‘WE KNOW LEAST
Experts warn we don’t understand just how real risk of catastrophe and even total extinction is
THE climate risk to human extinction or total societal collapse has been “dangerously under explored” according to a group of climate scientists.
It follows a study called Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios led by Dr Luke Kemp at Cambridge University.
The work, which involved experts around the world, found that while uncertainties on future emissions suggest the chance of climate catastrophe is small, there are “ample reasons” to think they can’t be ruled out.
As a result they believe the world needs to prepare for the possibility of climate-induced apocalyptic disaster.
“Climate catastrophe is relatively under-studied and poorly understood,” the scientists said.
The paper, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlighted how research on climate change “focused on the impacts of 1.5C and 2C, and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises are sparse”.
But it added that there have been “few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts from warming of 3C or above”.
‘Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction’
“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” says lead author Dr Kemp. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event.
Disaster
“It has helped fell empires and shaped history. Even the modern world seems adapted to a particular climate niche.
“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events.
“Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities and impede recovery from potential disasters such as nuclear war.
“The catastrophic risk is there, but we need a more detailed picture. A greater appreciation of catastrophic climate scenarios can help compel public action.”
Now those behind the study are calling on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to dedicate a future report to catastrophic climate change to galvanise research and inform the public.
The team behind the PNAS paper propose a research agenda that includes the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine and malnutrition, extreme weather, conflict, and vector-borne diseases.
Rising temperatures pose a major threat to global food supply, they say, with increasing probabilities of “breadbasket failures” as the world’s most agriculturally productive areas suffer collective meltdowns.
They also believe hotter and more extreme weather could create conditions for new disease outbreaks as habitats for both people and wildlife shift and shrink.
The authors caution climate breakdown will likely exacerbate other “interacting threats” from rising inequality and misinformation to democratic collapse and even new forms of destructive AI weaponry.
Dr Kemp added: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while remaining blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk-management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
Meanwhile, a top temperature of 31.2C recorded at Armagh Planetarium on July 18 was 14.1C higher than the same date in 1922.
Weather
The Planetarium and Observatory has been collecting weather data for almost 200 years. And thermometer readings collected on the same date each decade for the last century shows temperatures are rising here.
While not a climate scientist, its director Professor Michael G Burton is a physicist.
He says: “We can see what’s going on in our weather record.
“Over the course of the 200 years that we have been measuring it, you can clearly see the rise in the average temperature over the last three of four decades is very apparent.”