17.09.2026

Sub-Saharan Africa: drought, displacement and famine

Coping with the crisis

Deadly heatwaves, devastating wildfires and terrible floods - and El Niño has not even reached its peak. Communists say we need extreme measures if we are to avoid climate catastrophe, writes Eddie Ford

Surprising no-one, August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded.¹ Tying with July 2023, the record was partly driven by the influence of El Niño pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific - ensuring that the temperatures were 1.65°C above pre-industrial levels, because warmer waters across such a large area means that global average temperatures typically spike too. While, of course, a single month above 1.5°C does not mean it has permanently breached the limit set at the 2015 Paris Agreement, it is yet another indicator of runaway human-induced global warming.

This year also saw western Europe’s warmest ever summer on record, with the continent experiencing multiple heatwaves - temperatures exceeding 40°C in many areas and at least 35,000 excess deaths.² Much of the region and large parts of central and eastern Europe also saw widespread drought in August, in some cases persisting since May, with severe conditions reported in France, the UK, Hungary, Romania and Serbia. Similarly with North America.³

The global climate crisis is propelling temperature extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans, with the latter recording breaking levels. Thus new data suggests that the average surface temperature of the planet’s seas outside the polar regions hit 21.1°C on August 22, edging past the 21.09°C recorded in March 2024. That is far above average for the time of year - breaking heat records for 100 days.⁴ Warmer oceans can have wide-reaching and devastating consequences, such as creating yet more extreme weather, raising sea levels and harming marine life.

Average worldwide sea temperatures tend to reach their yearly peak in March or April, which corresponds to the end of summer in the southern hemisphere - not in August. But the oceans are already reaching record temperatures, yet El Niño is still some way off its expected peak at around Christmas time, and scientists are warning that it is bang on course to be the strongest in centuries and therefore we could see ocean temperatures climb yet further. In this way, we see that climate change makes every El Niño hotter and these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming. And we know that even small fractions of temperature change globally can greatly increase the risk of severe and deadly heatwaves, floods, drought and other impacts - quantity can transform into quality with extreme rapidity.

Feedback

Climate scientists have further warnings. The UN has reported recently that the 1.5°C limit will definitely be exceeded, concluding that global heating will reach at least 1.8°C under even the most optimistic scenario, and that “there are no good outcomes above 1.5°C”.⁵

Inevitably, this causes climate impacts, such as this summer’s record heatwaves and wildfires, to “strike faster, hit harder and last longer”. But there is far more to the overall picture, even if it does make for grim reading. As the world heats up, permafrost in the higher latitudes is thawing. Forests are drying, wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane, further worsening the climate crisis.

Scientists have, of course, long known about the “feedback loops” that amplify the impacts of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas.⁶ Emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections, argue scientists at Spark Climate Solutions, who recently published their results in Environmental Research Letters. They explain how warming-induced emissions of greenhouse gases “from natural sources are a large amplifying feedback that most climate models do not yet represent”.⁷ Once you factor in the methane and carbon dioxide released from permafrost, wetlands, freshwaters and wildfires - the four areas the paper analyses - you get a “hidden multiplier” that is normally missing, which can only mean they are likely to underestimate how much further warming is coming and overestimate how much carbon we can still afford to emit. This additional heating could add 20%-30% to global heating by the end of this century, adding an estimated 0.2°C-0.4°C to the global average temperature - depending, that is, on the overall action taken to combat the climate crisis.

This disruption of the world’s carbon cycles is now being seen in “real time”, says Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and co-author of the paper. As we have heard so many times, in study after study, the results are - or should be - a “wake-up call” and if they are not included in the next generation of climate policies, thinks Jackson, then meeting the world’s climate goals will be “less and less likely”.

This can only add to the fear that, should global heating melt enough of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, thaw enough permafrost, warp crucial ocean currents and turn the Amazon rainforest into a savannah, the world will career past a series of catastrophic tipping points, where the climate system spins wildly outside any sort of restraining human influence. Yet we have to face the fact that the planet is getting closer to such a “point of no return”, where this runaway global heating becomes a hellish reality - something concluded by a separate study published earlier this year.⁸ We have got to the point where the current policies (or, virtually, non-policies) put in place by various governments are likely to see the global temperature rise to 2.6°C above pre-industrial times, at least in the opinion of Climate Action Tracker.⁹ If so, this will probably cause severe disruption and hardship to billions of people through sea-level rise, crop losses and other consequences.

Emergency

While the world sizzles, with El Niño supercharging the climate crisis, the right - whether it be Reform UK or the Tories under Kemi Badenoch - is incessantly attacking net zero and everything it stands for (or what they think it stands for) in order to display their reactionary ‘common sense’. For them, net zero has become a symbol of the ‘woke madness’ that is holding back the country, preventing it from being great again. We cannot even “enjoy” the heatwaves, complained Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, because net zero and climate zealots have made us “be sort of doom and gloom” about everything.¹⁰

In which case, he certainly would not appreciate the comments from Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - imploring against treating the climate crisis “as territory in the culture wars”. That must be utterly rejected, he says, if we do not want environmental and economic catastrophe.¹¹ We have had a disturbing presentiment of what could happen, he said, in this year’s “hot as hell” summer that killed tens of thousands of people in Europe alone and “hammered” infrastructure, businesses and economics - costing a likely €180 billion (£155 billion), as well as leading to forced migration around the world. Speaking to a committee of the European parliament, Stiell described the climate crisis as a “continent-wide economic security emergency”, resulting in mass evacuations, power stations closed, trade routes choked, crops lost, yields down, food prices up (and set to rise further), and so on.

Not to confront the climate crisis, he went on, is to avoid tackling the very issues that the populist far right claim to care so much about. By backtracking on policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions - or even giving up on the attempt - Stiell claimed that these politicians are in reality “soft” on inflation, the cost of living, economic growth and jobs … In fact, they are effectively working against these very objectives. In the end, Steill offers us a stark vision: if we do not cut back on fossil fuel pollution, this summer’s brutal heat, fires and droughts will seem “mild” compared to the permanent climate nightmare that will follow.

Yes, there are a few on the right - though apparently a dwindling band - who seem to retain some baseline sanity about the climate crisis and net zero. Writing on the influential Conservative Home online website, Harry Clifford writes that “the right need a climate change plan” and a “nuanced” approach to net zero, even if claiming that it is “a thoroughly discredited policy for the present moment”.¹² He claims that the UK holds “the top position in the world in offshore wind innovation, with more technological advances made here than anywhere else”, and that net zero has given the country a “first-movers advantage”. Clifford concludes that, “if we let these sectors wither”, the UK is consigning itself to “irrelevance and faster decline”. Yet what these comments serve to highlight is that, when confronted with the enormity of the climate crisis, the right does not actually have a plan - Harry Clifford certainly does not, even if he thinks it is a good idea to have one.

Idiocy

Last month it was widely reported that UK citizens will be told to “stock up” on tinned food and “take steps” to ensure they are prepared for national emergencies as part of a new government campaign to improve the nation’s “resilience” - the aim purportedly to make sure most households have basic supplies and knowledge about how to cope in a crisis, in order to “free up” immediate government resources for the most vulnerable.¹³

Yet as Bill McGuire - the prominent climate scientist who spoke at this year’s Communist University - says, “it would be nice to imagine” that the government was finally waking up to the enormous challenges posed by extreme weather and the coming ‘super’ El Niño.¹⁴ But, of course, it continues to row back on green policies, while it prepares to greenlight the extraction of more fossil fuels from the North Sea. In his words, “cognitive dissonance doesn’t even begin to describe the idiocy of such thinking” - so absurd that “you couldn’t make it up”.

Amazingly there are still some people who appear to genuinely misunderstand the concept behind net zero, thinking it means zero emissions. Obviously, if that was true, we would not be able to breathe in and out: we inhale a mix of nitrogen (about 78%) and oxygen (about 21%); we exhale nitrogen (about 78%), oxygen (about 16%) and carbon dioxide (about 4%). So the claim that we want to shut down all coal mining, oil and gas extraction and steel and cement production in the name of achieving net zero is either disingenuous or monumentally stupid.

Simply put, net zero means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gases emitted and those removed from the atmosphere, effectively resulting in no increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases. But obviously, given that we have totally overshot targets like the Paris Agreement and global warming is now locked into the climate system for an indefinite amount of time to come, we need as a matter of urgency to reduce the overall amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

That is why communists, and anyone who cares about the future of human civilisation, talk about going beyond net zero as soon as possible - otherwise the consequences will be truly appalling. Essentially, this requires, as part of our minimum programme, transitioning away from the fossil fuel economy, rolling back the carnivore diet, public not private transport, imposing limits on air travel, allowing more trees and other plants to grow through rewilding, restoring the health of rivers, lakes and seas, preserving and where feasible re-establishing wetlands, etc. Such measures would lock in more CO₂ and CH₄ into vegetation, deep soils, ice sheets and the ocean floors, so there is less of it in the atmosphere. Such real ‘common sense’ is, perhaps, only achievable through working class state power and putting a stop to the insane, ecologically destructive M-C-M' logic of capitalism.