Are we sailing the Titanic?

On the night of Sunday, April 14th 1912, a sailor, Frederick Fleet, was stationed in the crow's nest of the Titanic. The crow's nest is the most elevated part of a ship. Up there, you can see for miles, and it's the best place to spot other ships or icebergs. Unfortunately, on that night, Fleet didn't see the fatal iceberg until the last minute. By the time he alerted the crew, it was too late to turn. At that moment, the Titanic was happily cruising at 22 knots, oblivious of the iceberg warnings already received from nearby ships. The inertia of the massive boat caused it to drift towards the iceberg despite a last-minute attempt at avoiding it.

The impact was inevitable, but a quicker reaction may have limited the consequences, possibly saving the ship or some more lives and avoiding crossing the line between a disaster and a catastrophe. As Fleet watched from his vantage point the crash unfolding, the short time between his warning and the captain's reaction must have felt like an eternity.

Spaceship Earth is a bit like the Titanic. Since the beginning of the industrial era, we have been speeding ahead with growth and development, resulting in ever-growing greenhouse gas emissions. Early warnings raised in the 1970s  stressing the contradiction of an economic system aiming for unlimited growth from finite resources have been happily ignored (See the Club of Rome's report, by Donella Meadows et al : The limits to growth).

We are now collectively living those excruciating moments between the sighting of the iceberg and the unavoidable crash, only at a time scale blown up proportionally to the climate evolution. Since 1995 the world governments have received the alert by the IPCC, our planetary equivalent of Frederick Fleet. It is crystal clear that we are heading towards imminent disaster. However, the pilots still have to turn the wheel, probably because "imminent"  in terms of the planet means a few decades, and the pilots are busy preparing for tomorrow's elections or drafting their company's next quarterly reports.

The plot below shows the concentration of CO2 in part per million since 1995. There is no visible sign of a command to steer the ship away from the crash. The IPCC also warned us that the limit between disaster and catastrophe is set at a  CO2 concentration of 430 ppm, which will result in a 1.5°C temperature rise. The horizontal scale is labelled not in years but in COP numbers ( The plot misses the 2020 gap and I already entered this year's COP 27). As it turns out, the COP number can be used as a convenient predictor for CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. At the current curse, we should hit the iceberg at full speed around COP34.

I borrow this provoking way of plotting CO2 data from a lecture of Jean-Marc  Jancovici at the Ecole des Mines de Paris. You can follow his enlightening lectures (in French, with English subtitles) here.  

Did anything change at COP26, and can we expect things to be any different in the coming years?   The outcomes of COP 26 are summarized in the presidency report ( Available here). The key commitments towards mitigation are related to the reduction of coal use, car electrification, reforestation, and reduction of methane emissions. All of those actions are undoubtedly useful and edging us in the right direction. However, we should look beyond the report's self-congratulatory tone, and assess the real impact of the measures proposed. We need to move away from accepting that our politicians pat themselves on their own backs and instead hold them accountable for the impact that may be achieved by the policies they propose. And the tools for doing so exist.

With some friends, I played with the EN-roads simulator (see the previous issue of this newsletter). We looked into the potential impacts of the actions promised at Glasgow. The result is shown in the plots below. Even stretching the pledges to the maximum, in the optimistic expectation that they will be kept at all, the end result is not impressive. Carbon emissions are still going way up and the effects will be limited to curbing the temperature increase by little more than a degree, achieving a catastrophic 2.2 °C temperature increase.

According to EN-roads , even with the most optimistic interpretation of the COP26 mitigation commitments, we are not even trying to avoid the crash. Instead, we keep steaming full speed into the iceberg. Our political and corporate bosses seem unable to steer the world in a safe direction. I purposefully refrain from calling them leaders because what is leading our socioeconomic course is the immense inertia of our economic system. Just like the unstoppable momentum of Titanic dragged the ship towards the iceberg. If you are not convinced, you can play with the simulator yourself here : the model is backed by fully referenced scientific papers, and you can even modify the assumptions if you believe you know better. The good news is that other, more effective policies are possible. You can experiment yourself with different options within the simulator and build your own policy to achieve 1.5°C temperature rise. Get in touch if you want to learn more.

Leadership is clearly at the heart of the lack of ambition in tackling climate issues. We need to invent new, inclusive leadership modes at all levels that can address the complexity of modern challenges by involving all the stakeholders. And since to change the world one needs to change oneself, personal development must be at the core of any co-responsible leadership approach.

If you are interested in learning more about how at my company, LUSVAL, we are trying to address the complex challenges of the future by promoting collective, inclusive leadership, join us for a free webinar on June 20th 17:30 CEST by signing up here .