That the current climate change is accelerating in its ferocity seems to have escaped its warranted attention. The chart of global atmospheric temperature illustrates a dangerous pattern which is accelerating.
A primary factor in this quickening rise is excess carbon release into the atmosphere via human pollutants. This has put the planetary carbon cycle into overdrive.
In 1960 carbon emissions were at 10 gigatonnes. In 2019 50 gigatonnes will be emitted. Hollow pledges by governments to do something have amounted to nothing. At root is the plutocracy which succors capitalism, the vampirish enterprise which has generated humanity’s doom.
The impact of global warming and other environmental calamities is manifold. Foremost is upping the tempo of extinction that is already underway.
Global food production is already dropping. That too will accelerate. Water shortages will become more widespread within the next 25 years, further reducing the ability to produce food.
The heat in tropical regions becoming unbearable will spell mass migration, at a time when immigration is unwelcome. The outcome will be misery and death for millions, even billions.
Continuing pollution of air and water, even at the present rate, means more disease and shorter life spans. The shorter life spans won’t matter much because world civilization will collapse by 2060–2070. No one under the age of 30 is going to die of natural causes, unless you consider the debilitation from obesity a natural cause.
The interlinked global economic system is more fragile than generally appreciated. So too the thin veneer of civility upon which humanity relies for societies to function. Societal collapses will be spasmodic and cascading. Wars born of desperation can only accelerate the process.
One point must be made clear. There is no technological fix for the insanity of humanity. (One can only laugh derisively at those obscenely rich men who think space travel provides a possible solution.) No human technology of significance has ever done anything but make the environmental situation worse. The very reason the world is in such dire straits is the direct outcome of technology – what economists call “externalities,” which are unintended consequences.
There is only the slimmest prospect that humans won’t be extinct by the turn of the 22nd century, when average global air surface temperature is 5–6 °C hotter than it was before industrialization. That hope lies in building survival cities specifically built to ride through the environmental devastation. Such an effort would require a degree of foresight and meticulous planning so far unseen in human history. And success would leave only a few million alive.