We Must Start Preparing Now For How Climate Change Might End Civilization, Says Report

We humans have always liked the sport of speculating about the end of mankind. We create religions based on our eschatological dreams, produce dystopian novels based on our anxieties, and even compose music that predicts the end of the world as we know it.

So it's astonishing that potential global disasters are so understudied in the face of an intensifying global climate crisis, one that affects everything from human health to the sustainability of entire ecosystems and their resources.

In a research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is suggested that it is past time that we begin considering worst-case scenarios and develop a sound game plan for what will happen if — or rather, when — our existing way of life crumbles.

"Every mass extinction event has been influenced by climate change. It has influenced history and helped bring down civilizations. Even the contemporary world appears to have found its climate niche "Luke Kemp, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in the UK, is the report's primary author.

"Extreme weather events and other direct effects of high temperatures are only one of several possible disaster pathways. Financial crises, armed warfare, and new disease outbreaks might have knock-on consequences that cause further disasters and hamper recovery from major catastrophes like nuclear war."

The authors of the essay argue that severe weather should join the ancient apocalyptic cavalry of sickness, war, and hunger.

Humanity has already seen a glimpse of what pandemics, economic instability, and global food shortages may look like when they come together in recent history. The global civilization's structures are still largely in place, despite the ugly effects.

However, the buildings that let us withstand such storms will eventually fall.

Famines on top of wars that restrict food distribution for years, then decades, and runaway inflation as economies struggle to adapt to new ways of doing business in a hotter, disaster-ravaged world are all possible consequences of food shortages that push humans closer to zoonotic disease reservoirs.

According to Chi Xu, a social complexity researcher at Nanjing University, "approximately 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast are now affected by average yearly temperatures of 29 degrees."

"By 2070, two nuclear powers, seven maximum containment facilities holding the most hazardous viruses, and the social and political repercussions of these temperatures will all have a direct impact on each other. There is a real chance that the consequences may be terrible."

It's not so much that we have trouble imagining such scenarios. The alerts are not brand-new.

According to Johan Rockström, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, "Our understanding of the complexity and fragility of our world is growing. Disaster math must be performed in order to prevent it."

Which, according to the scientists, is the issue. Effective risk management requires avoiding not just the worst-case scenarios but also those that are most likely to occur.

Ideally, we could reverse the situation and move that rise back a bit farther. The ideal trifecta of behavior modification, policy reform, and innovation may even assist in halting temperature increases at levels that prevent us from being hit by a new disaster every six months.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has high confidence that things will continue as they are, and if they do, we can almost surely expect to be 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels anytime between 2030 and 2052.

However, there is a one in five possibility that temperatures will be several degrees higher in an atmosphere with around 560 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. By May of this year, we had reached 420 ppm. It's a risk some of our kids may have to take, with rates progressively increasing by a few parts per million every year or so.

In a study of IPCC assessments released earlier this year, Kemp and colleagues found that the international organization's research emphasis doesn't adequately address such apocalyptic outliers.

In light of prior studies showing how little educated we are on what warming much beyond 2 degrees Celsius looks like, we may be passing up a good chance to be better prepared should more hopeful plans fail.

In Kemp's words, "Facing an accelerated future of climate change while staying oblivious to worst-case possibilities is ignorant risk-management at best and tragically dumb at worst."