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Summary:
(Click on a slide to see full page image)
Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 415 ppm
World population is over 7.75 billion
Mean global temperature is on trajectory for 4C rise over preindustrial levels by year 2100
(Some actually say that world will be +4C hotter much sooner)
Predictions are difficult as things might change but everything points to a miserable time for human civilisation.
Introduction: One hears slogans like 'Save the World', 'We must protect the environment', 'Planet is burning'. The fallacy in this thinking is to assume that it is the planet (mother Earth) that needs rescuing and we humans should do the right thing and help out.
What we must be saying is that human race is suffering, quality of life is on a declining path and we need to do something to rescue the human race from their self-inflicting foolishness. The planet has been around for over 4500 million years and has hosted various forms of life - humans only arrived a few million years ago. Nobody will notice if we disappear in a few hundred years - Earth will live on and, in a few thousand years, erase all traces of human existence.
Humans have been waging a war on the natural world and there can be only one winner. We need to take note.
It is not that we have not been warned - specially in the past 50 years, there have been scientifically sound advice about the need to take action. This has not been heeded and the negative effects of human activity on the earth are beginning to be felt in a serious way.
Earth's resources have limits - there are planetary boundaries - stay within the boundaries and the planet will continue to provide the facilities for us to live here. Current value of services nature provides us are estimated at 130 trillion dollars! Humans need food, water and air to survive. There are limits to how much food, freshwater, clean air our planet can give us. We have crossed many of the planetary boundaries and, unfortunately, there are few sign that humans are doing enough to improve matters in the future.
In this blog, I shall discuss why the trajectory we are on is not a good one and threatens the survival of human civilisation as we know now. I do not believe that there is an existential threat - we are not facing extinction - what is on the cards is a lot of misery for a good fraction of human population. In general, the wealthy OECD countries will manage to mitigate some of the effects of climate change, leaving the vast populations (and that is nearly 90% of the people) suffer miserably outside OECD. Ironically, it is the extravagant lifestyle of unbridled consumption in the wealthy countries that has been responsible for most of the damage to the environment so far. Even today, per capita, they are the biggest consumers of planetary resources.
Why can't Something be Done about it?
There are two factors at play that have serious effect on global warming and climate change: Fossil Fuels and Population. Let us look at some numbers first:
1. Fossil Fuels: We need fuel to generate energy. Fossil fules have been the driver of industrial growth for over 250 years (see slide). They emit CO2 that is responsible, in addition to boosting ocean acidity, for increasing global mean land and sea temperatures. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing since year 1800 with USA and EU being responsible for 50% cumulative emissions even though only about 11% of the population lives there.
Notice that Coal, oil and gas provide most of the energy. Renewables like solar and wind are barely able to supply the increase in energy demand.
Recently, much economic progress has been taking place in developing countries like China and India. These countries have large populations and people there aspire to reach living standards long enjoyed in USA and EU. This is a megatrend and unstoppable, and will largely be achieved by burning more fossil fuels. They also burn more of the highly polluting coal because it is cheaper and supplies are more reliable. The result is increasing emissions - in fact it is already happening with China now emitting 25% of global emissions - as much as USA and EU together. India too is catching up.
The CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use are actually increasing faster than in the past.
On the current trajectory, emissions will continue to increase over the next few decades and the atmospheric CO2 levels will continue to go up as well. Most experts are talking about global mean temperature rising by >3C by 2100 - a far cry from the 1.5C 'target' of the 2015 Paris accord.
Scientists and activists like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough make good points but they are up against formidable reality - for the next two to three decades, there is no energy source available that can replace the energy generated by fossil fuels. CO2 levels and global warming will continue to increase as in the past decades because the world leaders just can't move too far away from the global growth model - particularly in the developing countries where the people's expectations are at an all time high. It is interesting to note that fossil fuel industries receive an annual subsidy of $5000 billion.
Under current policies, temperature rise of nearly 4C by the year 2100 with all its consequences is projected. An interesting question is, whether we shall end up with a 5 or 6C rise!
2. Human Population: Our numbers have been rising exponentially. The slide shows some details:
There are several things about this slide that are worrying. Even with an extremely low rate of 0.1% annual increase (it is currently about 1% per year), the population will grow to 11 billion by 2100 and to 25 billion by year 3000. Mortality rates will be lower than today and the world will be overwhelmed by the number of 60+ years old people with hardly any young children around. The function of societies socially, economically, housing and healthwise will be very different.
More relevant for our discussion is the provision of basic necessities - feeding 11 billion population is difficult to imagine with the type of diet and waste that we indulge in these days. Massive changes to what we eat and how food is produced will have to be brought in. Much research is underway and new ideas about making more efficiently produced plant food diet are being talked about. Freshwater supply is a big worry too.
For the increasing populations, we shall need houses and factories - increased cement production will add massively to CO2 emissions. Huge area of land are currently cleared to grow food for livestocks and agriculture. Deforestation removes trees that then results in reduced absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere. Habitats for wildlife are lost and there is already a serious loss of bio-diversity throughout the globe.
Already, with 7.5 billion people, the earth's resources are extremely stretched. We live on a planet that has finite resources in terms of land, food, water and fresh air. These planetary boundaries are at breaking point - once broken the planet does not replenish itself efficiently and a vicious chain of decline sets in.
Many scientists feel that we are at that point already. Controlling population is a sensitive subject and nobody has a good answer as to how this aspect of the problem can be tackled. The current policy is not to talk about it!
In the wealthy countries, humans have treated the world resources inefficiently with total disregard for conservation. Globally, a third of the food produced is wasted. Obesity has been a problem of the rich countries but over the past 30 years, people in developing countries are also becoming obese and suffer with all the health related problems created by obesity.
Pollution has been a big problem in the throw away society where vast amounts of packaging (lot of it plastic) is used unnecessarily. Recycling is being encouraged and many people are talking about circular economy with the aim to achieve zero waste.
All efforts to control pollution, diet, waste etc. are not going to deliver the required climate mitigation as long as population keeps on increasing - even at 0.1% per annum - while each of us continues to consume more.
Many experts claim that population will plateau in response to better educated and more financially independent female population. To some extent this seems reasonable but I think that culturally humans will wish to have more children (the extent to which chinese couples tried to bypass the countries one-child policy) and under the weight of increasing number of over 60 year olds, govermnments will start encouraging higher birth rates - this is already evident in many countries. In any case, a projected population of 11 billion by year 2100 stands in sharp contrast to the much reduced carrying capacity of the earth of a few billion under a +4C scenario. Interesting times ahead...
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Have you read:
Making sense of Our Climate Change - Parts 1 to 6
Future of Food; How to feed 10 billion People?
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A 4C warmer world is Bad News
Scientific advice has been to act to limit global warming to 2C or less at the end of the century. The residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is several hundred years and climate change will continue for centuries beyond year 2100. Also, the climate of the earth is determined by a number of feedback loops - disrupt enough of these and the climate may irreversibly drift towards one extreme (hot or cold) - sometimes rapidly. The 2C warmer world is considered a limiting situation, beyond which changes can take their own momentum and could be difficult to control/reverse - so called 'tipping points' are reached. Predicting the climate then becomes difficult - almost certainly the reality will be much worse than linear models would suggest. Also, we lock-in adverse climate change with all its consequences for a much longer period - not good for human civilisation.
Specifically, let me consider what a 4C warmer world would look like. The mean global temperature increase is exactly what it says - it is an average increase in temperature - different parts of the globe will warm by different amounts. The poles will be warmer by 10 to 12 degrees, land area will also be warmer than 4C generally with the tropics affected most seriously. They will become sufficiently hot and humid to make them uninhabitable.
Warmer oceans will result in more water vapour in the atmosphere and hence we shall see more intense rainfalls and higher humidity. For ambient temerature of 37C or more, higher humidity causes heat stress and almost certainly tropics will be uninhabitable during the summer months.
The slide shows what the world will be like at +4C.
+4C world will not be a pleasant place for 11 billion people to live. Most regions in Africa, India, Southern China, most of USA and Brazil will be too hot or dry for agriculture and survival. Fresh water will be a problem and populations will have to migrate north. Canada and Siberia will be ideal places to live - infrastructure in the form of high rise, high density cities will need to be developed.
All people will have to eat plant based diet with new technologies like hydroponics widely used to safeguard fresh water and economise on land area.
It is expected that sufficient energy can be produced by using vast solar farms in Africa, Southern Europe, India, China and USA.
Arctic will be ice-free most of the year and new navigational routes will connect Europe to Asia. Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain. Currently, they are plentiful in coastal areas where lots of nutrients are available. Ocean upwelling also brings nutrients to surface and most phytoplankton are found in the northern latitudes. They will shift further north and vast areas of the ocean will not be able to support marine life higher up in the food chain.
Most mountain glaciers will have melted and rivers they feed will dry out. However, intensive rains will cause frequent flooding - life will be a nightmare.
Things might get much worse: The scenario I have described assumes a linear progression in the response of earth systems to a warming world. Once we hit +2C tipping points, we will expect to see unexpected events whose effects on the climate have not been included.
For example, permfrost that holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere will start to melt (it is already showing many sign of melting at levels that are 70 years ahead of schedule). Melting permafrost will put large amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere - accelerating global warming.
Oceans currently absorb about 50% of the CO2 we put in the atmosphere and there are some indications that the oceans are getting saturated with worrying implications of increased global warming.
Are There Any Hopeful Signs?
Historically, humans have always risen to the challenges. Even though world leaders are unable to take action because they are tied to the growth models requiring continued burning of fossil fuels and stoking global warming, there are strong signs that there is much unease at the grassroot level. Throughout the world, activist groups are protesting and asking for action to control climate change. Sustainable investment is being talked about that will divert funding from fossil fuel companies to more environment friendly sources of energy. Many new ideas about new sources of energy, new ways of growing food, switching to plant based diet on a big scale, increasing energy efficiency of products etc. are all welcome signs and may help delay the +4C world by a few years. However, rising population and absence of alternative energy sources makes the arrival of a +4C world near certainty - one can argue if it will be 2075 or 2100 or 2125? Societal Inertia also does not help - sustained action taken in 1970 or 1980 might have solved lot of the climate change threats in a sane fashion.
Final Word: It will not be out of place to address the apparent paradox: In year 2100, the world is expected to be +4C warmer with a carrying capacity of one billion people; what will happen to the remaining 10 billion?
First of all, it will be a gradual process - as parts of the world become uninhabitable and coastal cities start flooding, there will be a mass migration towards more northern latitudes. Siberia is already part of Russia, USA will annex Canada and Greenland by force and China will occupy Mongolia - the superpowers will accommodate their populations okay but the rest of the world - particularly 1.8 billion people of India will have no where to go. Many deaths will occur in the conflicts between indigenous populations of the north and migrants (who, if accepted, will be subjected to subhuman treatment).
With a large number of existential issues, World War 3 (WW3) is quite likely. Barring natural catastrophies like an asteroid strike or a super-volcano, other events could cause millions to die - for example, a virulent strain of a virus or widespread famines due to failure of monsoon rains and diseases due to polluted water supplies.
Going around is a crazy notion (by some eminent people) that somehow, when the earth becomes too crowded and polluted, we can colonize other planets and heavenly bodies in space. This is a hopelessly poor suggestion - I have discussed the matter of 'hype about space colonization' here.
However, I think the biggest threat will come from artificial intelligence that can prosper irrespective of the state of the climate. The super-artificial intelligence (SAI) might see no need of human existence. As I have said before - interesting times ahead...
Thanks for reading.
