Speculating on the death of humanity is a game we humans have always enjoyed. We build religion on our eschatological hopes, create myths out of our dystopian fears, and even write songs about the end of the world as we know it.
So it’s surprising that in the midst of the escalating global climate crisis, which affects everything from the health of individuals to the sustainability of entire ecosystems and their resources, potential global disasters are little explored.
has gone A report recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that it’s time to start taking worst-case scenarios seriously and come up with a solid game plan for what happens if — or if, actually , when – our current way of life breaks down.
“Environmental change plays had an impact in each mass eradication occasion. It has helped shape declining empires and history. Even the modern world is one,” says Luke Kemp, lead author of the report.
corresponds to a particular climate niche,” says the report’s lead author Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge. Center for the Study of Existential Risk in the UK.
“Pathways of obliteration are not restricted to the immediate impacts of high temperatures, like outrageous climate occasions. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflicts, and outbreaks of new diseases can trigger other disasters, and potential disasters such as nuclear can hinder recovery War.”
According to the article’s authors, the old apocalyptic cavalry of pestilence, war and famine must have a new companion: extreme weather.
Recent history has already given humanity a sneak preview of what pandemics, economic instability, and global food shortages look like when they combine.
Although the results are not pretty, the structures of global civilization are relatively intact. At some point, however, the structures that allow us to weather such storms will collapse.
Successive epidemics as food shortages bring humans into close contact with reservoirs of zoonotic disease. famines on top of wars that limit food distribution for years, then decades; Economies struggle to cope with new ways of doing business in a warming, disaster-ridden world as inflation recedes.
“The average annual temperature of 29 degrees is currently affecting about 30 million people in the Sahara and the Gulf Coast,” says Chi Su, a social complexity researcher at Nanjing University.
“By 2070, these temperature and social and political results will straightforwardly influence two atomic powers, and seven greatest regulation research facilities that harbor the most perilous microorganisms.
The potential for catastrophic knock-on effects is severe.” The problem is not so much that we cannot even imagine such outcomes. Warnings are not new.
As Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, explained, “We increasingly understand that our planet is a more sophisticated and fragile organism.
We must do the math of destruction to avoid it.” Which, scientists say, is the problem. Good risk management involves not only predicting which scenarios are likely, but also protecting against those that will have the greatest impact. Hopefully, we can turn things around and push it back a bit.
The perfect combination of behavioral change, policy action, and innovation can even help plateau temperatures rise to a level where we won’t be hit with a new disaster every six months.
If things continue as they are now – which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is very confident of – we can almost certainly expect to see an average of 1.5 degrees warmer sometime between 2030 and 2052. can, compared to pre-industrial levels.
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There is about a one-in-five chance that an atmosphere of about 560 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would still be several degrees warmer.
By May this year, we hit 420 ppm. With rates steadily increasing to a few parts per million each year or more, it’s a gamble some of our children may need to contend with.
According to a study on IPCC assessments published by Kemp and colleagues earlier this year, the intergovernmental body’s research focus does not sufficiently deal with such doomsday outliers.
Taken in the context of previous research showing that we are woefully ignorant of what more than 2 degrees Celsius of warming looks like, we would be better informed if the more optimistic plans fail.
A golden opportunity may be missed. “Being blind to worst-case scenarios in the face of a future of accelerating climate change is risk management at best and foolish at worst,” Kemp says.
