Raging forest wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become daily news. All this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above pre-industrial temperatures. If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by as much as 18C and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. Even warming to one-fourth of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved or on which civilisation has been built. The last time it was 4C warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 80 metres higher than it is today.
University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber explains we might be heading back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle...The problem is that humans can’t even handle a hot week today without the power grid failing on a regular basis,” he said, noting that the ageing patchwork power grid in the United States is built with components that are allowed to languish for more than a century before being replaced. “What makes people think it’s going to be any better when the average summer temperature will be what, today, is the hottest week of the year in a five-year period and the hottest temperatures will be in the range that no one has ever experienced before in the United States? That’s 2050.”
By 2050, according to a 2014 MIT study, there will also be five billion people living in water-stressed areas. “Thirty to 50 years from now, more or less, the water wars are going to start,” Huber said.
In their book Dire Predictions, Penn State’s Lee Kump and Michael Mann describe just one local example of how drought, sea level rise and overpopulation may combine to pop the rivets of civilisation:
“Increasingly severe drought in West Africa will generate a mass migration from the highly populous interior of Nigeria to its coastal mega-city, Lagos. Already threatened by rising sea levels, Lagos will be unable to accommodate this massive influx of people. Squabbling over the dwindling oil reserves in the Niger river delta, combined with potential for state corruption, will add to the factors contributing to massive social unrest. Massive social unrest” here being a rather bloodless phrase masking the utter chaos coming to a country already riven by corruption and religious violence."
In 2003, two hot weeks killed 30,000 people in Europe. It was called a once-in-500-year event. It happened again three years later (497 years ahead of schedule). In 2010, a heatwave killed 15,000 people in Russia. In 2015, nearly 700 people died in Karachi alone from a heatwave that struck Pakistan while many were fasting for Ramadan. But these tragic episodes are barely a shade of what’s projected.
“In the near term – 2050 or 2070 – the US Midwest is going to be one of the hardest hit,” said Huber. “There’s a plume of warm, moist air that heads up through the central interior of the US during just the right season and, man, is it hot and sticky. You just add a couple of degrees and it gets really hot and sticky. These are thresholds, right? These aren’t just like smooth functions. It gets above a certain number and you hurt yourself very badly.”
China, Brazil, and Africa face similarly infernal forecasts, while the already sweltering Middle East has what Huber calls “existential problems”.
Thank you for this summary, says this cold-weather denizen from Quebec. I prefer the winter to the summer. One cannot walk outside in an air-conditioned suit during the summer, but one can put on an extra layer of two of clothing to combat the cold. Either way, vegetation has a limited range of growth determined by temperature and moisture -- so there goes the supply of food for the animal world, while the oceans cook the marine life.
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