I’ve often imagined the future, not in the abstract, but in the heat. The kind of heat that forces silence on a city, where life once thrived in the early morning hours and suddenly doesn’t. The kind of heat that lingers, heavy and still, warning of a world that has tipped too far.
It’s no longer just imagination. Scientists, the United Nations and, perhaps most revealing of all, Wall Street itself are now telling us that the world is veering towards that very reality. We are not just on track to miss the 1.5°C Paris target. We are headed for 3°C of warming and some of the world’s most powerful institutions are preparing to profit from that collapse.
In recent weeks, two starkly different actors have converged around the same conclusion. The United Nations, in its latest climate report, warns that current policies are steering us towards a future of irreversible climate damage. Ice caps will collapse. Coastlines will retreat. Agricultural systems will falter. But what is more chilling is who else is preparing for that same scenario: the world’s biggest banks.
Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase have begun telling their clients that a 3°C world is the new business-as-usual. Hidden within market reports, like one on the rise of air conditioning stocks, is the blunt expectation that global temperatures will blow past the limits set by the Paris Agreement. And rather than respond with urgency, these institutions are quietly reconfiguring their strategies to profit from collapse.
Wall Street has stopped betting against climate breakdown. It is betting on it and building portfolios around catastrophe. This isn’t just a shift in climate science. It is a moral failure. When the most powerful financial actors accept disaster as the baseline and adapt their investment models accordingly, they signal to the rest of the world that surrender is not only inevitable, but profitable. What was once a planetary emergency is now an economic trend line.
But what does a 3°C world actually look like?
In my last TED talk, I described a future that’s far closer than we think. At 3 degrees of warming, entire swaths of the Gulf, including parts of Oman, will face temperatures so extreme that stepping outdoors could become life-threatening. In some areas, wet-bulb temperatures may exceed 35°C, where the human body can no longer cool itself through sweat. Regions we’ve inhabited for generations will become uninhabitable. Coastlines will disappear. Water scarcity will deepen. Outdoor labour, on which so many livelihoods depend, will collapse. And adaptation will no longer be enough. This is the future being priced into investor memos and celebrated in shareholder projections.
When the world’s most powerful institutions begin designing for disaster instead of fighting to prevent it, we move from climate realism to climate surrender. The narrative that 1.5°C is dead must not become an excuse for apathy. It must become the reason we fight harder, for equity, for survival and for the right to live where we’ve always belonged.
Because if Muscat becomes uninhabitable in our children’s lifetimes, what will we say? That we saw it coming and did nothing? That we weighed lives against profits and chose comfort?
We still have a choice. But every degree of delay is another nail in the coffin of the places we call home. If the smart money is on collapse, we may need to be the dissenters who bet on survival and work to make it possible.
The writer is environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development
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