Global nightmare: What happens if humanity doesn’t take real action against climate change

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Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire. Brain takes a serious, but also entertaining, look at the possibilities for Earth and humanity. He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.“ This is the first of a two-story examination of the global threat of climate change – what could happen and solutions.

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RALEIGH –How dangerous can climate change become? What could climate change do to humanity if we don’t take immediate action?

There have been many videos and articles on the internet trying to sugarcoat climate change. They embody the “don’t worry, be happy” approach. Hopium is even a new word that describes this phenomenon. The idea is that humanity does not really need to do anything special to solve climate change because “the marketplace” and “technology” will naturally solve it without any effort.

Photo courtesy Marshall Brain

Many scientists and climate change experts strongly disagree. They believe that humanity must make drastic changes to prevent the worst effects from climate change. Take this example:

Humanity must stop burning fossil fuels today and become carbon neutral in the future, not in 2050.
Humanity must remove hundreds of gigatons carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Not “someday” – right now.
Humanity must now protect major vulnerabilities such as the rainforests in western Antarctica and the glaciers there, so they don’t fall.

There is another group of scientists who believe that it is already too late – that humanity has already dumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and is so entrenched on fossil fuels that there is no way we can turn back. They believe that humanity is not capable of changing in the shortest time possible. The die is already rolled. The trigger has been pulled. The fuse has been blown. We can only watch the impending disaster unfold and engulf our ecosystem, utterly dissolving it. We are doomed.

The average person might then look at the world around them and ask: How are we doomed? Temperatures are still relatively low. It is fine to visit beaches and cities along the coast. It is currently raining in the rainforest. Antarctica is still frozen. Farmers are harvesting crops. The whales are flourishing. How can we make this a total disaster?

Therefore, let’s paint a picture of how this climate change catastrophe might unfold around us in the years to come if humanity refuses to act now. Let’s load up on some nightmare fuel by putting the worst effects of climate change center-stage, and let’s also speed up the clock a little bit.

Our thought experiment begins with the Amazon rainforest. July through October are the driest months for this biome. Humans who want to burn the rainforest and turn it into farms use these months to light it on fire. 2019 was a record year with tens of thousand of fires. This made headlines. 2022 could set new records. If the powers-that-be in Brazil stay in power, “fire in the rainforest” could become a complete free-for-all. See This article for details.

Imagine reaching a tipping point. Imagine that scientific models fail in their ability to account the rapaciousness and cruelty of unregulated farmers and firebrands. Because too many trees were destroyed so quickly, the rain in the rainforest stops falling and then drops much earlier than anticipated. Without rain, the rainforest collapses and then the dead trees are burned. This causes the atmosphere’s to release a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide. The planet is now warming faster.

All this carbon dioxide also creates more acidity in the oceans. Ocean acidity begins to fall below pH 8.0, and then moves toward 7.9. Half of the ocean’s inhabitants have been killed by humans today, due to overfishing and pollution. A combination of acidity + heating + human complacency causes the planet’s ocean ecosystems to hit a tipping point, and the remaining life in the ocean collapses. We lose most of our coral reefs and shellfish as well as the whales. See This article for details.

Marshall Brain: The enormous risk of ocean acidification

“Oh well!” humanity will shrug as it binges the latest Netflix special, “but did we really need the rainforests and the oceans? And what were blue whales good for anyway?”

The real heatwaves are then likely to arrive. We already see signs of this trend. Heating events in Canada and the Arctic can cause severe crop damage. Remember that in 2021, a Canadian town reached 120 degrees F. More than 1,000 people died in the heat dome. There are news reports about a heatwave sweeping India. Temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees F. Farmers, construction workers, and others are unable to work in the middle hours of the day due to heat sickness. The wheat crop has been damaged. The future heatwaves will be even worse

You may have seen the headlines about the Paris Climate Agreement 2015 in 2015. You may recall the headlines surrounding the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. The chances of heatwaves and droughts will increase if the planet Earth heats above this level. All of these risks are extreme.

• 2.0 degrees Celsius of global heating is bad.
• 3.0 degrees Celsius of global heating is terrible.
• 4.0 degrees Celsius of global heating is catastrophic.

1.5 degrees Celsius is impossible right now, and we will be at 1.2 degrees in 2022. The question is, how high will Earth’s average temperature go? And the deeper question underpinning it is, “When will humanity stop burning fossil fuels?” Right now, it looks like the answer may be “never” because of the strength of the global fossil fuel industry + human complacency + inertia + disinformation.

Consider what would happen if global warming reaches 3.0 degrees Celsius. This is a nightmare scenario. This creates many problems, but the most serious problem is that the heat could make the equatorial regions of planet Earth uninhabitable. The heat will be accompanied with drought. See This article for details. High heat + severe drought are fatal.

Pull up Google maps, zoom out so you can see the globe, and look at Earth’s equatorial region. Think of Nigeria, which has a population in excess of 200 million. Or Ethiopia, population 115 million. Or Indonesia, which has a population of 270 millions. Or Columbia, which has a population of 50 millions. Or Mexico, with its 120 million inhabitants. These areas will feel extreme heat from all the new carbon dioxide in their atmosphere. Are we to believe that these millions of people will just sit there and take it until death? Of course they won’t. So the climate migrations start.

Pixabay image

Imagine 100 million climate refugees fleeing Central and South America in search of relief. Or 100 million people moving from the Middle East to Europe. Europe looks at the approaching hordes and thinks, “if we let you all in, then everyone dies. So we cannot let you in.” This will be the kind of calculation that nations are running in the developed world. A combination of heat illness, thirst, or starvation will result in the deaths of a billion people. You can see this video to learn more about the unpleasant reality of temperatures below 2.0 degrees Celsius. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q67IWTQ55vM. It is even worse at 3.0 degrees. The effects of 4.0 degrees are unimaginable today.

“Oh well!” humanity will shrug, “but that’s a billion less mouths to feed. And what was Earth’s equatorial region good for anyway?”

All of this heat causes Thwaites and adjacent glaciers to collapse. See This article for details. Greenland will melt quickly. Sea levels will rise by 1 foot, 2 feet, and 10 feet respectively. This is irreversible change. One hundred million more refugees from climate change will be forced to flee coastal cities and settlements. The world’s beaches get destroyed.

Attention: The Doomsday Glacier poses a global risk

As global temperatures rise, what else could go wrong?

Crop failures
Food shortages
Drought is increasing
Monsoons and hurricanes that are more intense and powerful are often stronger.
Infrastructure destruction
Increased wildfire activity is already seen in Australia and California, as well as Russia
Atmospheric Rivers can cause more intense flooding events
Other unusual weather extremes
Mass die-offs
Societal upheavals. Riots. War.

The feedback loops are a great way to get nightmare fuel. A feedback loop is a situation in which a change in climate causes a side-effect, and then the side-effect causes the climate to change more. Here’s an example:

The general warming trend causes Arctic sea ice to melt. Incoming sunlight hits the darker arctic water and heats it up rather than being reflected back into space from white arctic. The seawater heats up as the melting seawater increases, and the temperature rises until the ice is gone.
Permafrost is melting in the Arctic due to rising temperatures. Permafrost melts, releasing carbon and methane into our environment. This raises the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere without human emissions. As the planet warms, permafrost will melt faster, and so on. Eventually, the atmosphere will be full of carbon dioxide.
Clathrate Gun Hypothesis is a phenomena. Because we are in uncharted territory, it is not clear if this occurs. If this hypothesis is true, methane-hydrates currently trapped on the ocean floor as ice will melt due to warming seawater. It is a huge amount of methane that enters the atmosphere. Because methane is stronger than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, it warms the earth even more. It releases more methanehydrates and so on.

As many species die off in the coming heatwaves, droughts and collapses, there will be thousands upon thousands of extinctions. It will all add up to a global mass extermination event. What if it becomes severe enough to cause a human mass extinction event? This video will help you understand what might happen in a world with 6.0 degrees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWoiBpfvdx0.

This is the stuff of nightmares.

Solutions

These climate change scenarios, which we explored in this thought experiment, paint a grim picture. What can humanity do to change the course and avoid these worst-case scenarios in the future?

This is the first step. Humanity must stop using fossil fuels immediately. Immediately. Today. Not in decades but today.

The big question is: Can humanity do this before major deaths occur or feedback loops become so extensive that they become irreversible for the entire population?

Take a look back at the Apollo moon missions. How did the United States become the first country to send an astronaut into orbit (1961) and land astronauts on the Moon (1969) in such a short time? The United States employed and organized 400,000 smart, dedicated individuals to solve the problem. This was done at a time when America’s population was much lower than it is today.

Similar to the United States, 10 million people were drafted and a large portion of their industrial capacity was used to win World War II. The U.S. had a half-million people, compared to today.

Climate change is a serious threat to humanity and the planet Earth. This threat requires the same intensity to be solved. Even more.

What can we do? The United States can hire and arrange a million smart, dedicated individuals to help solve the climate crisis as quickly as possible. They would:

Radially increase the power generated by renewable sources like solar, wind, and geothermal.
Radially increase the production of electric cars and batteries by rapidly developing new technologies and scaling them up to industrial scale.
Radically increase the amount of public transit, so that the world’s population needs far fewer cars.
Radially increase the production and use of synthetic gasoline, diesel, or aviation fuel. This will eliminate the need to burn fossil fuels in existing infrastructure.
Eliminate all coal-fired or oil-fired power stations and replace them with renewables.
You can replace natural gas from the ground by synthetic natural gas that is carbon-neutral.
Find and implement new methods to make concrete without the use of fossil fuels. Do the same thing for steel and bricks.
Explore and develop new ways to grow food using no fossil fuels.
Radially accelerate the production of plant-based and lab-grown meats and dairy products and end traditional meat farming.
The technology can be used to extract 200 gigatons from the atmosphere each year.
Find and implement energy-saving techniques.
Geoengineering strategies are easy to discover and implement.
Find new ways to save the glaciers of Antarctica and the rest of the world.
Eliminate human activity from rain forests and allow them to regenerate and expand.
Find and implement new ways to reduce ocean acidity.
Find and use new ways to save, store and transport water and make it fresh.
Find and implement new solutions to plastic problems.
And so on…

These tasks can be done simultaneously by millions of smart people as fast as possible. Save planet Earth while you can.

Someone out in the audience is yelling, “That’s impossible! How will we afford this?” Simply ask:

How did the United States finance the moon missions?
How did the world finance World War II?
How can the United States spend $1 trillion+ on its nuclear arsenal.
How can countries around the world afford huge military budgets.

How do we get these things on our budget? We make the decision to be able to afford these things. Humanity can certainly afford to solve the greatest existential crisis human beings and planet Earth ever faced.

We will lose everything if we don’t take action on this scale

We will lose the Earth’s equatorial region
We will lose billions upon billions of human life
All of our beaches and coastal cities are going to be gone
We will lose thousands upon thousands of species in our oceans
We will lose thousands upon thousands of species on the land
We will lose the world’s rainforests
We will lose a lot of our croplands and our food supply.
And so on…

There is so much at stake. Will we lose everything because it is impossible to make some sacrifices or stop using fossil fuels? It seems impossible that humanity would want to lose everything. But this is exactly what humanity is doing today.

It’s simple: The human species must allocate the money, people and resources to save the planet Earth and our species. We must act immediately and aggressively. We will see the climate crisis unfold to its full extent and then be swept away by catastrophe if we don’t.