Do We Still Have Time?
Image by Austin Anderson.
“We still have time” has been superseded by “How much worse can it get.”
The world has been turned upside down by a destructive, out-of-control global climate system. “Unprecedented” is found in every corner of the planet. There are no safe harbors, whilst disillusionment and anger build amongst 8.3 billion people. Indeed, climate deniers are at risk of being run out of town on a rail.
Along the way, oil, gas, coal producers quietly collect billions of dollars on the back of massive CO2 emissions bursting into the atmosphere. Oil, gas, coal are the primary sources of CO2 emissions (a record high 38GtCO2 in 2025) that cause global heat and climate-related disasters. It’s not at all surprising that anecdotal evidence points to a growing swell of public anger over failure to politically address climate change.
Nevertheless, as long as 8.3 billion inhabitants of the planet remain docile, while some may be angry, accepting fossil fuel poison of the atmosphere, with extreme heat, then they’ll simply have to realize it’s a brutal fact of life and learn to live with it. On the other hand, if they refuse, that’s an altogether different story; it’s messy!
Pockets of dissent: “This heat is political. It is where climate change driven by corporate greed and political failure collides with people’s rights, lives, and livelihoods,” according to Marta Schaaf, Program Director for Climate, ESJ and Corporate Accountability at Amnesty International.
Schaaf’s thesis “political failure collides with people’s rights” can only be resolved one of two ways: (1) change politics to align with people’s rights (2) people’s lives are trampled to smithereens. Take your choice. At this nerve-rattling stage of climate change there is no middle ground.
Scientists Speak Out
The world’s leading climate scientists are speaking out to address a host of issues that have been largely ignored by the oligarch-led political class that’s inexhaustibly funded by Citizens United* to wit:
(1) Why are wildfire infernos hitting Europe and North America so hard? Extreme, high-intensity wildfire infernos have more than doubled globally since 2000. (A Look at Two Decades of Wildfires Globally, YaleEnvironment360)
(2) How is it possible that 30% of global land is trapped in ongoing drought conditions versus only 10%-to-12% in the year 2000, triple drought conditions within only one generation? (The New Normal: 2025 Data Reveals a Fundamental Shift in Global Drought, DowntoEarth). In total, according to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, drylands now make up 40.6% of all land on Earth. Dryland refers to arid, semi-arid, or dry sub-humid areas where water is scarce
(3) Why are the world’s oceans over-heating year-by-year, non-stop, to ridiculous levels threatening marine life? According to the Met Office (London), year-end 2025 ocean heat content (OHC) continued to set new yearly records, every year consecutively for nine years. (Ocean Heat Content Sets Another Record in 2025, University Corporation of Atmospheric Research, UCAR). “Marine Mammals are Dying in Record Numbers Along the California Coast,” LA Times, Oct. 3, 2025
Global sea surface temperatures (SST) were the highest ever recorded for the month of July 2026, according to both NOAA and Copernicus.
(4) Why have the 10 hottest years in recorded history of humanity all occurred over the last decade? (This is How Scientists Measure Global Temperature, NASA)
(5) In the face of a rip-snorting climate system that breaks every known scientific barrier, what does the future hold, and what can be done about a climate system that terrorizes humanity?
Asia’s Leading Climate Scientist
Ben Horton, Dean of the School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, and a leading coastal scientist specializing in sea-level change, is widely considered Asia’s top climate expert. He was recently interviewed by South China Morning Post, July 10, 2026.
Sample quote: “There’s this phrase that right now ‘we are experiencing the worst weather of our lifetimes.’ But for our children, this year is the best weather of their lifetimes because adapting to the climate of 2026 is pointless. The climate of 2027 and 2028 and 2029 and 2030 is going to be worse.”
The world has been grappling with a barrage of disasters as the climate system becomes more unstable. Dr. Horton mentions predictions made by climate scientists as far back as the 1990s now playing out, e.g., Hong Kong is having record-breaking heat, the highest the city has ever experienced. Shanghai had record-breaking flooding. The U.S. has the warmest July since record-keeping started. European cities have all had record-breaking temperatures, record-breaking heat waves, record-breaking wildfires, record-breaking drought.
Years ago, it was stated, “that if greenhouse gases were continued to be put into the atmosphere, it would raise global temperatures on land and in the ocean, which, in turn, would cause extremes that hurt people throughout the world.”
Dr. Horton has been involved in ‘cutting edge’ experiments of “climate change attribution,” or how much any individual event is caused by climate change. Ten years ago, Horton did pioneer studies that looked at tropical cyclones and the influence of climate change. “Now, we see events that would have been impossible without climate change.”
“We Cannot Adapt Our Way Out of This”
There’s been a fundamental shift in the climate system, and longing for the friendly stable climate era of the past is out of the question. “Based upon physics, we’re not going to go back to the stable climates of 10, 20, 30 years ago.”
According to Horton, chatter about “adaptation” assumes we’ll see a stable system. But in the real world of today “adapting to the climate of 2026 is pointless because the climate of 2027 and 2028 and 2029 and 2030 is going to be worse… Going forward, unless we address this problem, it will only get worse to a point when adaptation is futile… we cannot adapt our way out of this.”
Horton solution: “The only answer is to change our energy mix and move from petroleum which is driving this problem and move to renewable energy. The issue of whether it’s too big of a problem to handle is exactly what vested interest in fossil fuels want people to believe. It’s not!”
A Small Minority Holds Society Hostage to CO2
Fortunately, society knows more about the natural world and how the earth works than at any time in history. We know what happens when we increase greenhouse gases. We also know the solutions. We have alternatives to consider. “But the frustration is that we’re all held back by a very, very small number of people.” (Horton)
Worst Case Scenario
The worst case, assuming we don’t take immediate action: “Paleoclimate history has shown that relatively small forcing factors can have big consequences. It’s all about planetary boundaries, according to Dr. Horton: “That we as a civilization for the past 8,000 years have grown from nomadic to developing the first cities to a huge amazing technological planet living in cities, but we live within a very small planetary boundary. The problem is when we go beyond that boundary and then stay beyond, civilizations don’t exist.”
Additionally, the climate change dilemma cannot ignore the astronomical population explosion post WWII, tripling from 2.5B to 8.3B within only a couple of generations, putting a lid on nature’s capabilities: “There are think tanks that claim Earth can only support maybe three billion people.”
We’re overshooting Earth’s capabilities which requires a change in socio-economic behavior from focus on infinite growth to husbanding finite resources.
What to do?
Horton’s viewpoint: “Net Zero is crucial for survivability of civilization.”
Yet, in some quarters of climate science Net Zero is thought to be nothing more than a dangerous Trojan Horse that leads a naïve society around by the nose.
Horton’s way forward: In the short term, it’s all about education and awareness. Individuals need to learn how to personally protect themselves from dangerous heat.
Horton’s medium term, we must employ ‘green’ cities with cooling water pools and green vegetation and creation of wind corridors, all-natural cooling, reflective paint on buildings. This has been pioneered at City University of Hong Kong. It reflects 90% of the sun’s heat. This should be implemented everywhere.
The Central Problem
*At the heart of the global warming problem, specifically in America, special interest money is dictating policy to the benefit of too few people. Citizens United Makes this possible: “Citizens United has reshaped American campaign finance at every level of government since 2010. The decision tossed aside a century of tight regulation over corporate political spending and threw open the floodgates for the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money that dominate the U.S. political system today. It’s had an immediate and dramatic effect. Reported independent expenditures of outside groups exploded by more than 28-fold from 2008 to 2024 (from $144 million to $4.21 billion). Unreported money also skyrocketed.” (Center for American Progress) One billionaire can outspend millions of people for control of their political future.
“Public Citizen reports that as of August 2024, 842 local governments, 22 states, and Washington, D.C., have called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. A state statutory change, which is a much lighter lift than a federal constitutional amendment, would likely enjoy even higher levels of support… Americans from across the political spectrum overwhelmingly oppose Citizens United and would dearly like to rid the U.S. political system of corporate and dark money. Voters and the state legislators they elect have the power to do it,” Ibid.
Meanwhile, excessive CO2 emissions hold onto Citizens United for dear life.
P.S. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4th, 2025, subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by $3,500,000,000 annually. (United States Senate Committee on the Budget, 02/26/2026)
