Flooded roads in downtown Houston, 2015. Photo by Elliot Blackburn/Flickr.

There is a widespread and not completely unjustified perception on the left that movements that struggle for socially just solutions to the climate crisis have a disproportionately middle-class base. To the extent that this perception has been accurate, it has perhaps reflected the fact that climate change has been approached as a crisis in the making and a “cause,” without sufficient attention to the devastating class-differential impacts of a changing climate and its exacerbation of social and economic inequality.

This view of things, however, is being decisively superseded by events. We have clearly entered a period when global heating poses immediate threats, even if the unfolding climate disaster is still at a relatively early stage, with plenty of room to deteriorate.

Powerful and irrefutable evidence of the enormity of the climate crisis confronts us at every turn. The online journal Climate and Capitalism reports that the University of Exeter in the UK recently hosted the first ever Global Tipping Points Conference. Participants discussed a number of irreversible shifts occurring across the planet and concluded that “every fraction of additional warming dramatically increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping points.”

Among the dangerous transformations that the conference considered were the “collapse of deep-water formation in the Labrador-Irminger Seas triggering abrupt climate changes that reduce food and water security in northwest Europe and West Africa.” They warned that the possible collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) “would plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters, while radically undermining global food and water security.” They also raised the alarm about the Amazon rainforest, which is in danger of “widespread dieback from the combined effects of climate change and deforestation.”

A final statement noted, “Global warming is projected to exceed 1.5°C within a few years, placing humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people.” In this desperate context, “global greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 compared to 2010 levels, requiring an unprecedented acceleration in decarbonisation.” Climate change has gone from being a dire prediction to a pressing reality, with people coughing and wheezing as the cities in which they live are shrouded in wildfire smoke, suffering through heat waves and droughts, and facing catastrophic extreme weather........

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