Extinction of the human species by 2050

More and more studies are emerging with scary details on how man-made climate change is going to be the collapse of the world as we know it. This one scariest to date. 

A new policy paper from an Australian think tank, called the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, claims that in order to avoid human civilization becoming extinct by 2050, we would need to declare an emergency status as grave as the emergency mobilization of World War II; as the risks of climate change are actually much, much worse than anyone can imagine. 

According to the paper, climate change is inevitable but if serious mitigation actions aren’t taken in the next decade, climate change could become an “existential threat to human civilization” with no way back.

The paper’s central thesis is that climate scientists are too restrained in their predictions of how climate change will affect the planet in the near future. The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have dealt with before. General climate models, like the one that the United Nations’ Panel on Climate change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of  degrees celsius could put hundreds of millions of people at risk, failed to account for the sheer complexity of the many interlinked geological processes of Earth. As such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The authors claimed that the truth was far worse than any models can fathom.

How the world ends

We are left to think, what does the actual worst-case scenario look like then?

The authors provided one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments “politely ignoring” the advice of scientists and the general population’s willingness to decarbonize the economy (through alternative energy sources) which results in a global temperature increase of 3 degrees celsius by 2050. At this point, the world’s ice sheets deteriorate; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazonian rainforest (which is one of the world’s largest carbon offset); and the planet plunges into a loop of even- hotter and deadlier conditions.

“Thirty five percent on the global land area and fifty five percent of the world’s population are subject to more than 202 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survival,” the authors state.

Meanwhile, droughts, floods and forest first regularly devastate the land. A third of the world’s land surface becomes a desert. The entire ecosystem collapses, starting with the world’s coral reefs, rainforests and ending at the Arctic ice sheets. These new climatic extremities affect the tropics of the world most heavily, destroying the region’s agriculture and turn more than one billion people into refugees. This massive movement of refugees, combined with the severe falls in the availability of food and water begins to stress the foundations of some of the largest nations in the world. The culmination of nuclear wars over resources is becoming more and more of a likely scenario. 

The result is “outright chaos” and the end of global human civilisation as we know it. 

How can we prevent this catastrophic vision of the future?

The only way we can prevent this global catastrophe is by accepting that climate change is a real threat and getting to work. Immediately. According to the paper’s authors, the human race  has about ten years left to organize a global movement to make to mount a global movement to transition the world economy to a zero-carbon- emission system. (Achieving zero-carbon emissions requires either not emitting carbon or balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal). The effort required to do so “would be akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization,” the authors wrote. 

The new policy paper was endorsed with a foreword by Admiral Chris Barrie, a retired Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander who has testified before the Australian Senate about the devastating possibilities climate change poses to national security and overall human well-being.

Barrie wrote in the paper, "human life on Earth may be in danger of extinction , in the most horrible way.”

Reference: The Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf