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As material for a West End show, the backroom machinations of an international climate conference sound unpromising.
Pedantry, boredom and delegates fighting over the wording of treaty clauses do not sound like the stuff of high drama. Nevertheless, Kyoto, a Royal Shakespeare Company production by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson now playing at Soho Place in London, has been widely praised by critics and rapturously received at its opening this month.
The play, which focuses on the talks that led to the agreeing of the Kyoto climate treaty of 1997, certainly excites. In Don Pearlman, the oil industry lobbyist – superbly played by Stephen Kunken – we are presented with a cunning, unprincipled manipulator who could rival Richard III for villainy. At the same time, the show’s energy, humour and pace never flags throughout its two-and-a-half-hour run.
It makes for a great night at the theatre, but a note of caution is needed. The play presents the Kyoto treaty as a world-saving triumph that set binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions, uniting humanity against the scourge of the climate crisis: a beacon of hope, it is claimed. This, sadly, is not the case.
For a start, the US refused to ratify the treaty, Canada and Japan later pulled out of it, and global emissions of greenhouse gases continued to rise unabated, so that by 2012 levels were 44% higher than in 1997. From this perspective, Kyoto is not so much a beacon as a tea-light flickering in the void. “The Kyoto protocol was the first really clear example of how politicians can say all the right words on the world stage about tackling climate change, but then fail miserably to deliver real action at home,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
It is a crucial point that has been endorsed starkly by a swathe of recent papers outlining how comprehensively the world has failed to tackle global heating. Far from saving ourselves in 1997, we have continued with our fossil fuel addiction so that weather systems are now destabilising across the globe, more and more solar radiation is being absorbed by the atmosphere, and temperatures continue to soar.
An example is provided by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in its State of the Climate 2024 report. “The record-breaking rainfall and flooding, rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, deadly heat, relentless drought and raging wildfires that we have seen in different parts of the world this year are unfortunately our new reality and a foretaste of our future,” writes Celeste Saulo, the WMO’s secretary general, in the foreword.
Last year was the hottest on record, following on from 2023 to create the hottest two years on record by a considerable margin. This unexpected jump in the rate at which the planet is heating has led some scientists to worry they have missed a factor that may have led them to underestimate the final impact of global warming.
Then there is the report by Reading University scientists which revealed last week that the rate at which the Earth’s oceans are warming has more than quadrupled over the past four decades. In the late 80s, ocean temperatures were rising at 0.06C a decade. Now they are increasing by 0.27C.
Worse, that rate of increase is set to accelerate. “If the oceans were a bathtub of water, then in the 1980s the hot tap was running slowly. Now it is running much faster and the warming has picked up speed,” said Prof Chris Merchant, lead author of the paper.
The “hot tap” referred to by Merchant is greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. By 1960, the figure stood at 315ppm as industrialisation took a grip of the planet. Today those levels stand at about 420ppm after they jumped by 3.58ppm in 2024. Predictions had anticipated a rise of 2.84ppm.
That figure contrasts with the target of 1.8ppm that was needed to stay on track to slow down and halt the increase in carbon dioxide levels by 2050, in order to keep the planet on course to hold air temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. This was the goal of the 2016 Paris climate agreement. In other words, we are still increasing emissions at twice the limit needed to keep our climate on an even keel.
The likely consequences of this remorseless rise in emissions are outlined in another uncompromising report, Planetary Solvency: Finding our Balance with Nature, by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and Exeter University. It argues the global economy “could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090, unless immediate policy action on risks posed by the climate crisis is taken,” adding: “Populations are already impacted by food system shocks, water insecurity, heat stress and infectious diseases. If unchecked, mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict become more likely.”
It is a stark message, said Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. “In light of the projections in Planetary Solvency, it is pretty clear that hope is now a luxury we can no longer afford, and the truth is we are in deep, deep excrement that is getting deeper by the day.
“It is a simple fact that there is now an extraordinary disconnect between government and business actions and the reality of the colossal impacts of climate breakdown of society and economy.”
The recent claim by UK chancellor Rachel Reeves, that economic growth is more important than fighting to achieve net zero, provides an example, added McGuire, who is the author of the forthcoming book The Fate of Our World: How Our Future is Written in the Past.
An equally gloomy picture is painted by Lancet Countdown, a global collaboration of more than 300 researchers and health professionals whose report on health and climate change in 2024 found that climatic extremes were already claiming lives on a massive scale.
Heat-related deaths among elderly people have risen by 167% since the 1990s; increasing sand and dust storms mean more and more people are being exposed to dangerously high concentrations of particulate matter; while rising temperatures are facilitating the transmission of deadly infectious diseases such as dengue fever, malaria, West Nile disease and vibriosis.
However, the cause of the most widespread suffering will be the impact on food production, said Prof Julian Allwood of Cambridge University. “It is going to hit countries near the equator with particular severity. As things get hotter and hotter and there is less predictable rain, crop yields will plummet,” he said.
Growing crops in places such as Mongolia might eventually compensate, as weather patterns shift, but not before hundreds of millions of people have been left facing starvation across Africa and Asia. Mass migration and international conflict will follow and, in regions that possess nuclear weapons, this raises fears of future calamitous confrontations. From this perspective, the world is now on a very worrying trajectory.
Many scientists emphasise that such outcomes are not inevitable and that it would be wrong not to continue to fight against the threat of global heating, a point stressed by Ward. “It is important to realise that more action now than ever before is being taken to tackle climate change. But we are still not acting quickly enough and on a big enough scale to avoid really terrible consequences.”
The situation is straightforward, added Rowan Sutton, a senior scientist at the UK National Centre for Atmospheric Science. “Are we going to stabilise the climate and keep global warming well below two degrees, and deliver a world that is broadly habitable? Or are we going to allow warming to continue unchecked – which is what will happen if we don’t achieve net zero global greenhouse gas emissions? That is a real choice that humanity faces.”
