This is absurd when considering climate change not only as a political challenge, but an existential threat to our species. Even if warming remained below two degrees – something viewed as increasingly unlikely – it would represent an almost indescribable disaster. Anything beyond that, though, could be cataclysmic, creating a cascade of feedbacks concluding in a world unable to maintain multiple species – including us.
Can We Survive Climate Catastrophe?
What might such a sequence of events look like? A reasonable template might be the last time our planet was three degrees warmer than today, as it was some 10 million years ago. Then, sea levels were twenty-five metres higher than at present, with continental glaciers entirely absent from the Northern Hemisphere.
In this world, much of the Amazon basin would become a desert, and the glaciers which provide drinking water for much of China and the Indian subcontinent would all but disappear. The southern belt of the United States, countries bordering the Mediterranean – not to mention the Middle East, Australia and much of Africa – would become too hot to sustain their present populations. Alongside all of this, there would be a major rise in extreme weather events and a profound disturbance to the hydrological cycle. Here ‘once in a century’ weather events would be happening all of the time, with the previously extreme becoming routine. In this respect the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season with Hurricanes Irma and Harvey in particular, not to mention the sweltering summer of the following year, provide a glimpse of the future.
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