Within a few decades, according to an article in New York Magazine, global warming will make our planet uninhabitable. Human beings will become extinct due to heat death, the end of food, climate plagues (such as bubonic plague germs thawing out when the icecap melts), unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, and poisoned oceans.
In fact, if this time table is correct, most of us now reading this blog will die of one or more of those factors, each of which is discussed in a section of the article. Read the article linked after the jump.
Now a number of climate scientists, including those who warn about global warming, are saying that this apocalyptic doomsaying gets the science wrong and does more harm than good.
Why is that?
Do you think there is something to these warnings. Are they an attempt to get people’s attention in the face of public skepticism about the problem? Is it better to give the worse case scenario rather than a more measured treatment if the purpose is to “wake people up”?
Compare this prophecy to religious end-of-the-world proclamations. Is it a sign that environmentalism has become a religion, complete with “Repent for the End is Near!” preaching?
From David Wallace-Wells, When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?, New York Magazine:
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Illustration from Max Pixel, CC0, Public Domain
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