https://rogerhallam.com/our-grandchildren-will-starve

Good News: Our Grandchildren Will Starve, Not Our Children

The most extreme climate scenarios are off, according to scientists in the conservative IPCC. However, the Godfather of Climate Science says otherwise.

Good news from The Times: our grandchildren will starve to death rather than our children. The new worst case is just 3.5C. Phew.

Firstly, let’s remember what a 3.5C world actually means.

1. Mass food system collapse, particularly in the Global South.
2. Vast areas of Africa, South and West Asia will become uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people already born. Translation: billions will die from impending poverty and disaster.

That is what this headline is supposedly reassuring us of.

Secondly, this report is not telling the truth about the science because it is based on outdated models. Even Trump jumped on it to advance his end-times fascist agenda.

To understand why both Trump and the Times are deeply wrong about where we are heading, let’s turn to the godfather of climate science, James Hansen, and look at one of his latest papers on climate sensitivity.

In May 2025, Hansen published a paper on Earth’s albedo (the reflectivity of solar radiation bounced back into space). Over the past 25 years of precise satellite data, Earth’s albedo has declined by 0.5%, leading to an increase of 1.7 watts per square metre of absorbed solar energy. Hansen describes this as a BFD (Big Fucking Deal), and he is right. That single number, in forcing terms, is equivalent to an additional 138 parts per million of CO2.

Clouds reflect sunlight back into space. Fewer clouds, or thinner clouds, means more solar energy reaches the surface and stays there. As the planet warms, evidence now shows that cloud cover is decreasing and, crucially, that this decrease is itself a response to warming. In other words, warming reduces clouds, which in turn cause more warming, which further reduces clouds. This is what climate scientists mean by a feedback loop, and this one is a fucking big one.

And a big cloud feedback means the planet is far more sensitive to CO2 than the IPCC’s standard figures suggest. The IPCC’s best estimate for climate sensitivity — the amount of warming you get from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 — is 3°C. Hansen’s three independent lines of evidence (of which the albedo data is one), all point to 4.5°C. The difference between 3°C and 4.5°C is the difference between devastation and extinction.

The corporate media has barely engaged with this work, and when it has, it has often cast doubt on its truth. At the end of the climate sensitivity paper, Hansen notes:

“Criticisms of the Acceleration paper in the media did not address the physics in our three assessments of climate sensitivity. Instead, criticisms were largely ad hoc opinions, even ad hominem attacks. How can science reporting have descended to this level? Climate science is now so complex, with many sub-disciplines, that the media must rely on opinions of climate experts. Although there are thousands of capable scientists in these disciplines, the media have come to depend on a handful of scientists, a clique of climate scientists who are willing, or even eager, to be the voice of the climate science community. But are they representative of the total community, of capable scientists who focus on climate science?”

The Problem of Fragmented Science

A key problem of scientific understanding is that it requires slicing reality into manageable chunks. Take “the doubling of CO2.” The slice aids understanding but paradoxically kills it too. Attending to the part deflects attention from the whole. Space. Time. The full arc of what’s coming.

So when Hansen and colleagues write that climate sensitivity for doubled CO2 is 4.5°C, and that sensitivity as low as 3°C is excluded with greater than 99 percent confidence — they stop there. Slice completed. No return to the whole. No wonder the media shrugs. So what.

Here’s the whole.

1. Doubling CO2 means going from 280ppm to 560ppm. We’re at 420ppm now. At current trajectory — roughly 40ppm additional per decade — we hit 560ppm around 2055. That’s 4.5°C by roughly 2060. Not 2100. 2060. Hansen also shows Earth’s albedo has already darkened by 0.5%, an extra 1.7 W/m² of absorbed solar energy. The system is already running hotter than the models admit.
2. Time doesn’t stop at 2060. At those temperatures, natural feedbacks (clouds, ice, permafrost) accelerate. There is no equilibrium, only continuation.
3. Above 5°C, effective human extinction is locked in. We are on that path.
4. Facts alone don’t move humans. Emotion does. We are human, after all. So the headline that would actually communicate the whole truth? “We are all going to die, you fucking idiots.”

In my recent paper with the 4 Billion Dead team, we examine what an All Systems Approach could look like to counter this fragmented thinking.

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