Essay by Eric Worrall
Our monkey ancestors thrived and spread across the planet during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. But these scientists think a few degrees warming could make us extinct.
Climate change: More studies needed on possibility of human extinction
Catastrophic climate change outcomes, including human extinction, are not being taken seriously enough by scientists, a new study says.
The authors say that the consequences of more extreme warming – still on the cards if no action is taken – are “dangerously underexplored”.
They argue that the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of what they term the “climate endgame”.
They want UN scientists to investigate the risk of catastrophic change.
According to this new analysis, the closest attempts to directly understand or address how climate change could lead to global catastrophe have come from popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth and not from mainstream science research.
…
“I think it’s sane risk management to think about the plausible worst-case scenarios and we do it when it comes to every other situation, we should definitely do when it comes to the fate of the planet and species,” said lead author Dr Luke Kemp from the University of Cambridge.
The researchers found that estimates of the impacts of a temperature rise of 3C are under-represented compared to their likelihood.
Using climate models, the report shows that in this type of scenario, by 2070 around 2 billion people living in some of the most politically fragile areas of the world would be enduring annual average temperatures of 29C.
“Average annual temperatures of 29C currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University.
“By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects,” he said.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62378157
The abstract of the study;
Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, Kristie L. Ebi, Goodwin Gibbins, Timothy A. Kohler, Johan Rockström, Marten Scheffer, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, and Timothy M. Lenton
Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; received May 20, 2021; accepted March 25, 2022
August 1, 2022
Abstract
Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.
Read more: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
There are plenty of events which could kill us off, most of them are thankfully very unlikely. One thing which doesn’t threaten our existence is global warming.
Our monkey ancestors spread from the tropics to the high arctic during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, all the way up to Greenland, because 6-8C of global warming turned most of the Earth into a paradise for our warmth loving primate ancestors.
If a bunch of monkey ancestors with walnut size brains could figure out how to cope with global warming, I’m confident we could figure it out.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Using climate models,” Nuff said so stopped reading further!!! If they’re so confident that their models can predict the future, can they please give me six numbers plus bonus ball on the national lottery??? Much appreciated!!!
Absolutely !
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find archived articles on the BBC’s “Science / Environment” webpages covering scientific papers where the BBC journalists (and/or editors) were able to include terms like “societal collapse” or “human extinction” ?
Again, do you have any idea just how few of the “climate science” papers covered by BBC articles focussed on the “worst-case” projections of the RCP8.5 pathway ?
– – – – –
I mean, it’s not like the paper’s authors have a vested interest or anything … is it ?
Ah ! OK … as you were …
Shortly, UAH temperatures for July 2022 will be announced.
If the number for lower troposphere over Australia continues its present trend, we will have reached 120 months of flat trend.
No warming trend for the last 10 years.
Is that enough to make you sad?
Has no Aussie youngster under 10 years old felt the savagery of global warming?
Climate change alarmists, please provide a mechanism that allows such a pause. Geoff S.
Geoff, as the Grand Pause stretched towards double digit years, they broke out the UN IPCC CliSciFi models and determined that it would take a pause of 15 years to falsify such models. A few years later they upped that to 17 years, a period that was borderline laughable, even for them. When the pause went beyond 18 years, everything was memory-holed and the subject never brought up again: Official government and media silence works.
I look outside and the plant growth this year is exceptional. It is almost as if a warm winter, lots of Sun and high CO2 levels are good for plants.
Yah but… just you wait, Andy. In 30 years, we will all be dead from Climate Something!! “The Science™” says so.
I live in Arizona take care of a dog park, the grass look like hell. The reason the Bermuda grass did not take off in June because we had night after night of 60F temperatures. Bermuda stay dormant in those temperatures. We are presently running three to four degrees our normal highs and last week it was worse.
“Then suddenly,(dramatic chord)…..nothing happened.
But it happened suddenly, mind you.”
– Spike Milligan, “The Goon Show”.
The late, much-missed Milligan.
‘A poet with ginger knees’.
Auto
Click to see the backgrounds of this list of clowns.
I have a problem with this GLOBAL WARMING thing as I CANNOT find it in the ACTUAL figures and can only see it in the claims made in the relentless Alarmist propaganda infesting the Media.
Also; even with the ACTUAL figures, these seem to be merely ABSTRACT rather than actual due to the complicated statistical processing and mindsets involved in the data measurement procedures.
I suppose in this eclipse of intellectual sanity the only way to react is to exhibit the Hysteria of doom. It looks as if we are only using the left side of our brains dealing in emotions these days.
To be fair, scientists aren’t taking it seriously because it’s not a serious problem.
If they have the proof they are claiming why do they need the UN scientists? Because they are selling windmills and solar panels and like most advertisements they are exaggerating.
If CO2 does what they claim and the Earth is entering another ice age we may need more of it. In other words my claim, which I am not making, is as good as theirs.
What is truly stupid here is that catastrophic impact studies assuming 3, 4 and even 5 degrees of warming are legion. The fabled extinction of a million species comes to mind.
Most generously government funded. Money for nothing.
But the chicks are free, David.
Have you seen the current generation of chicks?
You get what you pay for, if you’re lucky
I thought the 60’s Earth Babies were ugly, the current crop is just, well uh, revolting is a kind word.
There they go again.
It’s the Hotpocalypse! Thermageddon! Ever buddy gonna die! Panic in the streets! Listen to me, listen to me. It’s a knock on cascade tipping point force magnifier feedback loop to Heck! Why won’t you care? I’m setting my hair on fire here people. Beware The Science. Give me your money or else. The End is nigh!
The BBC is complaining about the “97%’s Settled Science”?
Did it ever occur to them that human extinction is more likely to be caused by the political efforts to stop Nature from doing what Nature does Naturally?
The author list sounds like “round up the usual suspects.” CliSci morphing into CliSciFi mental masturbation.
Can someone please explain exactly HOW a 3C temperature rise and/or a global average temperature of 29C would lead to extinction of the entire human race? Preferably without resorting to fantasy.
But..it’s all in the models! Oh, sorry, the models are fantasy.
Climate science has now advanced from psychotic delusion to Schizophrenia.
No wonder my bill went up. The cost of the drugs alone is astronomical!
Eric, I think you may have hit on the cause of our problems in this sentence.
“If a bunch of monkey ancestors with walnut size brains could figure out how to cope with global warming, I’m confident we could figure it out.”
Our brains have grown too big. We start thinking about superfluous ideas that don’t have anything to do with survival.
Thankfully our “experts” including Soros, Schwab, and the rest of the Davos crowd will take care of the excess of big brained eaters. They are going to switch our focus back to survival.
Perhaps what we have here is desperation. Rational people are ignoring them or saying “bugger off with your BS”, so they must now go all out apocalypse.
From the paper- “Our proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda aims to direct exploration of the worst risks associated with anthropogenic climate change.”
At least they admit it’s an agenda and not a scientific examination.
“For the Climate Endgame agenda, we are particularly interested in catastrophic consequences.”
“Average annual temperatures of 29C currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University.”
The Sahara Desert is one of the most sparsely populated areas of the planet, outside of Antarctica, so there are nowhere near 30 million people living there. The northern part of the Sahara extends above 30 degrees north latitude, so that winter nights there are cool enough so that average annual temperatures are well below 29 C (84 F).
Where is this “Gulf Coast” where a Chinese author believes average annual temperatures are 29 C? If he is referring to the Gulf of Mexico, where the American coast is about 29 degrees north latitude, temperatures in late spring and summer can average about 29 C, but in late autumn and winter, daily maximum temperatures do not reach 29 C, and overnight lows are in the 12 – 18 C range. An “annual average” temperature has to include these cooler winter temperatures to be considered an annual average.
Has this co-author ever bothered to read Willis Eschenbach’s studies that show that thunderstorms tend to form over tropical oceans when surface temperatures exceed about 28 C, which bring rain and cooler air from high altitudes toward the surface (as well as blocking sunlight) and limit surface heating? A little extra CO2 in the air doesn’t prevent ocean water from evaporating, and forming clouds and rain!
Yes. We need to get cereal about climate. We need to get super cereal.
What Climateers have been busy doing about Crisis Global Warming before it even shows itself is creating massive destruction of our economies, industries, ability to heat and light our homes, feed ourselves… and it is only going to get worse. It’s questionable if we could avoid 100s of millions perishing from famine, cold and disease such conditions engender, even were we to reverse the mass psychosis that is gripping half the population and all of its leaders, institutions, scholarship… Feeble, talentless leaders are trying to do this turnaround right now.
The desperation is palpable. But, you don’t repair the intended terminal hit taken by the global fossil fuel industry in even a couple of years – financing, developing resources, laying pipelines, refining, fertilizer manufacture, shipping distribution… The enrollment of petroleum engineers has dropped down sharply…
https://jpt.spe.org/petroleum-engineering-continues-to-drop-but-there-is-talk-of-better-times-ahead
While more and more bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, which is a real threat we should be taking more seriously, these clowns are claiming we should be worrying about climate change???????
There’s actually far more risk of a war breaking out with Russia because of net-zero, which would very likely annihilate the planet, than there is of anything serious because of climate change.
These are supposedly clever people coming out with this stuff. Jeez.
Pretty sure it’s not exploring anything but pouring tax-payer money into propaganda
Because it is a lie. D’oooh!
Is to hard to understand without clothing and housing people cannot survive in temperatures below 80F degrees. The aborigines did just fine with out either(although they did have fire) in Australia. In the desert southwest in the USA the problem always has been water not heat.