[0:03]3 degrees. It can be the difference between snow and sleet. wearing a jacket or not. In your day-to-day life, it may not seem significant. But 3 degrees of global warming would be catastrophic. Heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation, even fire. 3 degrees of warming is really disastrous. The scary thing is, the world is well on its way there. Since the industrial revolution, the Earth has warmed between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees Celsius. This is a problem that babies you pass in the street will have to live with. Children born today are up to seven times more likely to face extreme weather than their grandparents. If global temperatures do rise by 3 degrees, what would their world look like?
[1:03]Rising sea levels, desertification. Hollywood is always enjoyed imagining the end of the world. While blockbusters like this are clearly fiction, this film will show the scenario we all face. unless more drastic measures are taken to stop burning fossil fuels. In some parts of the world, the effects of in action are already clear. The slums of Bangladesh's capital are filling up with climate migrants. Minara comes from Bola District, an area in Southern Bangladesh. There, like many other parts of the country, river swollen by heavier rain and melting Himalayan glaciers are washing away people's homes. Many like her have lost everything. Our home in Bhola had endless amounts of land. There was lots of space for farming, we had a spacious house. There were different types of fruits, vegetation and trees growing at home. We used to eat the fruit from our own trees. I can't eat them now because they don't exist anymore. Since the river flooded for the third time, I had to flee to Dhaka. Life was much better back home. It was unbearable to live through, truly intolerable. We didn't have the time to save anything at all. 1.1 to 1.3 degrees of global warming has already transformed Minara's life. It's one of the reasons why so many migrants like her are moving to the city each year. Nearly 400,000 according to the last estimate. And climate models show there could be much worse to come.
[3:03]Climate scientist Yuri Rogel has spent the last 10 years modeling future climate scenarios for the United Nations. The models we use to carry out this exercise, really represent the state of the art of our current knowledge of climate change and where we are heading. Yuri's projections use data collected by hundreds of scientists around the world. Here, this is the three degree level and so there is at least a one in four chance that under current policies we would hit three degrees by the end of the century. This is just one of the scenarios Yuri looks at. Another one imagines that all policy promises are kept. The most optimistic assumes that all promises have been kept and net zero targets are met. Where our best estimate ends up around two degrees at the end of the century, there is still a one in 20 chance that we end up with three degrees instead. One wouldn't be entering a plane if there is a one in 20 chance that the plane will crash.
[4:08]A rise of 3 degrees would affect everyone. Even wealthy cities and rich countries wouldn't be immune to the consequences. European capitals like Paris and Berlin would bake under more extreme heatwaves. Frequent storm surges in New York could turn parts of the city desolate. In many ways, cities magnify, intensify climate events. Cities are hotter than the places around them. They tend to be more vulnerable to flooding and you can get a really bad event in a city in a way that you can't in the countryside. And because of their denser populations, disasters in a city affect far more people. Some cities might be badly prepared for the changes coming. But they have the means to adapt. Cities tend to be wealthier than the surrounding places. They have a lot of amenities. A city that has taken seriously the risks of a 3-degree world wouldn't necessarily be a worse place to be in a 3-degree world. But a city that hasn't prepared for these sort of eventualities, that might be a really nasty place. So far, many developed cities have gotten off lightly. But some rural parts of the world are suffering disproportionately. Small holders, small scale farmers are particularly vulnerable to climate change. And there are over 600 million around the world. Small holders with farms under two hectares produce around a third of the global food supply. Central America's dry corridor supports a mix of small holdings and medium-sized farms. Sandwich between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the area is prone to droughts.
[6:08]Israel Ramirez Rivera is a small holder in Guatemala. Here, climate change is making the dry seasons longer and more severe. This is the biggest ear of maize that this plot could deliver. He depends on his crops of corn and beans, but they're getting harder to grow. The surrounding mountains used to provide us with native food.
[6:40]And now that isn't an option anymore, due to climate change and its effects. Nearly two-thirds of the small holders in the dry corridor now live in poverty. The impact of all of this for us, malnutrition among children.
[7:04]We've lost a few. For my crops especially, the midsummer heat is harder than before.
[7:17]The plant dries up and can't provide us with the necessary food provision. Severe droughts in Central America are now four times more likely than they were last century. Many families from here have gone to the states. The economic despair and debts have pushed many people from this community to do this journey.
[7:54]Migration from Guatemala to the United States has quadrupled since 1990. Not all of this has been due to climate change. But longer droughts would force even more to move. In a 3-degree world, annual rainfall in this region could drop by up to 14%. At 3 degrees, over a quarter of the world's population could endure extreme droughts for at least a month of the year. Northern Africa could see droughts that last for years at a time. But for some, too much water will be the problem. 10% of the world's population lives on a coastline that's less than 10 meters above sea level. For these coastal inhabitants, a 3-degree world would spell disaster. By 2100, global sea levels could have climbed by half a meter from 2005 levels. Low lying cities like Lagos would be especially vulnerable, with up to a third of the population displaced. And in Fiji, rising waters are already upending lives.
[9:05]You can see the graveyard there. It's all under water now due to this rising sea level and climate change.
[9:15]The village of Togoru in Fiji is being swallowed by the sea. Barney Dunn, the village headman, has seen over half the village disappear. Relatives houses have been abandoned and family graves are now under water. We've been asked by the government to relocate. But no one wants to relocate because we have our great great grandparents down there in the sea. This is the place we've been brought up in. It's not easy to leave. Past attempts to build a seawall haven't worked. But Barney sees building a new one as the village's only hope. If they do that, maybe we can save whatever is left. But if we don't have the sea wall then it will be keeping eroding. Time will come, maybe in 10-15 years, will be only eroding. Rising seas also mean storms cause more floods. And many more countries could suffer. The Philippines and Myanmar are just two countries that will also see an increase in storm surges in a 3-degree world. To escape, many will move, often to urban areas. Half the world's population already lives in cities. Almost a third in slums.
[10:36]For them, a 3-degree world could be deadly. Minara has moved to Dhaka to escape the impact of climate change, but life could get even worse for her. I'm struggling a lot nowadays. The heat during the day is unbearable. Even late at night it doesn't cool down.
[10:57]The heat is getting more intense every day. I mean, it's going to get much worse. I can barely survive it now, how will I live through it in the future?
[11:09]Dhaka is getting hotter. In the last 20 years, the average day-time temperature has crept up by nearly half a degree. Days that approach 40 are now being reported. And high, so-called wet bulb temperatures are on the rise. A wet bulb temperature is a measure of heat and humidity. Humans cool themselves by sweating, but in these conditions, when relative humidity is near 100%, sweat doesn't evaporate well, so people can't cool down. even if given unlimited shade and water. At a high wet bulb temperature, the body can't lose heat and so it gets hotter and hotter and the body is designed to work at a given temperature and if it gets too hot inside, you will die. The human limit for wet bulb temperatures is 35 degrees Celsius, around skin temperature. Dhaka will have a much higher chance of reaching dangerous wet bulb temperatures if global warming reaches 3 degrees. You can't really adapt to that, you have to get out. If the temperature is so high that you can't work. Can't do hard manual labor outside for significant parts of the year, then many places will become functionally no longer part of the economy. Jacobabad in Pakistan and Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates have already recorded deadly wet bulb temperatures. More of the tropics and the Persian Gulf, as well as parts of Mexico and the Southeastern United States, could all get to this threshold by the end of the century. Climate modeling might show us the weather, but it doesn't show us its other effects on society. Established migration patterns could change. Climate disasters may exacerbate reasons people cross borders. Within countries, more people will move to cities. In a 3-degree world, tens of millions of people a year could be displaced by disasters made worse by climate change. When people are displaced by climate, they may well go to cities because cities are the places that attract people from the countryside already. A lot of people who can get to the developed world, not least because the developed world tends to be less hot, will give that a go. As migration around the world increases, there could be more competition for fewer resources. Water, already a highly contested resource, will be a focal point. Turkey's new Ilısu Dam has reduced the flow of water into Iraq. China lays claim to rivers vital to India and Pakistan. The prospect of a water conflict makes people very uneasy.
[14:03]How national tensions would exacerbate those sorts of reactions in a 3-degree world is the sort of thing that no one should really want to find out. I think you'd have to be incredibly sanguine not to think that the sort of climate extremes that we talk about in a 3-degree world wouldn't lead some places to the brink of societal collapse. Those lucky enough to escape unrest would still have to adapt to a radically different world. People are going to adapt to climate change in all sorts of ways. One of the most obvious ones is air conditioning. There are other ways to adapt at a local or regional level. I mean, one of the most obvious is diversifying agriculture. There are physical things you can do like seawalls. The fact that people can adapt and that adaptation will reduce suffering, doesn't mean that it will eliminate suffering. Suffering is built into this whole process of heating up the planet. Adaptation will only get the world so far. The best way to deal with a 3-degree world is not to go to a 3-degree world. And that's why increasing efforts on mitigation are important. It's why working towards negative emissions that could bring down the temperature after it peaks are important. Once you get to a 3-degree world, you are in real, bad, global trouble. The scale of change needed and the slow progress of governments so far, means 3 degrees of warming is uncomfortably likely unless more is done. Despite existing pledges, greenhouse gas emissions are still set to rise by 16% from 2010 levels by 2030. The need to act has never been clearer. There's still time to reduce emissions so that a 3-degree world remains fiction, rather than becoming fact.
[16:08]Thanks for watching. To read The Economist cover package on what a three degree world might look like, click on the link. And don't forget to subscribe.
