Our not-too-distant future is filled with famines, political chaos, economic collapse, fierce resource competition, and heat that “cooks us.”
Knock knock.
Humans: "Who's there?"
Mother Nature: "Climate Change"
Humans: "Sorry, don't believe in it"
Mother Nature: "I Don't Care."
Is it time to be concerned about climate change? The future looks pretty dark from where we are now. The Earth is at 1.1 degrees C of [average] warming above the preindustrial baseline, which is the historical temperature conditions that we measure global warming against. And already at 1.1 degrees, we’re seeing a lot of really extreme climate events.
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before.
You probably read in your textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, that accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead.
We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating.
We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating.
Since 1998, there has been an average of 279 tornadoes during the month of May 2019. So the fact that we have had more than 500 over the last 30 days means that we are running way, way above normal "Over the last 30 days, there have been more than 500 tornadoes in the United States. That is not normal. In fact, Tuesday was the 12th day in a row when at least eight tornadoes were spawned, and that is a new all-time record. Community after community in the Midwest now looks like a “war zone”, and billions upon billions of dollars of damage has already been done.
None of this is “normal”, and prior to the month of May we had already witnessed the wettest 12 months in all of U.S. history. All of this wet weather has been absolutely disastrous for Midwest farmers, and so far in 2019 agricultural production is way, way below expectations. In the months ahead, we should all be prepared for much higher prices at the grocery store.
None of this is “normal”, and prior to the month of May we had already witnessed the wettest 12 months in all of U.S. history. All of this wet weather has been absolutely disastrous for Midwest farmers, and so far in 2019 agricultural production is way, way below expectations. In the months ahead, we should all be prepared for much higher prices at the grocery store.
It is worse than you think. If your fears about global warming is dominated by sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what is possible within the lifetime of most humans alive today. And yet the swelling sea has so dominated the picture of global warming that they have occluded our perception of other threats much closer at hand. Rising oceans are very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
