Author: Acharya Prashant
We have begun to speak of the future climate as though we could settle the bill later. We shall keep emitting greenhouse gases, warm the planet beyond the limit we have agreed upon and, when technology has improved, bring the temperature down again. Scientists call this overshoot. The habit is familiar enough: enjoy now, correct later.
The United Nations Environment Programme’s October 2026 Emissions Gap Report examines a pathway in which warming peaks around 1.7-1.8°C by mid-century and returns to 1.5°C by 2100. Even on this exceptionally demanding path, the probability of returning is only about fifty percent.
Even if we succeed in bringing the temperature down, what exactly comes back? A fever can subside while the organs remain damaged. When it comes to the Earth, we keep confusing the reading on the thermometer with the health of the patient.
We know an enormous amount about how the Earth responds to our actions. But what is happening within the human being who keeps acting in these ways, even when he knows the consequences? We study the planet’s tipping points with increasing precision. How seriously have we studied the one doing the pushing?
Greenland’s ice sheet contains enough water to raise average global sea level by approximately seven metres. Ice reflects sunlight; once it melts, darker surfaces absorb more heat, which encourages further melting. Some of Greenland’s meltwater enters the North Atlantic, where it can interfere with the circulation that transports heat through the ocean. Research published in Nature Geoscience in 2024 examined how changes in this circulation could affect rainfall across the Amazon. Ice disappearing near the Arctic may therefore alter the conditions under which a forest thousands of kilometres away survives. We divide the world into departments: oceans, forests, agriculture, glaciers. Nature has no such administrative boundaries.
Some of the warnings are already visible, not merely projected. The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 assessed that the central estimate of the thermal tipping threshold for warm-water coral reefs, around 1.2°C, had already been exceeded. We hope to return to 1.5°C by the end of the century, even though that temperature may already be too high for some ecosystems. Scientists call it hysteresis when reversing the original pressure does not necessarily reverse the resulting change. We can restore the number without restoring the world that existed when that number was last recorded.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya gives us a warning much closer to home. According to a 2026 assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, glaciers across the region lost approximately 12 per cent of their area between 1990 and 2020. Retreating glaciers alter water availability and increase the risks associated with expanding glacial lakes. A sudden flood can destroy a bridge, cut a village off from medical care and markets, ruin farmland and deprive families of their livelihoods.
The damage falls unequally, just as responsibility for causing it is unequal. A farmer struggling with an uncertain monsoon has not exercised the same power over the atmosphere as an affluent person accustomed to frequent flights, oversized homes and needless purchases. The question is why those who already possess far more than they need are so unwilling to stop. What are they still hoping to obtain?
We call climate change anthropogenic, man-made. But who is this man whose activity is changing the climate? Engineers ask how vehicles can be made more efficient. Scientists seek cleaner energy. Economists study how to make production cheaper and more productive. This work is indispensable. Yet the assumption behind the demand for all this production is seldom examined: that wanting more and more is natural, and that more must always be better. Who examines the want itself? I want to examine the one who is making these demands.
The ego is the claim of incompleteness. It is not that the ego sometimes feels incomplete; its very definition of itself is built upon incompleteness. So it keeps searching for something that will complete it. A possession is no longer simply useful. It must prove that its owner is somebody. For a while, acquiring it brings a fleeting feeling of completeness. Soon the old unease returns. The possession no longer reassures, and another is needed. We normally investigate the object. Was the house large enough? Was the promotion prestigious enough? We rarely look at the one who expected these things to make him complete. If the claimant is mistaken about himself, how will a better object fulfil the promise he has placed upon it? We have given unprecedented technological power to a claimant whose assumptions we hardly ever examine.
The ego has a special affection for tomorrow. Let me first become secure, establish my position. Then I shall be less attached, more responsible, more generous. The promise of future wisdom is convenient for present desire. Our climate policies increasingly carry the same promise. A political promise can be revised; a physical threshold cannot necessarily be renegotiated.
The resemblance between ecological feedback and the ego’s habits is worth examining, though they are not the same kind of system. Yet in both we can see a pattern in which a disturbance gives rise to conditions that sustain further disturbance. But there is a crucial difference: an ice sheet cannot examine what is happening to it. The ego can be seen through. At Cambridge earlier this year, I was asked whether enough time remained for the inner transformation needed to address the ecological crisis. I asked the questioner to distinguish between work that takes time and seeing what is already before us. Rebuilding electricity grids takes years. But if I recognise that a pursuit is needless and destructive, and that I am defending it not because it meets a genuine need but because I am attached to the identity or gratification it provides, how many years must pass before I stop defending it? Perhaps the difficulty is not a lack of information. Perhaps it is that we do not wish to pay the price of what we already understand.
The Earth has limits. The ego’s appetite for more appears to have none. The ice does not choose to melt. The forest does not choose to lose its rainfall. But the one doing the pushing still has a choice. And that choice cannot be postponed without itself becoming a choice.
Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.