Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire.  Brain takes a serious as well as entertaining look at a world of possibilities for Earth and the human race.  He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.“ This is the first of a two-story examination of the global threat of climate change – what could happen and solutions.

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RALEIGH – How bad can climate change get? How horrible could the climate nightmare become for humanity if we do not take real action?

Lately there have been a number of articles and videos on the Internet trying to sugarcoat or greenwash climate change. They embody the “don’t worry, be happy” approach. There is even a new word to describe this phenomenon: hopium. The idea is that humanity does not really need to do anything special to solve climate change because “the marketplace” and “technology” will naturally solve it without any effort.

Many people in the climate change and scientific communities strongly disagree. They believe that humanity must change very quickly to avert the worst effects of climate change. For example:

  • Humanity must stop burning fossil fuels and go carbon neutral today, not in some indeterminate future timeframe like 2050.
  • Humanity must extract hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere today. Not “someday” – right now.
  • Humanity needs to protect big vulnerabilities like the rainforests and the glaciers in western Antarctica today, so they do not collapse.

There is another group of scientists who believe that it is already too late – that humanity has already dumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and is so entrenched on fossil fuels that there is no way we can turn back. They believe humanity is incapable of changing in time. The die has been cast. The trigger has been pulled. The fuse has been lit. All we can do is watch the impending catastrophe unfold and engulf us, utterly destroying the ecosystem. We are doomed.

And then the average person might look out at our world today, without paying much attention to climate news, and ask: How can we be doomed? Temperatures still seem reasonable. Beaches and coastal cities seem fine. It is raining in the rainforest. Antarctica is still icy. Farmers are harvesting crops. The whales are thriving. How can we go from this to utter catastrophe?

Therefore, let’s paint a picture of how this climate change catastrophe might unfold around us in the years to come if humanity refuses to act now. Let’s load up on some nightmare fuel by putting the worst effects of climate change center-stage, and let’s also speed up the clock a little bit.

We start our thought experiment with the Amazon rainforest. July through October are the drier months for this biome, and humans who want to destroy the rainforest (and turn it into farm fields) use these months to light the rainforest on fire. 2019 was a record-breaking year and there were major headlines as tens of thousands of fires burned. 2022 could break the records again. If the powers-that-be in Brazil stay in power, “fire in the rainforest” could become a complete free-for-all. See this article for details.

Photo courtesy of Marshall Brain

Imagine that we reach a tipping point. Imagine that scientific models fail to account for how rapacious these unregulated farmers and their fires can be. The rain in the rainforest declines and then stops much earlier than expected because too many trees have been destroyed so quickly. Without rain the rainforest collapses, and then the dead trees burn. This releases a spike of a hundred gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The planet is now warming up even faster.

All this new carbon dioxide also creates even more acid in the oceans. Ocean acidity falls below a pH of 8.0, then starts heading toward 7.9. Today humanity has already killed off half of the life in the ocean through overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction. A combination of acidity + heating + human complacency causes the planet’s ocean ecosystems to hit a tipping point, and the remaining life in the ocean collapses. We lose most of the coral reefs, the fish, the shellfish, the whales. See this article for details.

Marshall Brain: The gigantic risk from ocean acidification

“Oh well!” humanity will shrug as it binges the latest Netflix special, “but did we really need the rainforests and the oceans? And what were blue whales good for anyway?”

Then the real heatwaves will arrive. We see glimmers of this trend already. Heating events in the Arctic, heating events in Canada severe enough to damage crops. Recall that in 2021 there was a town in Canada that hit 120 degrees F. The whole west coast of North America was under a massive heat dome and 1,000+ people died. There are headlines right now about a heatwave in India, where temperatures are regularly topping 100 degrees F. Farmers and construction workers cannot work in the middle of the day for fear of heat sickness. The wheat crop is damaged. Heatwaves in the future will be worse.

You may recall the big headlines around the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. You may recall that the goal was, in this century, to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If planet Earth goes above that level, the chances for heatwaves, droughts, die-offs, etc. all rise precipitously.

• 2.0 degrees Celsius of global heating is bad.
• 3.0 degrees Celsius of global heating is terrible.
• 4.0 degrees Celsius of global heating is catastrophic.

The problem is that 1.5 degrees is impossible now, as we are already at 1.2 degrees in 2022. The question is, how high will Earth’s average temperature go? And the deeper question underpinning it is, “When will humanity stop burning fossil fuels?” Right now, it looks like the answer may be “never” because of the strength of the global fossil fuel industry + human complacency + inertia + disinformation.

To create a good nightmare scenario, consider what happens if global heating hits 3.0 degrees Celsius. It creates so many problems, but the biggest problem is that the heat may make the equatorial region of planet Earth uninhabitable for humans. The heat will be accompanied by drought. See this article for details. High heat + drought is fatal.

Pull up Google maps, zoom out so you can see the globe, and look at Earth’s equatorial region. Think about Nigeria, population 200 million. Or Ethiopia, population 115 million. Or Indonesia, population 270 million. Or Columbia, population 50 million. Or even Mexico, population 120 million. These places will experience extreme heat because of all the new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Do we expect that these hundreds of millions of people are going to sit still and take it, until they die? Of course they won’t. Thus the climate migrations begin.

Pixabay image

Imagine 100 million climate refugees coming up toward the United States and Canada from Central and South America seeking relief. Or 100 million people heading from the Middle East and Africa toward Europe. Europe looks at the approaching hordes and thinks, “if we let you all in, then everyone dies. So we cannot let you in.” This will be the kind of calculation that nations are running in the developed world. And thus, a billion people will die from a combination of heat sickness, thirst, and starvation? See this video if you would like to understand the uncomfortable reality at even 2.0 degrees Celsius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q67IWTQ55vM. At 3.0 degrees it is much worse. At 4.0 degrees the effects are unimaginable to us today.

“Oh well!” humanity will shrug, “but that’s a billion less mouths to feed. And what was Earth’s equatorial region good for anyway?”

With all this heat, the Thwaites glacier and adjacent glaciers collapse. See this article for details. Greenland will be melting fast. Thus, we see irreversible change when sea levels rise by 1 foot, then 2 feet, then 10 feet. A hundred million more climate refugees will be displaced from coastal cities and settlements. The world’s beaches get destroyed.

Slap yourself and pay attention: The Doomsday Glacier is a global risk

What else can go wrong as global temperatures rise like this?

  • Crop failures
  • Food shortages
  • Increasing drought
  • Bigger and more intense hurricanes and monsoons
  • Infrastructure destruction
  • Increased wildfire activity as already previewed in Australia, California, and Russia
  • More intense flooding events caused by things like atmospheric rivers
  • Other unexpected weather extremes
  • Mass die-offs
  • Societal upheavals, riots, and war

If you really want to load up on nightmare fuel, consider the feedback loops. A feedback loop occurs when a change in the climate causes a side effect, and then the side effect causes the climate to change even more. For example:

  • Arctic ice melts because of the general warming trend. Therefore, incoming sunlight hits darker arctic seawater and heats it up, rather than getting reflected back into space by white arctic ice. The warming seawater melts even more ice, which raises the temperature of the seawater even more, and so on until all the ice is gone.
  • Rising global temperatures melt permafrost in the Arctic. The melting permafrost releases carbon and methane into the environment, raising the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere independently of human emissions. The planet warms, so more permafrost melts, and so on, until it has all melted and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has become catastrophic.
  • There is a phenomenon called the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis. It is not certain if this happens or not because we are out in uncharted territory. Under this hypothesis, if it turns out to be true, methane hydrates that are currently trapped as ice on the ocean floor melt because of warming seawater. A massive amount of methane enters the atmosphere. Since methane is far stronger as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, it warms the planet even more, releasing more methane hydrates, and so on.

There will be thousands of extinction events in here as myriad species die off in the heatwaves and droughts and collapses that are coming. It will add up to a global mass extinction event. What if it gets bad enough to create a human extinction event? This video can help you understand how it might happen in a 6.0 degrees world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWoiBpfvdx0.

This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Solutions

The climate change scenarios that we have explored in this thought experiment paint a dire picture. What can humanity do if we want to change course and avoid these worst-case scenarios?

This is the first step: Humanity must stop burning fossil fuels right now. Immediately. Today. Not in decades, but now.

The big question: Will humanity be able to do this before major die-offs begin or the feedback loops get rolling so significantly that they become irreversible?

Think back to the Apollo moon missions. How did the United States go from its first astronaut in orbit (1961) to landing astronauts on the moon (1969) so quickly? Because the United States hired and organized 400,000 smart, dedicated people to solve the problem. We did this at a time when the United States population was much smaller than it is today.

Similarly, the United States drafted 10 million people and dedicated much of its industrial capacity to help win World War II. The U.S. population was half what it is today.

Right now, humanity and planet Earth are facing an existential threat from climate change. This threat deserves the same level of intensity to solve it. Even more.

What can we do? The United States and other countries can hire and organize a million smart, dedicated people to put maximum effort into solving the climate crisis quickly. They would:

  • Radically increase the amount of power generated from renewables like solar, wind and geothermal sources, along with storage technologies since these renewables can be intermittent.
  • Radically increase the production of electric vehicles and batteries, developing new technologies as fast as possible and then scaling them up to industrial levels.
  • Radically increase the amount of public transit, so that the world’s population needs far fewer cars.
  • Radically increase the production of synthetic gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel, eliminating the need for fossil fuels in existing infrastructure.
  • Completely eliminate all coal-fired, oil-fired, and natural gas power plants and replace with renewables.
  • Replace natural gas from the ground with synthetic natural gas that is carbon neutral.
  • Discover and deploy new ways to create concrete without any fossil fuels. Do the same for bricks and steel.
  • Discover and deploy new ways to grow food without any fossil fuels.
  • Radically accelerate lab-grown and plant-based meat and dairy alternatives and end traditional meat agriculture.
  • Discover and deploy the technology to extract 200 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year.
  • Discover and deploy techniques to save energy.
  • Discover and deploy geoengineering strategies.
  • Find new ways to protect the glaciers in Antarctica and around the world.
  • Remove human activities from the rain forests and let them regenerate and grow.
  • Discover and deploy new ways to abate ocean acidity.
  • Discover and deploy new ways to save, store, transport and create fresh water.
  • Discover and deploy new ways to solve the plastic problem.
  • And so on…

Use the million smart people to do all these things simultaneously and as quickly as possible. Save planet Earth while we can.

Someone out in the audience is yelling, “That’s impossible! How will we afford this?” Simply ask:

  1. How did the United States afford the moon missions?
  2. How did the world afford World War II?
  3. How can the United States afford to spend $1 trillion+ on its nuclear arsenal?
  4. How can the countries of the world afford their enormous military budgets?

How do we afford any of these things? The answer is: we make the decision to afford these things. Humanity can absolutely afford to solve the biggest existential crisis that human beings and planet Earth have ever faced.

If we do not take action at this scale, then we will lose it all:

  • We will lose the Earth’s equatorial region
  • We will lose billions of human lives
  • We will lose all our coastal cities and beaches
  • We will lose thousands of species in the oceans
  • We will lose thousands of species on land
  • We will lose the world’s rainforests
  • We will lose much of our croplands and thus our food supply
  • And so on…

There is so much at stake. Will we lose everything because we cannot make some sacrifices and stop burning fossil fuels? It seems impossible that humanity would choose to lose everything, but this is exactly the path humanity is on today.

It really is this simple: We, the human species worldwide, must allocate the money and people and resources to save our species and planet Earth while we can. We must act now, and we must act aggressively. If we do not, we will watch the climate crisis maximally unfold and engulf us in catastrophe.

What can we do to prevent climate catastrophe? Here are some solutions

Sources