Thirty Years to Climate Meltdown – or Not?

How much of a threat is climate meltdown?  Should we treat it as the biggest danger to life in the 21st century, or as one of many problems − serious, but manageable?

A new study says human civilization itself could pass the point of no return by 2050.  The Australian climate think-tank Breakthrough:  National Center for Climate Restoration says that unless humanity takes drastic and immediate action to save the climate, a combination of unstable food production, water shortages, and extreme weather could lead to the breakdown of global society.

One renowned US climate scientist, Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, says that Breakthrough is exaggerating and its report could be counter-productive.

In the UK, though, Mark Maslin of University College London says the report underlines the deep concerns expressed by some security experts.

Act together
Chris Barrie, a retired Royal Australian Navy admiral and former Chief of the Australian Defense Force, is now an honorary professor at the Australian National University, Canberra.

In a foreword to the Breakthrough study he writes:  “We must act collectively.  We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind.”

David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and a co-author of the study, says that “much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative,” but that the new paper, by showing the extreme end of what could happen in just the next three decades, aims to make the stakes clear.  “The report speaks, in our opinion, a harsh but necessary truth,” he says.

“To reduce this risk and protect human civilization, a massive global mobilization of resources is needed in the coming decade to build a zero-emissions industrial system and set in train the restoration of a safe climate,” the report reads.  “This would be akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization.”

Breakthrough acknowledges that the worst possibility it foresees − the total collapse of civilization by mid-century − is an example of a worst-case scenario, but it insists that “the world is currently completely unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of catastrophic climate change.”

The picture of the possible near future it presents is stark.  By 2050, it says, the world could have reached:

• a 3°C temperature rise, with a further 1°C in store
• sea levels 0.5 meters above today’s, with a possible eventual rise of 25m
• 55% of the world’s people subject to more than 20 days a year of heat “beyond the threshold of human survivability”
• one billion people forced to leave the tropics
• a 20% decline in crop yields, leaving too little food to feed the world
• armed conflict likely and nuclear war possible.

The report’s authors conclude:  “The scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end.”

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