Climate change and civilizational collapse
Climate change and civilizational collapse refers to a hypothetical risk of the
Some researchers connect historical examples of
Some of the more extreme warnings of civilizational collapse caused by climate change, such as a claim that civilization is highly likely to end by 2050, have attracted strong rebutals from scientists.
Some of the most high-profile writing on climate change and civilizational collapse has been written by non-scientists. Notable examples include "
Suggested historical examples
Archeologists identified signs of a megadrought for a millennium between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago in Africa and Asia. The drying of the Green Sahara not only turned it into a desert but also disrupted the monsoon seasons in South and Southeast Asia and caused flooding in East Asia, which prevented successful harvest and the development of complex culture. It coincided with and may have caused the decline and the fall of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization.[21] The dramatic shift in climate is known as the 4.2-kiloyear event.[22]
The highly advanced
More generally, recent research pointed to climate change as a key player in the decline and fall of historical societies in China, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. In fact, paleoclimatogical temperature reconstruction suggests that historical periods of social unrest, societal collapse, and population crash and significant climate change often occurred simultaneously. A team of researchers from Mainland China and Hong Kong were able to establish a causal connection between climate change and large-scale human crises in pre-industrial times. Short-term crises may be caused by social problems, but climate change was the ultimate cause of major crises, starting with economic depressions.[31] Moreover, since agriculture is highly dependent on climate, any changes to the regional climate from the optimum can induce crop failures.[32]
A more recent example is theModern discussion
2000s
As early as in 2004, a book titled Ecocriticism explored the connection between apocalypticism as expressed in religious contexts, and the secular apocalyptic interpretations of climate and environmental issues.[35] It argued that the tragic (preordained, with clearly delineated morality) or comic (focused on human flaws as opposed to inherent inevitability) apocalyptic framing was seen in the past works on environment, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1972), and Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992).[36][37]
In the mid-2000s, James Lovelock gave predictions to the British newspapers The Independent and The Guardian, where he suggested that much of Europe will have turned to desert and "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century.[38][39] In 2008, he was quoted in The Guardian as saying that 80% of humans will perish by 2100, and that the climate change responsible for that will last 100,000 years.[40] By 2012, he admitted that climate change had proceeded slower than he expected.[41]
2010s-present
In late 2010s, several articles have attracted attention for their predictions of apocalyptic impacts caused by climate change. Firstly, there was "The Uninhabitable Earth",[15] a July 2017 New York magazine article by David Wallace-Wells, which had become the most-read story in the history of the magazine,[42] and was later adapted into a book. Another was "What if we stopped pretending?", an article written for The New Yorker by Jonathan Franzen in September 2019.[16] Both articles were heavily criticized by the fact-checking organization Climate Feedback for the numerous inaccuracies about tipping points in the climate system and other aspects of climate change research.[17][18]
Other examples of this genre include "What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?", a year 2022 article for
Notably, subsequent writing by David Wallace-Wells had stepped back from the claims he made in either version of The Uninhabitable Earth. In 2022, he authored a feature article for The New York Times, which was titled "Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View".[53] The following year, Kyle Paoletta argued in Harper's Magazine that the shift in tone made by David Wallace-Wells was indicative of a larger trend in media coverage of climate change taking place.[54]
Scientific consensus and controversy
The
Only a minority of publishing scientists have been more open to apocalyptic rhetoric. In 2009, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, stated that if global warming reached 4 °C (7.2 °F) over the present levels, then the human population would likely be reduced to 1 billion.[8] In 2015, he complained that this remark was frequently misinterpreted as a call for active human population control rather than a prediction.[58] In a January 2019 interview for The Ecologist, he claimed that if we find reasons to give up on action, then there's a very big risk of things turning to an outright catastrophe, with the civilization ending and almost everything which had been built up over the past two thousand years destroyed.[9]
In May 2019, The Guardian interviewed several climate scientists about a world where 4 °C (7.2 °F) of warming over the preindustrial has occurred by 2100: one of them was Johan Rockström, who was reported to state "It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that" in such a scenario.[10] Around the same time, similar claims were made by the Extinction Rebellion activist Roger Hallam, who said in a 2019 interview that climate change may "kill 6 billion people by 2100"—a remark which was soon questioned by the BBC News presenter Andrew Neil[59] and criticized as scientifically unfounded by Climate Feedback.[6] In November 2019, The Guardian article was corrected, acknowledging that Rockström was misquoted and his real remarks were "It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that".[10]
Climate endgame
In August 2022, Schellnhuber, Rockström and several other researchers, many of whom were associated with
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Latent risk | Risk that is dormant under one set of conditions but becomes active under another set of conditions. |
Risk cascade | Chains of risk occurring when an adverse impact triggers a set of linked risks. |
Systemic risk | The potential for individual disruptions or failures to cascade into a system-wide failure. |
Extreme climate change | Mean global surface temperature rise of 3 °C (5.4 °F) or more above preindustrial levels by 2100. |
Extinction risk | The probability of human extinction within a given timeframe. |
Extinction threat | A plausible and significant contributor to total extinction risk. |
Societal fragility | The potential for smaller damages to spiral into global catastrophic or extinction risk due to societal vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and maladaptive responses. |
Societal collapse | Significant sociopolitical fragmentation and/or state failure along with the relatively rapid, enduring, and significant loss capital, and systems identity; this can lead to large-scale increases in mortality and morbidity. |
Global catastrophic risk | The probability of a loss of 25% of the global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades). |
Global catastrophic threat | A plausible and significant contributor to global catastrophic risk; the potential for climate change to be a global catastrophic threat can be referred to as "catastrophic climate change". |
Global decimation risk | The probability of a loss of 10% (or more) of global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades). |
Global decimation threat | A plausible and significant contributor to global decimation risk. |
Endgame territory | Levels of global warming and societal fragility that are judged sufficiently probable to constitute climate change as an extinction threat. |
Worst-case warming | The highest empirically and theoretically plausible level of global warming. |
The paper was very high-profile, receiving extensive media coverage
Public opinion
Some
In 2020, a survey by a French think tank
See also
- Anoxic event
- Late Bronze Age collapse
- Migration era
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