Bad News: Civilization Will Collapse By 2100

Climate change, of course, will deal the fatal blow, and no one who has looked into the data doubts it. Globally 110 million tons of man-made pollution are produced daily (something our planet hasn’t experienced since three million years ago when the earth was boiling).  In the recent bestseller “The Uninhabitable Earth---Life After Warming” author David Wallace-Wells walks the reader through all the horrors that are already building and leads us to the obvious and terrifying conclusion: civilization will collapse by 2100 and the humans that are left will be warring tribes.  All of this can be prevented only if the entire population of the earth, as a unity, takes major preventative steps in the next twenty years. After twenty years it will be too late to stop the coming nightmare.  The book is terrifying to read but it’s not dull: a real page turner listing how we got here and the horrors that are just over the hill.  Be warned that once you read this book sleeping at night will become a challenge as your mind tries to wrap itself around this new startling reality.  The United Nations has been banging the drum loudly, with its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] issuing increasingly dire reports on the severity of the problem, and Secretary General António Guterres turning up last week on the cover of Time Magazine standing in a suit up to his knees in the rising waters of Fiji where habitation is becoming dicey unless you happen to be a fish. 

The industrial revolution, starting around 1750, triggered our current problem as we began pouring carbon into our air, and by the mid-nineteenth century scientists were beginning to worry about the effect of all that carbon making its home in our atmosphere.  In the twentieth century the alarm bell was louder and nowadays it’s a cacophony.  Wallace-Wells comments:

[N]ever in the earth’s entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed—by one estimate, around ten times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years.  Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets—enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean.  Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

The Netflix series “Our Planet” (wonderfully narrated by David Attenborough) documents how man’s ruination of the planet both through climate change and misuse of the land (burning down rain forests, polluting the oceans and lakes, over-cultivation) is currently destroying a million species of animals, birds, insects, plants in a major global tragedy.  In Episode Two the series focuses on walruses who gather annually on an ice-covered mountain to meet and mate only to find this year the ice is gone and the mountain too small for the huge numbers of walruses piling up there.  They climb clumsily on top of one another, smothering those below, until finally the pile grows so high they begin to tumble—horribly—to their deaths, as the living mound beneath them collapses. 

Melting the Greenland ice sheet alone, which is well underway, would raise sea levels six meters, eventually wiping out 90% of Florida, Manhattan, London, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Mumbai.  Rising temperatures cause all sorts of “natural” disasters to get worse: more forest fires, hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.  The new “normal” will be hotter and hotter.  We are never going back to the predictable weather we all grew up with.  This past year was the hottest on record.  The last ten years the same.  Huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable because of heat and drought.  By 2100 no one will be able to go to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage—they would immediately fry in the incinerating heat. 

Since the last century a growing chorus of scientists and others have been trying to turn public attention to the dramatic problem of climate change,  Al Gore made a movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award (and led to his Nobel Peace Prize).  Recently new voices are being heard everywhere.  A notable one is a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg who has led a worldwide protest, including school demonstrations and strikes everywhere, trumpeting the need for immediate actions on climate change.  She has addressed a U.N. Climate Change Conference, berated billionaires at the World Economics Forum in Davos, Switzerland, met with the Pope, and lectured the U.K. Houses of Parliament about the need for immediate action.  And every day when you look at the news startling evidence of climate change horrors are awaiting us all from many sources: the biggest hurricane on record; the 500 year flood occurring two years in a row, California fires consuming the state county by county, and on and on.

We must change our world so that we don’t increase the carbon in the atmosphere so as to raise the temperature more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century.  The Paris Accord, by which most countries of the earth agreed to cut carbon emissions so as to hold heating to that amount (or, worst case, 2 degrees Celsius) has already been breached.  No country has met its goal so far, and President Trump, who doesn’t believe in climate change (though when he applied for a permit to build a sea wall for his new golf club in Ireland gave climate change as a reason), has dumped the agreement and increased carbon emissions in our country.  In May the United States vetoed any mention of climate change by the Arctic Council in a new report.   Unless dramatic steps (to be described below) are taken within the next twenty years the temperature will rise by 4 degrees Celsius (or even as much as 8 degrees in some studies!), frying the earth.  People in the hottest parts of the planet will of course flee to cooler parts with huge migrations of starving and desperate people.  Countries will simply collapse from heat: India and Bangladesh will be early victims (as will island nations all over the world), with China and southeast Asian countries suffering horribly, Australia is already baking with killing heat (but nonetheless elected an anti-climate change government in early June), and the United States, wracked by wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding coastlines, baking farmlands, will be overrun from the south by billions of people fleeing unbearable heat.  Russia (where the northwestern city of Arkhangelsk reached 84 degrees this May, a record), Canada and some northern countries will be the last to collapse, but the refugees will get them too in the end.  Want to know what it will all look like?  Watch a Mad Max movie.  Imagine its real.

The experts say we have about twenty years to stop making the atmosphere worse and avoiding the horrors just mentioned.  But—and here’s the rub—we won’t take these steps even though we know we need to do so.  Why not?  Well, consider what they are: 

Within twenty years we would have to completely stop using fossil fuels (petroleum, coal, natural gas).  No more vehicles (except electric ones), airplanes, trains, ships, or industries that use these fuels to run our lives (so there goes air conditioning, for example) and stop most of our power sources except nuclear, wind, solar, etc.  We’ll have to kill all the cows in the world since their burping and farting produces methane and contributes to an estimated 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions—thus no hamburgers, no milk.  We will need zero emissions from all other sources: deforestation, agriculture, landfills.  And what government would actually do all this?  In the next twenty years?  Wallace-Wells concludes it would take a new system of global government united to achieve what must be done, an effort greater than the mobilization that won World War II. 

Want to take bets on what will actually happen over the next twenty years?  Hmm.  Perhaps its best not to think about it.  Instead have a drink, put your feet up, get on with life as usual.  At one point in “The Uninhabitable Earth” the author compares what we’re currently doing to someone sitting in a running car in a closed garage knowing things aren’t going to work out well but stupidly unable to shut off the engine and escape the inevitable end.

There are new things coming that would help.  HBO has a documentary called “Ice on Fire” explaining possible scientific solutions that could be very useful if promptly adopted on a worldwide scale (cows, for example, could be fed seaweed and thus produce no methane at all).  A populace that understands the coming Armageddon might be persuaded to make huge sacrifices to escape from our gas-filled garage.

Consider babies being born the very day you’re reading this.  If they live to be 80 they’ll see the collapse of civilization and actually become Mad Max survivors fighting over the debris of our destroyed world.  Do you have or plan to have grandchildren?  Here’s their heritage: the day when the internet goes dark, the day when electricity is no more, the day when vandals replace local government officials, the day when everyone damn well better be armed and only move about in well trained groups.

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Me?  I was born lucky.  As I’ve commented before on this blog, I was fortunate to be a child born during WWII.  There weren’t a lot of us.  Thus I was accepted by every school I applied to.  When I needed a job there were lots of them.  The baby-boomers followed me and fought like dogs, but I was ahead of that mass.  Like most people on the planet I accepted our likely future as one that would get better and better for me, for my children, for future generations.  Startlingly that isn’t going to be true, but I’m 75, still time lucky, and I'll die before it gets really bad. 

But for most people—younger people—this nightmarish chaos just described is their future.

Unless we all demand change now.  Huge changes!  And make it clear we will make major sacrifices in return for a livable planet for all those who will come after us.  If we don’t do that . . . well, imagine their contempt for us as they hide in the caves and look around at the ruins of a once proud civilization.

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Related Posts:

“A Guide to the Best of My Blog,” April 29, 2013; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-guide-to-best-of-my-blog.html

“On Being Lucky: The Second Anniversary of My Heart Transplant,” November 23, 2011; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-being-lucky-second-anniversary-of-my.html

“The Collapse of 2050: Earth as a Ponzi Scheme,” August 17, 2015; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-collapse-of-2050-earth-as-ponzi.html