This is the scariest scientific report to date. The new analysis, carried out by an Australian specialist center, Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, and endorsed by a former Australian army chief, suggests carrying out an effort “similar to the emergency mobilization of World War II.” to avoid the catastrophes that this scenario implies; among them, a “high probability that human civilization will come to an end” in 2050 if mitigation measures are not taken in the next decade.
The end of climate change is not inevitable, but the situation is increasingly desperate. Without immediate and drastic action, this analysis predicts that by 2050, climate change could become an “existential threat to human civilization” that can never be undone.
As it is, this Australian think tank claims that the rest of the research published so far is wrong: the risks of climate change are actually much, much worse than anyone can imagine.
The central thesis of the article is that the predictions of climate scientists are too limited. Climate change will affect the planet in the near future and the current climate crisis, they say, is bigger and more complex than any human has ever dealt with before.
General climate models, such as the one used by the United Nations Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 to predict that a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius could put hundreds of millions of people at risk, did not account for the great complexity of the many interconnected geological processes on Earth; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the possible consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any model can imagine.
How the world ends
What is the expectation for the future? The authors of the work offer a particularly grim scenario that begins with the world’s governments “politely ignoring” the advice of scientists and the public’s willingness to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in an increase in the global temperature of 3 ° C by 2050. At this point, the world’s ice sheets are melting away; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the largest carbon offsets in the world); and the planet is plunged into a feedback loop of increasingly hot and deadly conditions.
“35% of the global land surface and 55% of the world’s population are subjected to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survival,” the authors state.
Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly devastate the land. Almost a third of the world’s land area becomes desert. Entire ecosystems are collapsing, beginning with the planet’s coral reefs, rainforest, and Arctic ice sheets. The world’s tropics are the most affected by these new climatic extremes, which destroy agriculture in the region and turn more than a billion people into refugees.
This massive movement of refugees, along with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in the availability of food and water, begins to stress the fabric of the world’s largest nations. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in nuclear war, are likely.
The result is “absolute chaos” and perhaps “the end of global human civilization as we know it.”
How can this catastrophic vision of the future be prevented?
Accepting globally climate change and putting ourselves to work immediately as if it were a vital emergency. According to the authors of the article, the human race has approximately a decade left to organize a global movement to transition the world economy to a zero-carbon system. ( To achieve zero carbon emissions it is necessary to not emit carbon or to balance carbon emissions with carbon removal). The effort required to do so “would be similar to the emergency mobilization of World War II,” the authors wrote.
The new policy document was backed by a foreword from Admiral Chris Barrie, a retired Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander who has testified before the Australian Senate about the devastating possibilities that climate change represents for national security and the human welfare in general.
“Human life on Earth may be on the verge of extinction, in the most horrible way ,” Barrie explained.
Referencia: The Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf
