According to a new paper form the Australian think tank, human civilization will crumble by 2050 if we don’t do anything about climate change. That’s only thirty years from now.
The paper was published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne and was authored by a climate researcher who states that climate scientists are restrained in their predictions of how climate will affect the Earth in the eminent future.
What They Are Saying:
The climate crisis is larger and more complex than humans have ever had to deal with. Climate models like the United Nations’ Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit could risk millions of people, do not account for the complexity of Earth’s interlined geological processes. This means that they do not properly predict the scale of potential consequences.
How They See the World Ending:
They paint a picture of the governments ignoring the advice given by scientists and the desire of the public to decarbonise the economy, which results in the global temperature increasing by three degree Celsius by 2050. When this happens, the world’s ice sheets will vanish, severe droughts will kill most trees in the Amazon rainforest and the planet will become a hotter, deadlier place to live.
The authors hypothesize that thirty-five per cent of the global land area, coupled with 55 per cent of the global population will be subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions. This will go beyond the human threshold of survivability.
The Stuff That Hurts:
At the same time, droughts, floods, and wildfires will ravage the land. One-third of the world’s land surface will turn to desert and the entire ecosystem will collapse, beginning with the coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world’s tropics will be hit the hardest by the extreme weather, destroying the agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into climate refugees.
When We Become Refugees:
The movement of refugees from one place to another, coupled with shrinking coastlines and drops in food and water availability, will stress the largest nations in the world. There will be armed conflict over resources and likely result in nuclear war. The result will be “outright chaos” and be the end of the global civilization.
How Long Before Dooms Day?
According to the paper, the human race has one decade left to create a global movement to take the world economy to a zero-carbon emissions system. That doesn’t leave much time for anything else, which means that the effort required to do so would be the same as the World War II emergency mobilization.
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