Guest “Really?!?” by David Middleton
Did you know that “?!?” is an interrobang? Neither did I until I started writing this post.
What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?
BY PARAG KHANNA
AUGUST 15, 2022 7:55 AM EDT
Khanna is the founder of FutureMap and author of the new book MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us.
In 2021, global carbon dioxide emissions reached 36.3 billion tons, the highest volume ever recorded. This year, the number of international refugees will cross 30 million, also the highest figure ever. As sea levels and temperatures rise and geopolitical tensions flare, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity is veering towards systemic breakdown. The superpowers will be no salvation: Locked in a “new Cold War,’ the U.S. careens between populism and incompetence, while China remains locked down at home and alienates many nations abroad.
We’re not very good at predicting the next five days, let alone five years.
[…]
Today it’s fashionable to speak of civilizational collapse. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) states that just a 1.5 degree Celsius rise will prove devastating to the world’s food systems by 2025.
[…]
TIME
Really?!?
2025 is just three years away. Let’s go to the data.
- Food Supply (Our World in Data)
- Crop Yields (Our World in Data)
- Temperature Change and CO2 (Wood For Trees)
Crop yields
Daily food supply per capita
The article actually gets worse
Meanwhile, the most recent IPCC report warns that we must reverse emissions by 2025 or face an irreversible accelerating breakdown in critical ecosystems, and that even if the Paris agreement goals are implemented, a 2.4 degree Celsius rise is all but inevitable. In other words, the “worst case” RCP 8.5 scenario used in many climate models is actually a baseline.
TIME
RCP8.5 is a close to physically impossible as the human imagination can get. Atmospheric CO2 will probably double relative to the assumed preindustrial level around the end of this century.
Climate sensitivities derived from the closest thing to direct actual observational measurements (instrumental) yield climate sensitivities ranging from innocuous to mildly concerning. It’s also important to note that equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is not the key parameter. The transient climate response (TCR) is what matters. It is the warming that occurs concurrent with the rise in atmospheric CO2 and it’s generally only about 1/2 to 2/3 of the ECS. So a 2 °C ECS would probably equate to a 1.0 to 1.3 °C rise in temperature as the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubles. The remainder of the ECS warming theoretically occurs over the subsequent 500 years, or so, as Trenberth’s missing heat returns from the depths of the oceans. Anywhere from 0.5 to 0.8 °C of the predicted TCR-induced warming has already occurred… Assuming arguendo that the 2.0 °C ECS estimate is reasonable, “business as usual” will lead to only an additional 0.5 °C or less of warming by 2100.
And worse
Let’s assume that we are indeed hurtling towards the worst-case scenario by 2050: Hundreds of millions of people perish in heatwaves and forest fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, state failures and protracted wars.
TIME
Then he channels Thanos
But even in the most plausibly dire scenarios, billions of people will survive.
[…]
So where will the young survivors of today’s storms gather over the next 20-30 years? Which technologies will be the platforms of our future societies and economies? What new model of civilization awaits us?
TIME
He closes out with bits of plotlines from just about every post-apocalyptic science fiction movie ever made. I wish I had time to ridicule every paragraph in the article.
Dr. Parag Khanna and his PhD in international relations has earned a Billy Madison Lifetime Achievement award.
References
Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie (2013) – “Food Supply”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply’ [Online Resource]
Run away! The killer rabbits have returned!
“And every bunny was kung .. fu fighting.”
“The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) states that just a 1.5 degree Celsius rise will prove devastating to the world’s food systems by 2025.”
Based-on what? Other than what they really REALLY hope will happen, I mean – that seems to be what all their other predictions are based-on. Has anybody pointed-out to them that they’re basing their catastrophism on global warming, which they claim will be caused by CO2 – and that plants JUST LOVE CO2?
As a result of all this pesky CO2, the Earth is greening – which suggests plants will do a whole lot better than they so direly predict. Nothingburger.
The Borg have an infallible counter for this increase to food supply. Their success with the climate change hoax can be extended to demonise the use of fertilisers. Fertiliser manufacture depends on NO2 as a precursor for ammonium nitrate. The Borg believe NO2 has much more potential as a GHG target than methane, and banning the use of ammonium nitrate will do much more damage to the world than the war on CO2 has done for them.
Sri Lanka has provided a very succinct example of just how much damage this campaign can achieve. The Greens in the EU are already forcing this calumny on Europe with the WEF cheering them on. It seems that the only lesson learned from the Sri Lankan disaster is that the Borg now has another very effective weapon.
What is sickening is that governments now appear to be purposely imposing policies to make food shortages a reality – see Sri Lanka and the Netherlands as 2 who are leading the way. It is not climate change that will create food shortages, it is climate policy that will.
Don’t forget Canada in that list.
Makes one wonder if the war on fertilizers that contain nitrogen is a desperate attempt to make all their food shortage prophesies come true?
Ooh ya think? The fact that not one single solitary one of their predictions has come close to true so far has probably not escaped their attention. In their fruitless quest to become relevant, I wouldn’t put it past them to engineer a disaster. On the other hand, Hanlon’s razor suggests they really might all be bloody stupid idiots without a clue.
I’ve been wondering where this 3-year until disaster timeline was coming from – been seeing it all over.
Have you been reading 30 year old back issues of magazines?
Assuming Brandon serves out one full term occupying the White House… Donald Trump or Ron Desantis will be moving in in January 2025, hence the world ending in 2025 trope… 😎
David, to paraphrase a great statesman and Nobel Prize winner, never underestimate the ability of [Republicans] to F-things up.
It’s like the skit from Beyond the Fringe – Now is the end perish the world (nothing) well not quite the conflagration we were counting on. Oh well, better luck next time.
The one truth in the referenced article is that hundreds of millions may well perish if current trends continue, not from imaginary catastrophic warming but from starvation when these idiots convince the policy-makers to destroy the systems that produce our food, energy and safety. We are already making food more unavailable/unaffordable for people in the least developed nations. How can we think this is virtuous? How can we ignore the welfare of so many in the cause of an imaginary bogeyman totally unsupported by real science? Worse, the climate evangelists keep claiming we are saving the poorest and least developed from catastrophe – what catastrophe? enough to eat? cheap reliable energy? education? female empowerment?
“The one truth in the referenced article is that hundreds of millions may well perish if current trends continue, not from imaginary catastrophic warming but from starvation when these idiots convince the policy-makers to destroy the systems that produce our food, energy and safety.”
Climate change policy will have killed them, not human-caused climate change, which has never been shown to be real.
They will die because our leaders are living in a delusional alternate universe where they think CO2 is a dangerous gas. The CO2 is not dangerous, it is the deluded leaders who are dangerous.