Climate, nuclear crises stoke fears of worst
Doomsday seems to be over the horizon.
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — For thousands of years, predictions of apocalypse have come and gone. But with dangers rising from nuclear war and climate change, does the planet need to at least begin contemplating the worst?
The Global Challenges Foundation, a Swedish group that assesses catastrophic risks, warned in an annual report that the threat of nuclear weapons use was the greatest since 1945 when the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in history’s only atomic attacks.
The report warned that an all-out exchange of nuclear weapons, besides causing an enormous loss of life, would trigger clouds of dust that would obscure the sun, reducing the capacity to grow food and ushering in “a period of chaos and violence, during which most of the surviving world population would die from hunger.”
Kennette Benedict, a lecturer at the University of Chicago who led the report’s nuclear section, said risks were even greater than during the Cuban Missile Crisis as Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared less restrained by advisors and experts fear a quick escalation if the US responds.
Benedict is a senior advisor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which will unveil this month its latest assessment of the “doomsday clock” set since 2021 at 100 seconds to midnight.
Amid the focus on Ukraine, US intelligence believes North Korea is ready for a seventh nuclear test, Biden has effectively declared dead a deal on Iran’s contested nuclear work and tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have remained at a low boil.
Unchartered territory
On the year that humanity welcomed its eighth billion member, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the planet was on a “highway to climate hell.”
In extremes widely attributed to climate change, floods submerged one-third of Pakistan, China sweat under an unprecedented 70-day heatwave, and crops failed in the Horn of Africa — all while the world lagged behind on the UN-blessed goal of checking warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
UN experts estimated ahead of November talks in Egypt that the world was on track to warming of 2.1 to 2.9C — but some outside analysts put the figure well higher, with greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 again hitting a record despite pushes to renewable energy.
Climate change could cause ripple effects on food, with multiple breadbasket regions failing, fueling hunger and eventually political unrest and conflict.
A research paper that Luke Kemp, a Cambridge University expert on existential risks, co-authored noted that even a two-degree temperature rise would put the Earth in territory uncharted since the Ice Age.
Using a medium-high scenario on emissions and population growth, it found that two billion people by 2070 could live in areas with a mean temperature of 29 C, straining water resources.