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Earth Science Technology

New Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming To an End' Starting in 2050 (vice.com) 576

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. From a report: The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as "a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization" and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years. The paper argues that the potentially "extremely serious outcomes" of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they "fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years." On our current trajectory, the report warns, "planetary and human systems [are] reaching a 'point of no return' by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order."
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New Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming To an End' Starting in 2050

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  • Okay (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:26PM (#58713376)

    Probably for the best, based on any comments section on any website.

  • by RickyShade ( 5419186 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:27PM (#58713390)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Daddy, what's it gonna be like in the year 2000?

    Well sweetheart, for your sake I hope it'll all be peaches & cream.
    But I'm afraid the end time is near
    The cataclysmic apocalypse referred to in the scriptures of every holy book known to mankind
    It will be an Era fraught with boundless greed & corruption
    Where global monetary systems disintegrate, leaving brother to kill brother for a grain of overcooked rice
    The nations of the civilized world will collapse under the impressive weight of parasitic political conspiracies which remove all hope & optimism from their once faithful citizens
    Around the globe, generations of polluters will be punished for their sins
    Un-shielded by the ozone layer they have successfully depleted
    Left to bake in the searing naked rays of light
    Wholesale assassinations served to destabilize every remaining government
    Leaving the starving & wicked to fend for themselves
    Bloodthirsty renegade cyborgs created by tax-dodging corporations wreck havoc
    Pissed off androids tired of being slaves to a godless & gutless system, where the rich get richer & the poor get fucked over and out
    Unleash total worldwide destruction by means of nuclear holocaust
    Annihilating the terrified masses
    Leaving in its torturous wake nothing but vicious, cannibalistic, mutated, radiating, and horribly disfigured hordes of satanic killers
    Begged on revenge, but against whom?
    There are so few left alive
    Starvation reigns supreme, forcing unlucky survivors to eat anything & anyone in their path
    Massive earthquakes crack the planets crust like a hollow eggshell
    Causing unending volcanic eruptions
    The creatures of the seven seas, unable to escape the certain death upon land, boil in their liquid prison
    Disease then circles the earth, plagues & viruses with no known cause or cure
    Laying waste to whatever draws breath, and human-kind having proven itself to be nothing more than a race of ruthless scavengers
    Fall victim to merciless attacks at the hands of interplanetary alien tribes who seek to conquer our charred remains
    This is, Extinction Level Event
    The Final World Front, and there is only, one, year, left

  • ....we are going to destroy ourselves within 50 years. I don't think he was referring to climate change.

    But Consider, if there really is a point of no return in a rise of global temperature where all life dies then certainly there are those who would go to war to reduce the population and cause a short nuclear winter that some may survive. And with this, the WWIII threshold would have to be before the global warming point of no return happens.

    If these where the only choices you had, wouldn't you do the same

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:30PM (#58713418)

    That's when we'll finally run out of IPv4 addresses and all *have* to switch to IPv6, then we'll run out of colons (':') ... -- then things get bad.

  • If it happens, maybe the survivalists, once they've rebuilt civilization, will pay extra attention to not fucking with the planet we depend their lives on.

    I don't have much hope for the current Earth inhabitants.

    • With a tech reset I don't know that you could get back to the fossil fuels that are left, we already got the low hanging fruit. Without access to fossil fuels it'll be harder to build a renewable energy network, they might not be able to do much better than colonial era tech.
  • by bigpat ( 158134 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:33PM (#58713474)

    If climate change is actually a real threat, which I believe it is, then people need to get on board with 400% increase in nuclear power production in the next 15 - 20 years and stop fretting about the very manageable nuclear waste that in the US has been safely stored on-site for decades.

    Nuclear power production is the only carbon free alternative energy that can provably scale at affordable costs. Hydro is tapped out for the most part and solar and wind have scalability and other environmental sustainability issues that come along with a massive industrial scale infrastructure and widespread distribution of power production.

    • by ItsJustAPseudonym ( 1259172 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:44PM (#58713574)
      Do them all: nuclear, wind, solar.
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:17PM (#58713950)

        Do them all: nuclear, wind, solar.

        New nukes cost $0.15 / kwhr.

        Large PV solar farms cost $0.05 / kwhr.

        The latest wind turbines cost $0.03 / kwhr.

        Nuclear is for people that are bad at math.

        • Diversification in all things. The goal is to diversify the schedule and methods of power generation. Do that math.
          • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @02:03PM (#58714324)

            Diversification in all things.

            Diversity can mean building many windfarms in many different locations. The wind is always blowing somewhere.

            We can build 5 windfarms for the price of one nuke.

            The goal is to diversify the schedule and methods of power generation.

            The goal is reliable and affordable power. Diversity is a mechanism, not a goal in itself.

            • Wind only really works in places that are always windy. Solar only really works in places that are really sunny. And hydro needs a major river. Nuclear works pretty much everywhere, but I would avoid putting it on the coast or near fault lines. Fortunately those two places tend to be a good match for either wind, solar or both.

        • Well, when Solar and Wind start providing power 24-7, then nuclear will be a bad thing.

          Alas, the sun doesn't shine much at night, so solar isn't going to be 24-7 till we start putting up solar power satellites beaming power groundside.

          Wind isn't keyed to the Sun being in the sky, but it's still not 100%. Even ignoring the no-wind periods, there are also Really High Wind periods when you have to shut down your windturbines.

          Which leaves us with nuclear as the only zero-carbon energy source that runs day a

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <mashikiNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:59PM (#58714296) Homepage

          Large PV solar farms cost 0.192-0.22/kWh
          The latest wind turbines cost 0.125-0.255/kWh or more
          New nukes cost 0.085-0.095/kWh - existing nukes including fuel replenishment cycle and maintenance after 20 years is right around the same. The only game that beats new nukes, is hydroelectric like Niagara Falls which is around 0.023 kWh.

          Unless you live in a country where nuclear power is bad, in which case it costs more. Sit back, enjoy those fit prices. [www.ieso.ca] It's even more expensive in various european countries. I seem to remember that various places in Germany are still paying around 0.76kWh.

          Nuclear is for people that are bad at math.

          Looks like you live in a country where nuclear power is bad.

          • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @04:38PM (#58715502)

            New nukes cost 0.085-0.095/kWh

            You forgot to account for the decade of delays (with interest accumulating) and the final construction cost ballooning to three times the initial forecast.

            Vogtle only went 80% over budget, and the managers certainly deserve generous bonuses for that achievement, but even multiplying by 1.8 puts your prices over 15 cents (which is what I said).

        • Do them all: nuclear, wind, solar.

          New nukes cost $0.15 / kwhr.

          Large PV solar farms cost $0.05 / kwhr. The latest wind turbines cost $0.03 / kwhr. Nuclear is for people that are bad at math.

          Not really. You failed to factor in the savings from cleaning up some existing stockpiles of waste that can be consumed as fuel in more modern designs. But there is a larger logical fallacy, an inconsistency, that the pro renewables often make. They often argue that the costs of eliminating carbon are justified by the imminent threat. Yet for nuclear they are all of a sudden cost conscious, what happened to that imminent threat of climate change? Of the desperate need to remove all fossil fuel based power g

        • I think you are counting installed capacity rather than actual reliable power at scale. Nuclear can work alone with just transmission lines. Solar and Wind require much larger and complex distribution and energy storage systems and have higher real estate costs.

          I am all for solar and wind, but not if we are really just talking about solar and wind that is a front for natural gas power plants 70% of the time.

          In that case it would just be more environmentally sound to skip the solar and wind and just do nat

    • by kackle ( 910159 )
      I don't think it (nor anything) will matter if we allow population to grow unchecked.
  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:37PM (#58713530) Homepage

    If you ever try to to submit a story to a Sci-Fi magazine, they will tell you do not bother with a whole bunch of junk, including things such as "If this goes on..." stories. It's one of the most obvious and poorly thought out ideas ever. Why? Because things NEVER go on. It did not happen when people wrote about horse manure clogging our cities because we stopped using using horses. That was an actual "If this Goes On" story printed in the 18th century.

    But more importantly, we especially love the idea of everyone dying. Mainly because we like to think of ourselves as the only ones smart enough to save ourselves. It's why people thought the earth was coming to an end in the year 1000, the year 2000, the year 2012, and hundreds of other times. I love the history of the 7th Day adventist church.

    It started when they thought Jesus would come in 1843/1844 to begin a great Cleansing. Even though they clearly were wrong (called it "The Great Disappointment") they still managed to hold onto their followers and created a huge, powerful church.

    I have no doubt that the issues discussed here are true. I also have no doubt that humans will at least ameliorate those problems till they are liveable, and eventually new technology will solve them completely (creating new problems...)

    • ... do not bother with a whole bunch of junk, including things such as "If this goes on..." stories. It's one of the most obvious and poorly thought out ideas ever. Why? Because things NEVER go on.

      Things never going on is, technically, something always going on. (just sayin')

    • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      If you ever try to to submit a story to a Sci-Fi magazine, they will tell you do not bother with a whole bunch of junk, including things such as "If this goes on..." stories.

      If modern human civilization goes on...

      I also have no doubt that humans will at least ameliorate those problems till they are liveable, and eventually new technology will solve them completely (creating new problems...)

      If technological solutions (in general) go on...

      You're seemingly happy to apply "Because things NEVER go on..." only to

    • During the lead-up to Y2K, there was this thought-ladder prevalent:

      1) If un-remediated, Y2K could cause a huge problem - scale unknown, but potentially, at the top end, TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it).
      2) It probably can't be remediated (fully) on time.
      3) Because of #1 and #2, and the general anxiety of not knowing for sure where the problem lurked, IT *WILL* BE TEOTWAWKI!

      #3 was an almost hysterical leap from #1 and #2, but a lot of people made it - including people who worked in the comput

  • Is there really any difference between this doomsday scenario and the doomsday scenarios exposed by religious fanatics?

    • Is there really any difference between this doomsday scenario and the doomsday scenarios exposed by religious fanatics?

      Yes. The two scenarios are different. One is an implausible fantasy. The other is supported by scripture.

  • Carbon cycle (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DrSpock11 ( 993950 )

    Preface: Yes, global warming is happening. Yes, it is caused by man's emissions of greenhouse chemicals.

    That being stated, these apocalyptic scenarios seem extremely unlikely. 100% of the stuff we are burning came from *organisms that were once alive*. And where did they get their carbon from? From CO2 in the atmosphere. And the vast majority of those dead organisms become types of rock that we do not use for fossil fuels. Source: https://earthobservatory.nasa.... [nasa.gov]

    Thus, it seems to me that even if we burned

    • Re:Carbon cycle (Score:5, Informative)

      by bluegutang ( 2814641 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:56PM (#58713714)
    • Re:Carbon cycle (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:08PM (#58713850)

      Life can thrive with much higher levels of CO2. In fact, that's happened for long periods during prehistoric times. The problem isn't necessarily the CO2 level, but the rate of change. It's much harder for life to adapt to abrupt climatic changes than to gradual changes. Evidence suggests that these abrupt changes are particularly hard on apex predators, which is precisely what humans are.

      While humans do have a remarkable ability to adapt, we are judging that based on the limited time of human civilization. Several thousand years is a tiny compared to geologic time scales, and we've experienced very little of what the climate system and universe are capable of throwing at us. Could humanity survive an asteroid impact like the chicxulub asteroid? It's far beyond anything that humanity has ever experienced.

      Life has thrived with far higher CO2 levels than in the present day. An example is the Permian period, where CO2 levels were around 900 ppm and global temperatures were about 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the present day. The climate was relatively steady during the Permian and life thrived during this period. At the end of the Permian, however, there was an abrupt change, with CO2 and methane levels rapidly increasing, oceans absorbing large amounts of CO2 and acidifying, and global temperatures rapidly increased. This occurred over a period of 10,000-20,000 years and nearly wiped out life in Earth. Once the climate stabilized during the Triassic, life was able to recover and thrive once again. But that transition was particularly difficult.

      So, yes, life can exist just fine with far higher CO2 levels than in the present day. The problem is that the transition to higher CO2 levels might wipe out a lot of life if it occurs too abruptly.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Dasher42 ( 514179 )

      There is no precedent in natural processes for large-scale unearthing and releasing huge amounts of previously sequestered carbon in 150 years. There's no direct natural counterpart to fossil fuel mining and extraction. The closest thing to that was the ignition of coal seams in Siberia around 252 million years ago, through asteroid impact or volcanic activity or both. The result? The Permian-Triassic extinction event, the worst ever, in which 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate

    • Feel free to correct me if I've made a mistake.

      You are assuming that all the geological CO2 was originally all in the atmosphere . This is not true. There has always been trillions of tons of carbonate rocks. Carbonates are formed by both biological and non-biological processes. They are subducted into the earth where they melt into magma, and the CO2 is vented in volcanic eruptions.

  • by Mes ( 124637 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:59PM (#58713752)

    .. fleeing a war zone made Europe flip out. Imagine a billion people moving due to climate change. Goodbye borders. Goodbye everything you think you know.

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Goodbye borders

      I doubt that very very very much. As you say just Syria and Libya's refugees are making Europe flip out. I think the looking at the rise of populist politics already the response will be "goodbye porous borders" hello "militarized borders" and "eat lead" if you caught crossing at somewhere other than a designated port of entry where you not getting thru without all the correct papers - no "but muh I need asylum from uhhh....." .

      Really people need to recognize the current world order is now basically 70 yea

    • not seeing any "flipping out", meme-boy. You imagine things from social media. You're like a person flipping channels looking for a soap opera to cry over. Meanwhile, more level headed people don't think any such thing is going to happen.

    • .. fleeing a war zone made Europe flip out. Imagine a billion people moving due to climate change. Goodbye borders. Goodbye everything you think you know.

      More like hello borders for all the states that border Mexico since we've largely been ignoring them for decades. The social cost has already been huge to the US. At some point we'll start taking it more seriously by finding people who are willing to do something about it.

  • by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:08PM (#58713852) Journal

    by James Howard Kunstler.

    We will be lucky if we can make the transition from our current circumstances to a future [resilience.org] of re-sized, re-scaled cities and a reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of hamlets, villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct commerce and manufacturing.

    If it worked 200 years ago, before the automobile, it can work again in a post-oil world. Welcome to the future, same as the past!

    • What the hell. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shane_Optima ( 4414539 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @02:35PM (#58714580) Journal
      This will not occur. One major reason the climate change debate has turned into such a clusterfuck is 95% of energy expended is arguing about things that simply aren't going to occur under any foreseeable circumstances whatsoever. It's sucks the life out of us rational folk just seeing it brought up.

      I mean, I don't even know for certain what all of the supposed whys are behind this insane thought:

      We will be lucky if we can make the transition from our current circumstances to a future [resilience.org] of re-sized, re-scaled cities and a reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of hamlets, villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct commerce and manufacturing.

      If it worked 200 years ago, before the automobile, it can work again in a post-oil world. Welcome to the future, same as the past!

      I guess the pseudo-logic here is that if you cut the distance between where we live and where we grow food, that reduces our reliance on oil? I guess?

      Let's just accept that for the sake of argument. Well, um, we already know that electric is viable (and there's still a lot more room for tech improvement and economies of scale), and there are multiple viable ways to get electricity without burning hydrocarbons. Why the fuck would we let our entire centralized supply chain fall apart, allow our nations to be balkanized and bastardized at the cost of trillions of dollars in lost productivity and (almost certainly) soaring crime and corruption rates, instead of simply moving over to electric vehicles to move food around?

      There are several thousand other objections as well. (Hydrogen is clean as well, or at least it can be if you make it using high temp electrolysis from geothermal or nuclear power.)

      I can't help but using this term again: neo-Luddite. There is this batshit insane desire to suggest a return to the (horribly inefficient) past, and/or an aversion to any sort of progress forward.

      This fails to be either normative or positive. In other words: It's not just bad policy, it's bad forecasting. Human beings will not behave this way. It's a non-solution, if not a complete non-sequitur. The advantages simply are not there. Life in the past sucked. Local grown foods blah blah organic hipster marketing slogan crap is not sufficient to base a hypothetical future society around. Locally produced foods is not, in fact, an important piece of this puzzle at all.

  • People were saying the same thing in the '80s and it hasn't happened. We were supposed to be living in a polluted desert hellscape by now. Before that, people were saying industrial pollution was going to trigger an ice age.
    This all assumes that both humanity and Earth biota are somehow fragile.

  • Moving a billion people is far from the end of Human civilization.

    Hyperbolic projections don't help. They make great headlines, but damage your credibility.

  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:42PM (#58714140)

    So a think tank makes alarmist nonsense and two military head paper pushers endorse it, therefore we're all doomed.

    yeah, seen this before, for the past few decades

  • Coming To an End' Starting in 2050

    You forgot to add: "Or After."

  • All that news like this does is promote the futility of even *trying* to change.

    It wouldn't surprise me if this is being perpetuated by big oil.

  • I can make one prediction that's almost certain to come true: The majority of predictions about the future timeline will be wrong.

  • by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @03:11PM (#58714840) Homepage

    I'm just going to leave this link here.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Discuss among yourselves.

  • by fish_in_the_c ( 577259 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @03:38PM (#58715032)

    "It's the end of the world as we know it .. and I feel fine" ;)

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research. -- Wilson Mizner

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