Is Collapse Coming?
Hey hey!
Hope this email finds you well. This month I dove into the extreme scenarios of climate change. The scary, low-probability warming scenarios that, if they were to happen, would spell disaster for our whole world. It was not the most pleasant research process, but I felt it was necessary to understand the exact range of what was possible if we collectively did nothing. If you’re feeling stressed just thinking about extreme scenarios, I uploaded a guided meditation for my patreon supporters (link below) that might help. As always, below you can find three quotes and three links I found illuminating during the research process.
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I made some digital pamphlets and prints! You can check them out here: https://ourchangingclimate.shop/
Three Quotes:
“Due to deep uncertainty linked to ice-sheet processes, global mean sea level rise above the likely range – approaching 2 m by 2100 and in excess of 15 m by 2300 under the very high GHG emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5) (low confidence) – cannot be excluded. There is medium confidence that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will not collapse abruptly before 2100, but if it were to occur, it would very likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns, and large impacts on ecosystems and human activities”
— Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
“Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today”
— David Wallace-Wells
“Climate change (either regional or global) has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history. The current carbon pulse is occurring at an unprecedented geological speed and, by the end of the century, may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions.”
— Luke Kemp et al.
Three Links:
Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios (Luke Kemp et al.)
When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans? (Intelligencer)
AR6 Synthesis Report (IPCC)
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Hope you have a wonderful weekend,
Charlie