New Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End' in 2050

[JonLP24]

The climate change analysis was written by a former fossil fuel executive and backed by the former chief of Australia's military.

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander.

The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years.

The paper argues that the potentially “extremely serious outcomes” of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.”

On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597kpd/new-report-suggests-high-likelihood-of-human-civilization-coming-to-an-end-in-2050?sfns=mo

[Loki Liesmith]

1. No way at all to model this

[LanternWaste]

13. it begs the question: What then are the specific and relevant flaws in the analysis?

(and note: the paper is an analysis rather than a model... there's an important difference between analysis and analytics)

[Loki Liesmith]

15. Yes I have a problem with the entire analytic method

I don’t think it is a valid or useful predictive approach

[Snackshack]

2. Yep

The change already coming will be catastrophic. Children being born today are going to grow up in a vastly different world.

[roamer65]

3. The longer we delay, the less the amount of humans that can survive on the "other side".

That number shrinks every day we delay. Every child now brought into this world just makes the situation worse. Time for significant financial rewards for not having children and financial penalties for those who do.

[JCMach1]

7. Can we bury Malthus already, but still get serious about CO2?

If you have read any of the recent science, you know just how scary the problem has gotten. It is now going to take a supermassive effort just to hold the 4-5 degrees most scientists say would be catastrophic.

Too many politicians and normal people's last engagement with the science of the issue was Gore's now outdated 'An Inconvenient Truth' and so we are stuck.

It's not the number of people, but per capita consumption that has to change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita

[hughee99]

12. Financial penalties for those who have children?

Do you have children? If you did, you’d already know they’re not cheap.

But is the plan that children should be something only the wealthy can afford to have?

[appalachiablue]

4. Mayday, Mayday! Jesus

The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization”—but this time focused on rapidly building out a zero-emissions industrial system to set in train the restoration of a safe climate.

The scenario warns that our current trajectory will likely lock in at least 3 degrees Celsius (C) of global heating, which in turn could trigger further amplifying feedbacks unleashing further warming. This would drive the accelerating collapse of key ecosystems “including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic.”

The results would be devastating. Some one billion people would be forced to attempt to relocate from unlivable conditions, and two billion would face scarcity of water supplies. Agriculture would collapse in the sub-tropics, and food production would suffer dramatically worldwide. The internal cohesion of nation-states like the US and China would unravel.

“Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end,” the report notes.

[pecosbob]

5. This is part of the reason for increasing instability among political systems around the world

The one percent forsee the coming death-struggle for resources. Their go-to playbook is fascism.

[RoadMan]

8. And they want to extract as much value/money out of everything

before the shit hits the fan.

The top tier investor-class type wealthy think in terms of generations.

They will cover THEIR end: probably will be the last bastion of what we mere mortals consider "civilization;" i.e, THEY will endure, have food, plumbing, electricity.

[MrScorpio]

6. It was nice knowing all of you.

[Vinca]

9. Given my age, I imagine I won't be around for the going away party. Good luck people.

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Survival of the Richest

From the article:

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

Source: https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

[SammyWinstonJack]

11. Survival of the scum of the earth is more like it.

[smirkymonkey]

14. Kicking for later!

[Duppers]

16. Thanks for posting in GD.

Too much is not read back in the E&E forum where we've been saying this for years.

This begs the question: why bring a baby into the world to suffer this?

[SammyWinstonJack]

19. Why indeed. Denial is my guess.

[appalachiablue]

17. Kick

[Beringia]

18. Tom Brown, the tracker and survivalist says that in his video too

[Amishman]

20. Society won't be willing to change until it's too late

If you are young, spend a little time and effort preparing accordingly. I'm not talking doomsday prepper shit, but knowing how to do things for yourself might really matter in 20-30 years (first aid, fixing things/woodworking, gardening)