The situation is bad. This is shown by the number of what were hottest day and hottest years ever recorded, by the heat in the Arctic and Antarctic, by the wildfires and bushfires that occurred all over the planet often in places which had not been burnt in living memory (with anecdotes from Australian fire fighters that these fires were not normal and created their own weather), by extending droughts, change in intensity and frequency of wild storm, by the shift of warming air and sea currents which could lead the UK to cool down and freeze over, by the progressive bleaching and death of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, by the thinning of ice at the poles, by the melting of permafrost in Siberia and release of methane. The list goes on.
It appears that the main reason for this situation is the increase in Greenhouse Gas emissions, from burning fossil fuels, from concrete production, and from bad agriculture. The situation is made worse by degraded environments, from deforestation, collapse of insect populations, to acidification of the Oceans. Human beings, or some human beings, are generating their own destruction. One way of measuring the potential for change is the calculation of carbon budgets. A carbon budget gives us an idea of how much carbon we can burn in total, before climate change becomes runaway, and unsustainable, leading to a new and largely unpredictable (at this stage) context for human life. We cannot be exactly sure of the carbon budget, because we are analysing complex systems, and there are different measures. It could be at current rates we will exceed the carbon budget slightly later than some expect, but it is unlikely (given the observable circumstances) that we will consume it much later than we expect.
This project has been, and still is, about the problems of change and the consequences of technology, particularly climate technologies – that is technologies which are developed as a response to climate change.
