In this month’s “In Depth” feature, we discuss the climate emergency, the limits to growth, and the challenges of decarbonization with Jordi Solé, head of the Physical Oceanography Department at ICM-CSIC.
Polish journalist and essayist Ryszard Kapuściński once said that the world often speaks to us through uncomfortable silences and numbers that conceal human tragedies. Today, the outcry does not come from a war in remote Angola or a revolution in the streets of Tehran, but from a conference room at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC). There, Jordi Solé, a researcher at the center, observes not troop movements, but the movement of carbon particles in the air we breathe.
The following reflection stems from the lecture “The current systemic collapse: symptoms, mitigation, adaptation, and implications for the oceans,” which Solé delivered last February at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC). In this talk, he clearly outlined the risks of delaying climate action and the growing tensions between our economic model and the planet’s physical limits.
Trained as a physicist and an expert in climate modeling and energy transition, Jordi Solé combines scientific research with public policy advising. He is currently a member of the Expert Committee on Climate Change of Catalonia, an advisory body of the Parliament of Catalonia tasked with providing guidance on carbon budgets to achieve emissions neutrality by 2050.
“The longer we delay emissions reductions, the more drastic the measures we will need to implement,” the researcher states, summarizing one of the key consensuses within the scientific community.
In this context, Solé emphasizes that climate policy decisions are constrained by a physical limit: the carbon budget, that is, the total amount of greenhouse gases that can still be emitted without exceeding certain global warming thresholds. As he explains, every year of delay in reducing emissions shrinks the room for maneuver in the future.
Time and the limits of the carbon budget
One of the central ideas highlighted by the researcher is that delaying climate action has direct consequences for the scale of the measures that will be required later. The later emissions reductions begin, the faster and more intense the transformation of the energy and production systems will need to be.
Solé also reminds us that carbon budgets define the cumulative emissions limit that the climate system can absorb before surpassing specific warming levels. If a significant portion of this budget is consumed in just a few years, the remaining margin shrinks, forcing much faster reductions in the future, with potentially stronger economic and social impacts.
This urgency, the expert explains, often contrasts with the pace of politics and public decision-making, which tend to be driven by short-term horizons. For Solé, this disconnect between political timelines and the timescales of the climate system is one of the main risks in addressing the climate crisis. He argues that public policies should more consistently reflect the scale of the challenge and the need for anticipatory action.
The illusion of growth and social fracture
As the talk progresses, the physicist examines some of the key contradictions of our economic and social model in the face of the climate crisis. In this context, he notes that the impacts of climate change are not distributed equally. Global warming often acts as a multiplier of inequalities: communities with fewer resources are also the most exposed to water scarcity, heatwaves in poorly insulated housing, or rising food prices caused by increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Solé also challenges the idea that economic growth can continue indefinitely without affecting natural systems. As he explains, the data show that, to date, the growth of the capitalist economic system has been accompanied by an increase in resource consumption and an ever-accelerating rate at which planetary boundaries are being exceeded. He therefore warns that relying solely on what is often presented as ‘green growth’ can create a false sense of security if it is not accompanied by structural changes in the way we produce and consume.
For Solé, excessive reliance on technological solutions that do not yet exist at scale can also delay necessary decisions. In this regard, he advocates for an honest public debate on the challenges of the energy transition—one that acknowledges both the costs and opportunities of the process, without downplaying the magnitude of the problem or falling into paralyzing alarmism.
His final message is clear: time is a key factor in responding to the climate crisis, but it is not the only determining one. As he points out, there is also resistance to changing the current socioeconomic system, which further hinders action. The longer emissions reductions are delayed, the more difficult and abrupt the transition may become in the future. Therefore, he stresses the need to prepare for the social and cultural changes ahead, whether they are planned or imposed in the worst possible way.