2050 is less than 25 years away!

OK that’s obvious, but the point is that 2050 is much more relevant than 2100 for climate predictions. For one thing, most of us are likely to still be alive. So what can we expect?

Helsinki Tram Station 2050

Climate models tend to go out to 2100 allowing most scenarios and reports to tell us what it might be like by the end of the century, but less so in between. Temperatures will be X, sea level rise will be Y, but I, along with most of you, will be dead by then, so who really cares? For many people, there’s no point in making sweeping changes today if they won’t personally see the benefits.

2050 is a much more interesting horizon, and its only 25 years away. Thinking back to the year 2000, 25 years doesn’t seem that long at all. Like thousands of others, we saw the new millennium in with friends standing on the Thames Embankment in London and were then disappointed by the Millennium Dome the following day. Life didn’t seem that different. We had mobile phones, the internet, cars had GPS and we worked in offices. About the only real difference was that our PC screens were deeper than they were wide and we still listened to CDs.

In 2050, if I’m still alive, I’ll be in my mid-eighties. Fortunately I didn’t have children, but my nieces and nephews will be in their early forties to mid-fifties, the prime of life. What might the world, and especially the climate be like by then and how will it affect every one of us?

Emissions Accumulation

Unless there is an unprecedented shift in political ambition, coupled with an effective neutering of vested interests, it is exceedingly unlikely that net-zero greenhouse gas emissions will be achieved in the next 25 years. Perhaps one or two progressive countries may be getting close, but globally, although it may be declining, it is likely that emissions will remain problematic. This is partly due to increasing energy demand as population and wealth increases, along with continued land use change and the challenge of agricultural emissions reduction. Linking emissions to anticipated GDP growth suggests strong increases in emissions, but with significant efficiency and decarbonisation measures the curve could be bent downwards.

In another article I looked at these trajectories¹. To summarise, if the growth projected by the OECD was indeed achieved, coupled with the recent rate of decarbonisation, atmospheric CO₂ levels would reach 495ppm by 2050. If we could double the rate of decarbonisation, this might bring it down to 475ppm. Even if net-zero was achieved, levels would still be close to 450ppm. That’s just for CO_2. Methane and nitros oxide levels are also likely be higher than today. Emissions of all of them would also be continuing into the future.

Global temperature response

Really no matter what scenario is played out, temperatures will by well above +2ºC by 2050. If decarbonisation is delayed or lacks ambition, then +3ºC is certainly possible.

The reason for this is that temperature response in the next couple of decades is largely due to the cumulative emissions already in the atmosphere. The warming force being applied by the Earth’s energy accumulation takes time to take effect due to the huge inertia within the climate and ocean systems. We are only now recognising the acceleration underway from the last few decades of emission growth.

Feedback mechanisms are also starting to engage that will take time to level out, even if we were to stop emissions overnight. The most significant is a cloud dimming feedback which is dramatically increasing the energy imbalance. By reflecting less sunlight back into space, the Earth is accumulating increasing amounts of energy, causing accelerated warming.

Reducing sulphate emissions by fitting scrubbers to coal burning power stations, cleaning up shipping fuels and enacting cleaner air policies is reducing the emission of aerosol particles which act to locally cool the planet, or at least mask some of the warming from GHGs. These are very short lived in the atmosphere so their reduction has a more immediate effect.

Even if global mean temperatures are around +2.5º rather than +3ºC, some years will certainly see +3ºC or more. Continents that are warming faster than average, such as Europe could see years of +5-7ºC. The Arctic could rise by as much as 10ºC due to Arctic Amplification that is seeing that area warm 3-4 times faster than the global average. An Arctic blue ocean event where all the sea ice melts in the summer is likely by 2050.

As we’ve seen recently, it’s not the average temperature that’s the problem though, its the extremes that this amount of energy in the system can produce. Droughts will be more extreme, partly from less rainfall but also from warmer air drying the soils faster. Extreme weather and flooding will also increase. The recent tragic floods in Pakistan and India are an taste of what is to come². Thousands of villages have been swept away together with an entire crop of much needed food. Storms and wildfires will also be more severe and frequent.

Triggered tipping elements

Given such a rapid increase in mean temperatures and unprecedented increases in extremes, some of the known tipping elements may be in significant danger. A tipping point is a point of no return, one which if temperatures stabilised or even dropped afterwards, would continue regardless.

Adapted from a presentation by Prof Johan Rockström to show the likely global temperature band of 2.5-3ºC

At 2.5ºC there is a strong chance that the following tipping elements will be triggered:

• Greenland ice sheet collapse leading to continuous sea level rise and weakening the Atlantic overturning circulation,

• West Antarctic ice sheet collapse leading to continuous sea level rise,

• Tropical coral reef die off leading to marine food chain and habitat collapse as well as impacts on revenue for coastal communities and fisheries,

• Northern permafrost abrupt thaw releasing new carbon emissions accelerating warming further and potentially releasing ancient pathogens and viruses into the world,

• Labrador Sea current collapse weakening ocean circulation and heat transport,

• Barents Sea Ice loss further reducing planetary albedo increasing the energy imbalance and warming rate,

• Mountain glaciers loss affecting albedo and the freshwater supply for billions of people.

• West African monsoon shift affecting agriculture and migration by flooding previous dry areas and causing drought in previous wet areas.

The Amazon rainforest tipping point has a higher theoretical threshold temperature but this is reduced significantly if deforestation and fragmentation are allowed to continue. It is possible that this lowered threshold could also be breached under this level of warming, leading to regional climate changes such as drought in food producing areas, loss of carbon sequestration potential, additional emissions and biodiversity loss.

None of these are beneficial. All will have wider implications. They may be triggered one at a time, or they could interlink into a cascade where one triggers the next and so on.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is unlikely to have passed its actual tipping point, but is highly likely to have weakened further, affecting northern European climates and increasing east coast US sea level rise. Science may have advanced to the point where detection of its tipping threshold may be better. If this is the case, it is likely that humanity will know how long it has until the point of no return is reached, whether there will be time to do anything about it is another question.

If tipping points are triggered by 2050, that will mark a point in time where humanity has changed the planet permanently with no chance of recovering to even today’s climate on anything approaching human timescales.

Oceans and biodiversity

A recent paper on cumulative impacts to global marine ecosystems examined the pressures from human activities expected by 2050³. They examined 10 human pressures across 5 categories. Climate changes (water temperature; air heat-index; sea level rise), ocean chemistry (ocean acidification; dissolved oxygen levels), land-based (nutrient input; light pollution, coastal human population density), net primary productivity, and fisheries (biomass loss).

They used two common IPCC scenarios, SSP2-4.5 which is the one which most closely resembles existing policy, though does not achieve net-zero, and SSP5-8.5 which is a fossil fuel dominated future widely expected to be avoided. Over 25 years these two scenarios don’t differ much as even in the lower emission future it takes time to transition to cleaner energy.

On a global level they found that cumulative impacts will have more than doubled by 2050 (2.2x for SSP2-4.5 and 2.6x for SSP5-8.5). In other words we will do as much damage to the oceans in the next 25 years as we have done in the last 175. Ocean warming and biomass loss due to poorly managed fisheries are expected to be the largest overall contributors to future cumulative impacts. Regionally, the tropics face rapidly increasing rates of impact, while the poles, which already experience a high level of impact, are expected to continue that trend. According to the paper, the high level of future impacts "may exceed the capacity of ecosystems to cope with environmental change, in turn posing challenges for human societies and institutions in a wide variety of ways.”

Figure from Halpern et al. Cumulative impacts to global marine ecosystems projected to more than double by midcentury

The world's coasts are expected to bear the brunt of these increasing cumulative impacts since most human uses of the ocean are near the coasts. This is worrying because the coasts are where people derive most value from the ocean. Additionally, many countries are dependent on the ocean for food, livelihood and other benefits, including moisture and inland rain.

The paper admits that some other drivers were not included in the analysis, such as the future distribution and intensity of noise pollution (important for whales and dolphin interference), invasive species through warming induced fish and other species migration, habitat destruction from fishing practices such as bottom trawling, marine plastics and micro-plastic pollution, coastal hardening (building of flood protection, docks and breakwaters), drought and salinity changes within coastal habitats such as salt marshes, and marine structures such as offshore wind and oil platforms. Most of these missing pressures arise from nearshore activities, so their projected increase in cumulative impacts within coastal zones is an underestimate of the future. Furthermore, disturbance related to shipping, agro-fisheries, and offshore energy, among others, will likely increase and may contribute significantly to future cumulative impacts. Finally, their models assume additive pressures, but many pressures likely interact synergistically, although in ways we are currently unable to predict. The more than doubling of ocean impacts by 2050 is therefore quite optimistic.

A warmer, deoxygenated and more acidic ocean is also bad news for carbon sequestration. Warm water absorbs less CO₂ from the atmosphere, in fact in the marine heat wave of 2023, the Atlantic emitted huge volumes of the gas rather than absorbing it⁴.

Ocean acidification is reported to have a critical level linked to 450ppm of atmospheric CO₂. At that level plankton in high latitudes struggle to grow carbonate based shells, reducing in number and the amount of carbon they can sequester. Sea ice reduction restricts algal blooms which also sequester carbon. These feedbacks are not tipping elements as such, but add to the pressures and to the warming rate.⁵⁶

This week, the Australian Government received its National Climate Risk Assessment⁷. The report, prepared independently for the government, found that 1.5 million people living in Australia’s coastal areas will be at risk of sea level rise and coastal flooding by 2050.

By 2090, about three million Australian’s will be at risk from rising oceans. Sea level rises pose a significant threat to homes, livelihoods, and cultural connections—particularly in locations such as the Torres Strait Islands, the report said. Scattered through the warm waters off Australia's northernmost tip, the sparsely populated islands are threatened by seas rising much faster than the global average.

Other low lying areas are subject to risks from sea level rise which includes storm surges and saline water intrusion into coastal aquifers. Of particular concern is Bangladesh, the Netherlands and Belgium, East Anglia in the UK, Florida, wide parts of East Asia and the Gulf of Mexico, and many Pacific Islands.

Pollution and air quality

Here there is some good news as well as bad. Air pollution is dropping globally as more countries enact cleaner air regulations. This is especially the case for coal fired power generation where sulphate scrubbers remove the dangerous sulphur dioxide aerosols that used to be dumped into the lower atmosphere. Shipping regulations came into force in 2020 that lowered the emission of these aerosols from the world’s shipping fleet by 80%. This is good news as the emissions from fossil fuel burning kill about 8 million people a year!⁸

Continued regulation strengthening around the world (well mostly) and a level of decarbonisation as renewables continue to out-compete fossil fuel energy, should see this pollution decline and general air quality improve over the coming 25 years.

Not to be outdone though, the petrochemical industry will try to redress the balance by continuing to increase the amount of plastic waste entering the environment. If you are my age, you’ll have a higher mass of micro-plastics sloshing about in your brain, than iron in your whole body. That’s just going to get worse as recent attempts to curb this pollution have failed due once again to pressure from vested interests. Today’s babies are born pre-loaded with micro-plastics and receive top-ups while breastfeeding.

For more details on plastics pollution, I can recommend this discussion with Jane van Dis on Planet Critical.

Another pollution risk of sorts is linked to the melting of permafrost. People are amazed when woolly mammoths are found in the melting ice still with skin, hair and even stomach contents intact. They have been in a deep freeze for thousands of years with no microbes able to decompose them. The trouble is their environment was also frozen with them, potentially including ancient viruses and bacteria that current ecosystems may not have been exposed to recently and may have lost their immunity to. Did ancient animals die of a virus that could be contracted and spread by today’s scavengers feeding on defrosted carcasses?

When the Europeans invaded north America, it was the diseases they brought with them that killed the most indigenous people, despite all the genocidal efforts. The same thing could easily happen with pandemics caused by defrosted diseases of the distant past.

Population and migration

Global population has just exceeded 8.2 billion but it is expected to peak around 2050 at something like 9.5 to 10 billion. That’s still a 15% increase which impacts on living space and food availability. This affects nature through further deforestation and conversion of wild spaces for food production and materials. It also drives energy demand growth which keeps legacy fossil fuel energy profitable and means even though clean energy technologies are expanding they are providing growth rather than replacement of fossil fuels.

The climate extremes expected during the next 25 years will disproportionally impact poorer nations less able to afford adaptation measures. This will inevitably lead to increase migration pressure, firstly within countries, then with a push to higher latitudes. Some predict that by 2070, almost 20% of the Earth’s land area could be ‘outside the climate niche’ of temperatures tolerable to life, spreading around the Equatorial belt from Australia, Africa, India, the Pacific, to Central and Latin America.⁹

Figure from Xu et al. Future of the human climate niche

This area currently provides habitat and living for 3.5 billion people. Although this is a high emission scenario for 2070, as we’ve seen, the scenarios are very similar over the next 25 years, so scenarios suggested by the Exodus Equator report showing 1 billion climate refugees on the move by 2050 don’t seem unrealistic.¹⁰

Twenty five years is not a long time to prepare for this level of global upheaval. The scale of that kind of movement is unimaginable and will put huge pressures on regional and global security, welfare, housing and food security.

Water & food security

A recent global study found that the world is losing freshwater at dangerous rates. The satellite study shows dramatic losses since 2002 driven by a combination of climate change, unsustainable groundwater use and extreme droughts.

The historically dry areas of the planet are becoming dryer while the historically wet areas are becoming wetter. This was predicted by climate models but the reality is more extreme and, more worryingly, out of balance.

75% of the world population across 101 countries are living in areas that are becoming dryer. As a result more use of pumped groundwater is being relied on, depleting reserves at an unsustainable rate. The consequences of global groundwater depletion include reduced irrigation water supply with threats to agricultural productivity, reduced capacity for climate adaptation, drought resilience and for growth in desert cities, reduced biodiversity and damage to groundwater dependent ecosystems, decreasing access as water tables fall, and more.¹¹

Global land water storage decline also has implications for seasonal variations in sea level and long term sea level rise. In fact land water storage loss now accounts for more sea level rise than either Greenland or Antarctica. Groundwater loss is now even higher than land based glacier and ice cap loss.

Mega-drying regions encompass huge areas including major human settlement concentration in the western US, Europe, north Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. These are also major food production areas. Agriculture accounts for 70% of water usage but 40% of that is wasted. Industrial processing of food uses huge volumes, especially within the dairy sector. In New Zealand 1 litre of milk uses 11,000 lites of water through its entire supply chain and processing.

Figure from Hrishikesh A. Chandanpurkar et al. ,Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability, and increasing land contributions to sea level rise. 2025

With climate change affecting the hydrological cycle including more severe droughts and faster drying soils, water management and issues are likely to be an important component over the next 25 years. Will we in the West still have 24/7 access to as much as we want? This reminds me of an African quote: “the West is so rich, they crap into drinking water”

Economy

Estimates of the economic impacts of climate change range from hardly at all, to full collapse by +3ºC. The reality is going to be somewhere in the middle, but I do agree that exponential growth with finite resources is fanciful. I certainly don’t think a continuation of 2.6% growth, as suggested by the OECD, is feasible as this would see a doubling of global GDP by 2050. Set against all the challenges mentioned already, that’s unlikely.

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries say that using reverse stress testing suggests a 50% GDP destruction between 2070 and 2090 based on current trajectories, with half of that damage done by 2050¹². Swiss Re, the global insurance company, predicts climate change could reduce global GDP by 11 to 14 percent by 2050 compared with a world without climate change, amounting to a $23 trillion loss.¹³

Every civilisation collapses eventually. Ours is built on capitalism that requires growth to function. Continuous or exponential growth is simply not physically possible. Over the course of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, the height of the great Pyramids grew at an average of 3% per year. If their civilisation has persisted and pyramid height had continued that steady growth rate, today’s Pharaoh would expect a pyramid reaching to more than twice the altitude of the International Space Station!

OK that’s a good use of reductio ad absurdum, but you get my point. How much longer growth can continue is a lively debate, but inevitably a period of de-growth is getting closer (de-growth is a nicer way of saying global catastrophic depression or economic collapse).

Insurance may be the trigger for stalling growth, if not initiating de-growth. As loss and damage increases, policy price increases obviously follow. We’ve all noticed this in the last few years with house and car insurance rates going through the roof. When it becomes unaffordable or simply unavailable, it will have serious knock-on implications. If you can’t get home insurance, you can’t have a mortgage. When a business can’t get asset insurance, it can’t get a loan or investment. Shocks like this to the market will be seismic and permanent. The two latest annual reports from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK both highlight this risk.¹⁴ They use the term Planetary Insolvency for our current trajectory. If people are unconcerned about the natural environment when they make voting decisions, maybe they should think about their homes and pensions.

Since pensions are linked to growth, what are the chances of today’s youth being able to retire with a cash reserve built up through investments? Would you start a pension scheme today that was due to pay out in 40 years (2065), I wouldn’t. Are you hoping your pension will be worth something if you’re due to retire in 2050? I wish you luck.

Conclusions

Some may have been a little shocked at the start of the article when I said that ‘fortunately I didn’t have children.’ In the past I’ve been asked whether I regretted choosing not having children, but less so these days. It does make people think when you turn the question back on them and ask them if they regret having had children. Obviously they love them, but with full knowledge of what they can expect for their offspring’s future well-being and happiness, it’s not that easy a question to answer.

We could also look at the explosion in AI both from an energy demand but also from an economic and employment perspective, but things look dire enough, so I’ll save that for another day.

There is still hope, however fleeting. If we can find a way through the campaign of disinformation forced onto a trusting public by the fossil fuel lobby and their bought and paid for political puppets, if can embrace the huge benefits of rapid decarbonisation and exploit what is now the cheapest source of energy in history - solar power, then we have a chance of avoiding the terrible future we are steering towards.

If we decarbonise, slash our emissions with the urgency it deserves, while investing in carbon capture both natural and technological, we can probably avoid triggering tipping points, we can preserve liveable habitats in the tropics to avoid the need for mega-migration, we can avoid the worst impacts of extreme weather and destruction, protecting our economy, food security and safety.

Shouldn’t we do something about this situation now, while we stand a chance of at least limiting the damage? Isn’t that the pragmatic and proportionate response to the looming crisis? After all it is our future too.

1.

2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/06/everything-gone-punjabi-farmers-suffer-worst-floods-three-decades

3. B. Halpern et al., Cumulative impacts to global marine ecosystems projected to more than double by midcentury Science 10.1126/science.adv2906 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adv2906

4. Müller, J.D., Gruber, N., Schneuwly, A. et al. Unexpected decline in the ocean carbon sink under record-high sea surface temperatures in 2023. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02380-4

5. IOC-UNESCO. 2024. State of the Ocean Report. Paris, IOC-UNESCO. (IOC Technical Series, 190) https://doi.org/10.25607/4wbg-d349.

6. State of the Cryosphere 2024 – Lost Ice, Global Damage - We cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice. November 2024 www.iccinet.org/statecryo24

7. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/sep/15/millions-of-australians-at-risk-from-rising-sea-levels-and-heat-deaths-could-soar-landmark-climate-report-warns

8. Karn Vohra et al. Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem, Environmental Research, Volume 195, 2021, 110754, ISSN 0013-9351, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754.

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935121000487)

9. C. Xu, T.A. Kohler, T.M. Lenton, J. Svenning, & M. Scheffer, Future of the human climate niche, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117 (21) 11350-11355, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117 (2020).

10. https://jonathonporritt.com/exodus-equator-one-billion-on-the-move/

11.

12. Climate Scorpion – the sting is in the tail. https://actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2024/mar/14-mar-24-climate-scorpion-the-sting-is-in-the-tail/

13. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-economy.html

14. Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature, Global risk management for human prosperity. https://actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2025/jan/16-jan-25-planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature/