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‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost - iPolitics
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Let's be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as "winning" or "losing" the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn't a game, there's no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is "too late". The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it's "too late" to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don't blame him for feeling defeated with everything that's happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
Suzuki is and always was just a mouthpiece for corporate masters. Controlled opposition to steer public opinion. He is not and never will be a climatologist. His message is one of defeat because his backers want us to give up.
Suzuki can kiss my white ass.
"Too late" implies civilization collapse to me. That's pretty much guaranteed once the warming we're locked into happens.
Sort of? I don't think he mentioned tipping points anywhere in there, it was pretty non-specific and ranty, but if we've passed a tipping point it becomes less a matter of applying a brake and more of actively causing massive climate change in the other direction. Failing that, climate change will stop when it reaches a new balance and no sooner.
Nobody really knows where those tipping points are. The Paris thresholds were our expert's best guesses for a "safe" amount of warming.
Even if we do pass some kind of "tipping point" (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people's attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That's all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.
That is completely, utterly wrong. Climate scientists are talking about the physical concept of the tipping point, which is observed in nature and also comes out of their models. In climate, it's the point at which reversing a change that originally happened over decades would take thousands of years. For example, this has been the huge concern with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which plays a large role in the climate of western Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2791639/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
Especially read the sections about Stability and vulnerability, Effects of an AMOC slowdown, and Effects of an AMOC shutdown.
My point is, tipping points are absolutely not an arbitrary thing. They are very solid predictions based on the physics of the climate. We don't necessarily understand exactly how close we are, even though we're observing some effects of being close to them, but the impacts of crossing them will make climate change even worse and hence the alarm.
Edit: If anyone reads these links and your eyes glaze over and you don't understand of word of what's written, then you need the humility to listen and accept what climate scientists have been trying to tell you. Some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this for decades.
If that's what we're meaning when we talk about "tipping points", yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, "We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are." The idea that passing some arbitrary line like "1.5 degrees" is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that's what the vast majority of people mean when they say "tipping points."
And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.
If you're under the impression that I'm arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I'm arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you've missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.
No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better' is "fewer people die."
The fight isn't lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He's speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.
Back before George W Bush directed NASA to call it climate change, it was called global warming, and you can definitely win against that - by stopping the earth from warming. That's unwinnable due to feedback loops that have now begun.
Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.
The point where the harm could be reduced to "none" is decades past us. If that's the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.
The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I'm aware of ideas like "Permafrost methane bombs" and I've also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They're flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.
What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.
There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.
In your car crash analogy, we are now past the point where hitting the brakes will help. The car will be irrepairably destroyed and all passengers will be killed.
This is flat out wrong. In fact, the more co2 is emitted, the more extreme the consequences are. The change from 0->1 degree of global warming barely registers. The change from 3->4 degrees is catastrophical, for example.
Thus, the warmer it gets, the more worth it is to fight against it, as each small win contributes more to the bottom line than in the beginning.
That's why it's an analogy, and not reality.
There is no point where hitting the brakes will not help. We can always reduce the amount of harm done.
This seems like the "comforting fantasy" to me. Or a terrible analogy.
In not an appropriate analogy. We are not just the people in the car, we are the whole neighborhood.
Even if the people in the car cannot prevent a crash by braking, they can still prevent further damage to people and property by braking as much as possible while within their means.
The comforting fantasy is the idea that we can throw up our hands and say "We lost."
Losing is easy. It demands nothing from us. Losing has no call to action. If we've lost, then there's no fight left to be fought.
The reality is that the fight is always worth fighting. And that sucks, because it means we never get to give up. We never get to say "It's over", and stop caring. Caring is a lot harder.
Just put ice in the airbags.