties elsewhere. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he says.

But Richard Betts, a climate scientist at Exeter University and the Met Office, and one of the authors of the UK government’s climate change risk assessment, argues differently. We need to be aware of the risks of these 4°C worlds that we could – plausibly – still find ourselves in, he says. And there’s been lots of research done on worlds like that, mostly using RCP 8.5.

Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, adds that using extreme scenarios allows modellers to tease out causality in a way that more narrow ones don’t. “It allows you to see non-linearity, allows you to look for thresholds,” he says. “You get a stronger signal to noise ratio.” The actual emission scenarios are less likely, he agrees, but studying them helps us understand the climate system better.

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The trouble is that if a journalist sees two graphs in a study, one of a plausible RCP 4.5 world and one of a much more dramatic RCP 8.5 world, they’ll probably want to run the RCP 8.5 graph, “because it’s more impressive,” says Hausfather. “And they’ll say scientists predict this much sea level rise, or this many heat deaths. And it’s not accurate because you’d need to add ‘but only if we burn all our coal or get very unlucky’.”

There’s also a risk that RCP 8.5 will crowd out research into other areas. For instance, Our World in Data’s recent efforts to understand human impacts on biodiversity have been hampered because almost all the research into coral reef collapse has been carried out using RCP 8.5. Predictably enough, all the coral dies in that scenario. But what would coral reefs look like under 2°C of warming, or 3°C? We don’t really know.

(People have got in touch to suggest that recent studies have looked into the other pathways, and they do seem to show severe impacts on coral even at lower concentrations.)

The RCP 8.5 debate is heated. Pielke Jr and Schmidt in particular have a longstanding mutual animosity, and Schmidt feels Pielke Jr has “spent 20 years trying to elbow out scientists from the centre ground” on climate change. So it’s hard for a journalist to get involved without taking sides.

But it’s important, because the more we associate the worst-case scenario with business as usual, the more pessimistic the public debate will be. “It might demotivate people,” says Hausfather. “It’s much easier to see the Paris goals [of no more than 1.5°C warming] as achievable if you know we’re on course for a 3°C world, rather than a 5°C one.”

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I disagree with Pielke Jr: RCP 8.5 has its place, because as Betts says, there’s a whole range of research into unlikely but plausible scenarios using it, and if you’re doing risk assessments, you need to look at outcomes that probably won’t happen but which would be disastrous if they did, so you can try to avoid them. At the moment the papers looking at those scenarios all use 8.5.

But on the other hand, if the IPCC puts out RCPs without explicitly saying which are the most likely, then policymakers and journalists will take whichever scenario most suits their needs, whether that’s pretending there’s no problem, or magnifying the problem for the sake of a headline. This isn’t the fault of climate modellers. But no one involved in the IPCC is explicitly saying “RCP 8.5 is pretty unlikely,” and that fateful phrase “business as usual” is still attached to it.

Hausfather has a solution for this: attach explicit percentage likelihoods to the different scenarios – say that RCP 4.5 is 45% probable, or RCP 8.5 is 5% probable. They’d be necessarily subjective but at least it would show that no one thinks they’re all equally likely, or that RCP 8.5 is the course we’re already on. Betts agrees.

There’s a risk that climate sceptics will leap on ideas like this, and say that climate scientists have systematically overstated the risk of climate change; Betts says that this already happens. But climate change is an unhedgeable risk, and we need to pay attention to even unlikely outcomes if they’re very bad, in the same way that you wouldn’t play Russian roulette even if it’s only a 17% chance of death. Besides, even the less dramatic 3°C worlds involve dangerous levels of sea level rise, heat waves, and millions of unnecessary deaths a year. You’d think that’d be worrying enough.

Every week, people see headlines, based on RCP 8.5 scenarios, that say things like three billion people could face “near-unliveable conditions” by 2070. Understandably, people are rattled; and some are even saying they’re not having children. People are more scared than they need to be.

Climate change is extremely bad. But we’re not in the “last chance saloon”, if that means that we face some inevitable catastrophe, or 5-1 down and facing ruinous defeat; and the politicians at COP26 are not guilty of facilitating a worse genocide than Hitler’s. Archbishop Welby apologised for that. But it’s an understandable mistake if he’s always being told that “business as usual” means a march to doom.

Most notably, scientists, like people, are social. If they exist in a social or professional circle that believes X, it is hard to say not-X; if they have professed to believe Y, they won’t want to look silly and admit not-Y. It might even be hard to get research funded or published if it isn’t in line with what the wider group believes.

All this makes it very hard, as an outsider, to assess some scientific claims. You can ask some expert, but they will be an expert within the social and professional milieu that you’re looking at, and who will likely share the crony beliefs of that social and professional milieu. All of which often makes it hard to disentangle why scientists do and say the things they do. Especially when it comes to scientific claims that are politically charged, claims on hot-button topics like race, sex, poverty — and of course climate.

I couldn’t help thinking about that as I was reading Steven Koonin’s new book, Unsettled. Koonin is (as it says, prominently, on the front of the book) the “former Undersecretary for Science, US Department of Energy, under the Obama administration”. The publishers are obviously very keen to stress the Obama link: “…under the Trump administration” might not have carried the same heft.

Koonin came to public attention a few years ago, after he wrote a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “Climate science is not settled”. It was a response to what he considered the widely held opinion among policymakers and the wider public that, in fact, climate science is settled. His particular concern was that we can’t yet accurately predict what the future climate shifts will be. The book itself is best thought of as the extended version of that op-ed, with added graphs.

We can break down his thesis into, roughly, three areas. One, is that despite “the mainstream narrative among the media and policymakers”, it is hard to be sure that the climate has changed in meaningful ways due to human influence. In particular, floods, rainfall, droughts, storms, and record high temperatures have not become more common, and although the climate is unambiguously warming and sea levels have gone up, it’s hard to confidently separate human influence from natural variability.

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 Two, he says, climate models are highly uncertain and struggle to successfully predict the past, let alone the future, so we shouldn’t trust confident claims about the climate future. And if we do accept the IPCC’s predictions, they aren’t of imminent catastrophe. Instead, they point to slow change which humanity can easily adapt to, and, broadly speaking, to humanity continuing to prosper.

And three, he continues, there is basically nothing we can do about it anyway, partly because carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for so long, but mainly because the developing world is developing fast, and using ever more carbon to do so, and actually that’s a good thing.

These are — according to Koonin — all, by and large, only what the IPCC assessment reports and other major climate analyses say. The public conversation, which he says is full of doom and apocalypse and unwarranted certainty, has become unconnected from the state of the actual science. And he blames scientists — and policymakers, the media and the public — for that disconnection.

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So is he right? Certainly he has a case when it comes to Point One: I think he is correct that the media narrative about climate change is not especially well correlated with the IPCC’s own central assessments. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that the recent floods in London, China and Germany have been held up as examples of a changing climate. But the IPCC’s most recent assessment report, 2014’s AR5, found studies showing evidence for “upward, downward or no trend in the magnitude of floods” (see p214 of the AR5 Physical Science Basis document; be warned it’s a big PDF), and concluded that they were unable to be sure whether, globally, river floods had become more or less likely. 

Similarly, I think there is a perception among many commentators and policymakers that storms, hurricanes, and droughts are all more common as a result of climate change, but the IPCC’s own report (see p.53 of AR5) has “low confidence” that those things are more common than they were 100 years ago. I know some scientists think the IPCC is overoptimistic, but it is the closest we have to consensus climate science.

That said, there is some fairness in accusing Koonin of cherrypicking. He spends a lot of time arguing about extreme daily temperatures, convincingly (to my mind) debunking a claim in the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR), the flagship US government climate science assessment, that US extreme daily temperature records have gone up. In fact, CSSR is comparing the ratio of extreme high temperatures to extreme low temperatures, and what in fact has happened is that extreme low temperatures have become less common. Which is interesting.

But the IPCC does think extreme daily temperatures have gone up globally (see p53 again). In his chapter on “Hyping the Heat”, Koonin doesn’t mention the IPCC, and the IPCC outranks the CSSR. His detective work is interesting, but he is fighting a henchman, not the end-of-level boss. Maybe the IPCC is wrong as well, but we don’t learn that here.

On Point Two, I don’t feel competent to assess the models; certainly it seems highly plausible to me that there are enormous uncertainties in predicting something as inherently chaotic as the climate, especially when to do so you first have to predict something as inherently chaotic as people. But my non-expert understanding is that broadly speaking the models have been getting it about right. 

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That said, I think he is right that, if you were to ask the average person in my social circle, you would hear that climate change will lead to catastrophe in the near future. And I think that is overstating what the IPCC reports actually say. For instance, it is true that the IPCC predicts more people will go hungry than otherwise would have: it says that almost 140 million children will be undernourished, in a world where climate change goes unmitigated, compared to 113 million in a world where there is no climate change (see p730 of this IPCC report). But that is still fewer than went hungry in 2000 – almost 150 million, out of a much smaller population. The IPCC predicts that a world with climate change will be worse than one without; but not so much worse that other things, such as economic growth and technological progress, won’t broadly keep the big things, like life expectancy and human health, improving. That does seem worth saying.

And Koonin’s Point Three is worth making too. If India were to increase its per capita emissions to those of Japan, “one of the lowest emitting of the developed countries”, he says, then that change alone would raise global emissions by 25%[1.  He’s right. Japanese people emit about nine tons per capita, and Indians about two, so if 1.3 billion Indians started emitting seven extra tons a year, that’d be about nine billion tons on top of 2019’s 38 billion or so]. Realistically, we’re not going to be able to stop India — or China, or Brazil, or Mexico, or any of the other middle-income countries — from developing, and development at the moment means carbon. 

More importantly: we don’t want them to stop developing. Richer countries have healthier, longer-lived citizens and are better able to cope with a changing climate. Even huge, swingeing cuts to Western emissions — politically unrealistic — would only go some way to offsetting the inevitable growth in the developing world. Those cuts may be worth doing, but there are limits to how much good they can do.

But even if Koonin is right about almost everything — if the best guess of the science is that we’re heading towards things merely getting better more slowly, rather than getting worse — then I think he’s missing a major point. That is, climate change models are uncertain. In fact Koonin claims they’re even more uncertain than we think. So they could easily be erring on the side of optimism.

And the one thing we should have learnt from the Covid pandemic is that it’s not enough to say “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, so let’s act as if it’ll be fine.” The correct thing to say is “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, but if there’s a 10% chance that it’ll be completely awful, then we need to prepare for that 10% chance.” Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world reduces the chance of some unforeseen but plausible disaster: as a happy bonus, it makes our cities more pleasant places in which to live. It will come at some cost, but hopefully not too high, because green technology is getting so cheap and effective these days.

Reviews by climate scientists have been unimpressed. “I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist,” starts one review, which goes on to not ignore it. Another accuses him of cherry-picking his fights (not entirely unfairly, as I said). A third says the book is “distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified”. 

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But none that I’ve read really addresses the nitty-gritty of his arguments — which is hard to do in a 900-word review, of course, but still. They usually pick some line out of the first chapter or two, disagree with it, and then say the whole book is therefore rubbish. But I wanted a bit more meat to the objections. 

The third review, for instance, quotes Koonin as saying “The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years,” and then asks “According to what measure?” Well, Koonin tells you the measure, at length: absolute record extreme daily temperatures. Maybe he’s wrong, but he does answer that in the book. (And your next sentence is “Highest annual global averages?” He’s talking about the US! You just quoted that bit!)

Similarly, it complains that Koonin says that the sea is only rising about a foot per century, saying “The trouble is that while seas have risen eight to nine inches since 1880, more than 30 percent of that increase has occurred during the last two decades.” But again: Koonin addresses this, for pretty much an entire chapter. His point is that most of the rest of the rise came during an (unexplained by climate models, according to him) period of rapid warming from 1910 to 1940, before human influence should have been relevant. That, he says, is good evidence that natural variation is driving the current acceleration. Is he right? I don’t know. But the reviewer is not attacking Koonin’s argument at its strongest point. 

In fact, none of them seem to: they just want to dismiss the book. They attack Koonin’s credibility and credentials, his temperament. They say he was only hired by the Obama Energy Department because of his contrarian views; they call him a “climate denier”, which seems de trop since he accepts most of the central claims of the climate consensus. The response felt more like a circling of the wagons than a serious effort to counter a serious argument. After all, it is unpleasant to hear reasons why you might be wrong about something: cognitive dissonance is painful.

I started this book confident that climate change is a serious concern, and I finished it only slightly less confident; Koonin has not persuaded me. But I’m glad Unsettled, flawed though it is, has been written. As I said at the beginning, science in a politically charged environment is very hard to assess. Scientists are as prone to groupthink and motivated reasoning as anyone else, and I know very well that there are some who feel they need to keep heterodox views quiet. The reviews, which make so little effort to engage with the substance of the arguments, do not reassure me that climate science is a uniquely groupthink-free discipline.

One thing Koonin suggests is a so-called “Red Teaming” of climate scientists: getting scientists to act as adversarial critics of the existing consensus, a method used by superforecasters, among others, to improve their accuracy by actively hunting out flaws in their reasoning. Science can only progress if assumptions are tested. Red teams in climate institutions — any institutions — seem like a good idea, and I’d support them.

Whether it’s possible or not, of course, is tricky to say. The climate debate is so highly charged, so borderline toxic, that it might be difficult for any climate scientist to take on the red-team role without making their own life more difficult. According to Koonin, one senior climate scientist told him “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.” The old “in my emails, everyone agrees with me” line is hardly a new one, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a bit of truth in it.

But if the Catholic Church was able to stomach someone advocating for the Devil, then climate science should be able to stomach one doing it for the sceptics. And in the meantime, this book does an acceptable job.

For the far Left, it is the free market system itself that has created this existential crisis. If ‘Capitalism is killing the planet’, as the placards at radical eco-protests proclaim, then what other choice is there but to overthrow the system?

Yet to believe that anti-capitalism offers a panacea for climate change is to ignore twentieth century history. The destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union was unparalleled in Western democracies. By the time of its collapse, 40% of Soviet citizens lived in areas where air pollutants were three to four times the maximum allowable levels, nearly half of the children in Leningrad (St Petersburg) were suffering from intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water, and a fifth of the population lived in ecological disaster areas.

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The market may not guarantee an optimum allocation of resources, but the price mechanism is essential in determining resource scarcity. No bureaucrat or communist idealist – whether Stalinist or Libertarian – has yet found a way to replicate this function.

This does not mean the state has no role to play in encouraging better choices (more on that later), but knowledge about resource availability is fragmented and fluid, and is not something that can be slotted neatly into a government database.

The existence of private property can also act as a bulwark against the destruction of the environment (though it by no means guarantees it). When nobody owns something – a plot of land, say, or a forest – it tends to fall into disrepair or be exploited to destruction.

All of which disproves the idea that capitalism is the root of the climate change problem – the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the radical environmentalists is the equivalent of standing atop a sand dune and grandiloquently declaring ‘If I were king’.

It is also a myth to think that liberal democratic countries are a bigger obstacle to climate action than autocracies. So far, democracies have taken a stronger stand in climate change mitigation than non-democratic regimes. The only exception is in democratic states where corruption is high.

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The problem, then, is not liberal democracy, but liberal individualism. In a finite world, the demands of 7.7 billion people for a comfortable life will inevitably crash up against the planet’s limitations, whatever the economic system. In the face of a rapidly warming planet, liberal individualism is unsustainable. In Patrick Deneen’s words, it “undermines the virtues and cultural norms needed to enable humans to live together in harmony”.

Deneen is a Right-wing Catholic thinker who rejects many of the freedoms that liberals should defend (like gay marriage), but when applied to untrammelled markets, rather than to cultural questions, his argument stands. Without common forms of life there can be no freedom for the individual, and catastrophic climate change – prompting huge migrations of people and the potential submergence of great cities such as London under water – poses an obvious threat to this common life.

There is, therefore, something to be said for critiques of neo-liberal capitalism – even if calls on the far-Left to reject capitalism in toto and replace it with central planning are misguided. In Naomi Klein’s 2014 book on climate change, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, she writes:

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.”

This is a pertinent critique of a particular strain of capitalism, rather than capitalism itself. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott has written, the struggle to combat climate change “brings out the best and worst of capitalism”. It is because of capitalism, and the market incentives it creates, that great strides have been made in developing clean alternatives to dirty fuels such as oil, coal and gas. It is now cheaper to produce solar and wind energy than most fossil fuels.

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The problem is when a particularly polluting resource is abundant, which is true of oil and gas. A decade ago peak oil theory was fashionable. It claimed that because oil was a finite resource demand would soon overtake supply, leading to the terminal decline of the industry in the foreseeable future.

The flaw in the theory is that new technologies are constantly being developed to extract resources from untapped sources, be it shale or mining deeper wells – also driven by capitalist incentives. Peak oil may become a reality one day, but we still have enough oil and gas to fry the planet many times over.

And that is why expecting the market alone to solve global warming is as much a mistake as believing that an end to markets will solve it. As long as fossil fuels remain relatively abundant they will be cheap enough to use profligately. Some government intervention is needed to change consumer behaviour. This is perfectly compatible with capitalism: the state shapes the context in which markets can operate, from defending property rights to regulating to protect consumers. But over recent decades we have become reluctant to use the state to defend the rights of the commons – that needs to change.

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A practical example of this would be getting rid of internal flights in Britain. Few of these flights are essential – it takes around half an hour longer to get to Manchester from London by train than it does to get there by plane. And this doesn’t include the extra hour it takes to pass through airport security. Yet the cost of train travel in Britain is so exorbitantly expensive – and trains are so unreliable and uncomfortable – that people regularly choose to fly.

The unwillingness of the state to restrict the use of inefficient and environmentally damaging transport brings us back to the belief in liberal individualism: that a person should be free to travel how he or she pleases, regardless of the consequences.

On climate change, as with much else, the public good is not always synonymous with the interests of private, wealthy individuals. Indeed, the two are often opposed. Yet it needn’t take any large-scale coercion to reconcile these competing interests, just a greater willingness on the part of the state to move people towards sustainable choices.

Our politicians appear to re-learning this lesson, albeit slowly. Prime Minister Theresa May vowed to intervene in “broken markets”, and the 2017 Conservative Party manifesto rejected what it termed the “cult of selfish individualism”. However we still have some way to go: which politician will call for a ban on private motor cars within our congested cities, as Peter Franklin asked on UnHerd last week? No prospective candidate for the mayoral seat in London – ranked as one of the world’s worst commuter cities – has yet dared propose the idea.

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As climate change ramps up, we can expect massive price-hikes for basic foodstuffs due to crop failures and severe flooding in coastal areas. As it prompts waves of migration from draught-stricken parts of the world, social tensions are likely to increase as populists stir up resentment against newcomers. The resulting tide of national chauvinism risks unravelling the social fabric that makes a country like Britain worth living in. There is still time to ward off the worst-case climate scenario, but as the IPCC put it, it will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.

Those who have traditionally resisted the state taking any action at all to moderate human behaviour – typically in the name of classical liberal ideology – thus face a paradoxical choice: accept that liberal individualism means death for the common life, or acquiesce in the destruction of the very freedoms they purport to be defending.