“WE are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster.” This is the terrifying opening sentence of the 2024 State Of The Climate report, co-written by a team of leading climate experts and published in the Oxford University Press academic journal BioScience.

The highly respected authors — including Prof William J Ripple, Prof Johan Rockstrom, Prof Michael E Mann and Prof Naomi Oreskes — note current policies mean humanity is on track for 2.7°C of warming by 2100. It is “a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.”

Out of 35 planetary vital signs, the report warns that 25 “are at record levels,” with the warming climate potentially causing “many millions of additional deaths by 2050” and displacing hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of people. According to the authors, “more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse.”

In the face of this planetary catastrophe, the world has made “only very minor headway on climate change,” the experts conclude. Why? “In part because of stiff resistance from those benefitting financially from the current fossil-fuel-based system.”

Like much of the news and science published about the climate, the report makes for chilling reading. However, a new journal article gives me a tiny bit of hope.

Published in Climate Policy journal, the paper investigates the dynamics of competing climate policy narratives and the impact of climate protest in Britain between 2017 and 2022.

Analysing parliamentary debates and interviewing politicians and civil servants, Dr Nicole Nisbett from the University of Leeds and her co-authors conclude: “Climate movements can affect a shift in climate policies through increasing political salience of climate change and changing the frames used to negotiate climate policies.”

They note there was a shift to a “pro-climate action narrative” in 2018-19 “when Britain experienced unprecedented levels of climate protests.” This, of course, was the time of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the increasingly large nationwide school strikes inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

The shift affected both the governing Conservative Party and the opposition Labour Party. The flagship British climate policies during this period, including the net zero by 2050 legislation passed in June 2019 and the Labour Party’s Green New Deal launched in March 2019, “were aided by climate protests,” the paper concludes.

One cross-bench politician explained that XR “was extremely influential in persuading Theresa May’s government to legislate for net zero … extremely quickly.”

Another interviewee, also a cross-bench politician, noted: “Theresa May wanted to leave a legacy of saying we’re committed to net zero” and that XR, and young people in particular, “was actually helpful” in getting it through Parliament.

Dismissed and ridiculed by many, including influential sections of the media, the journal article demonstrates the huge energy of XR, and the school strikes had a decisive, positive impact on government policy in 2019.

However, this good news needs to be tempered by the reality of our predicament. As the State of The Climate report concludes: the worsening climate crisis means “bold, transformative change” is essential. And from reading what other climate experts have said, I’d amend this to: “immediate, bold, transformative change.”

Incremental change is simply not going to cut it. Net zero by 2050 will not be enough. Ed Miliband winning some arguments in the Cabinet for important but limited climate action will not be enough.

A few more Green MPs will not be enough. In fact, no current political party or MP in Britain is being honest with the public about the size and seriousness of the threat or the enormous level of change that is needed in the next few decades.

As Prof Kevin Anderson, one of Britain’s top climate scientists, explained in Nature journal in 2019, “technocratic approaches could have reduced emissions in line with a 2°C global-warming target” in the 1990s.

“However, climate change is a problem of cumulative emissions. Ongoing failure to mitigate emissions has pushed the challenge from a moderate change in the economic system to a revolutionary overhaul of the system.”

The State Of The Climate report sets out some of the elements of the transformative change needed: rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use, drastically reducing overconsumption and waste, reducing the human population and shifting to plant-based diets.

Moreover, they argue unlimited economic growth “is a perilous illusion” in a world of finite resources, advocating instead for the adoption of “an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice.”

Important and impactful as XR and the school strikes were in 2019, to force the level of change now needed requires a mass movement many times larger and many times more effective than both of these combined.

Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell — the co-editors of the book The Climate Majority Project — concur: “The climate crisis is too vast, complex and multi-faceted to be addressed adequately without mass public mobilisation.”

How big? We are talking a second world war-level mobilisation of all of society to fight a common threat. And this needs to happen in Britain and throughout the world. And it needs to start happening right now.

And we need to be in it for the long haul, winning battle after battle after battle — a point highlighted by the decade’s long narrative sweep of Stephen Markley’s brilliant, incredibly powerful climate novel The Deluge.

“Even if we succeed, it’ll be generations before the emergency ends,” says the character Kate Morris, leader of the fictional grassroots group A Fierce Blue Fire. “I think we have to be at peace with that.”

Climate Action or Delay: The Dynamics of Competing Narratives in Britain's Political Sphere and the Influence of Climate Protest by Nicole Nisbett et al. is published in the Climate Policy journal. Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.