2100

   2100: An Unlivable World?

 

 

Former World Bank chief economist and author of the 2006 Stern Review, Nicholas Stern, famously warned that climate breakdown threatens to be the greatest market failure ever because the costs of fossil fuel emissions are not incorporated into free market accounting and polluters are not forced to pay for the social / environmental costs / impacts of their pollution.

Now he warns of "severe risks" if global average temperature rises by the predicted +4 ºC to +7 ºC by 2100.

Agriculture would be destroyed and life would be impossible over much of the planet.

The last time the Earth was that hot was 30 – 50 million years ago.

The last time it was even +3 ºC warmer was 3 million years ago and we are racing there again LONG BEFORE 2100.

In fact, as you read this, global average temperature is already higher than at any time over the last 2 MILLION YEARS.

                                                                   Meanwhile, humanity is only 200,000 years young!

In the article, Perfect storm of environmental and economic collapse closer than you think, founder director of Forum for the Future, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and author, Jonathon Porritt, makes the argument that a confluence of factors are anticipated to build over the next few years and mount into "world upheavals", perhaps as soon as 2020.

Climate breakdown will be a major contributor and the most glaring root threats are:

 

Arctic meltdown that could result in summers without sea ice as soon as 2013 instead of 2100 (!). So much for our confidence in the 2007 IPPC report suggestion that we have until 2015 to level off emissions.

 

Methane time bomb — Millions of tons 20 x more potent than CO2 as a heat trapping gas are leaking out from underneath melting permafrost and warmer ocean floors. Scientists fear the increasing rates of release could become a giant positive feedback and             result in a massive acceleration of global heating.

 

Ocean acidification (carbon saturated and chemically altered) and ocean heating could render the base life of the ocean food chain unable to produce protective shells (exist) and, therefore, unable to absorb carbon by 2030. Ocean life creates every second
            breath we breathe. If the food chain and carbon regulation were  to collapse, land life could not survive either.
            See: 10 x weaker carbon sink absorption in the southern ocean and 10, maybe even 20 x higher levels of ocean acidification.
            See: Mass base life (phytoplankton) die-off (40% since 1950) threatens survival of most life on Earth, blogeye
            See: climateye's Ocean acidification compilation, blogeye

 

   ■       Potential sudden climate system flip — +2 ºC to +4 ºC in as brief as a 3 year period of time. The record is +6 ºC in 1–3 years,
            +10-12 ºC over 50 years (Steffensen, 2008).
            See: Dramatic climate change is unpredictable, Science Daily

 

On our present course, these forces would, among other things, lead to epic fresh water scarcity and the collapse of global agriculture THIS CENTURY. Along the unpleasant way: sea level rise, floods, extreme weather events, resource wars and mass-migration, mass-
extinctions, extreme deforestation, soil depletion, extreme drought and desertification, proliferation of disease(s) and intangibles like the potential for a massive bee die-off (pollination).