A pair of recent news stories explain why our species, along with a million more, may be doomed. Because we fecklessly make messes, then we even more childishly refuse to admit they exist or act to clean them up.
The first story concerns a report by Breakthrough, a private Australian think tank, on climate change. It reaches many of the same conclusions as similar forecasts from the United Nations climate panel, the World Bank, and the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment, with one alarming difference.
The Breakthrough timeline suggests the point of no return is 2050 and implies the other reports adopt a more middle-of-the-road analysis in part to avoid running afoul of powerful governmental and economic interests.
By contrast, the think tank’s report is either more candid or more alarmist. It calculates that if the current trajectory of carbon release doesn’t change dramatically the process will be irreversible by 2050 and human civilization will face immediate peril.
Coral reefs will be gone. Rain forests will be gone. Polar ice will be gone, with accompanying effects. These will include sea level rise and temperature increases, causing one billion refugees to flee no longer habitable areas.
Thirty-five percent of the land and 55 percent of the pollution of the planet will be subject to 20 days a year of heat beyond the threshold of human survival. One third of the earth will be desert. Droughts, floods, and wildfires will become commonplace, and massive numbers of species will become extinct, food chains will be disrupted, and global crop yields will plummet by 20 percent.
All of these stresses will devastates underprivileged countries, especially in equatorial regions, but developed countries will hardly be immune. They will find themselves forced to compete for scarce resources and make draconian, dog-eat-dog decisions about who lives and who dies. The use of nuclear arms to defend territory can’t be ruled out as prospects become more dire and waves of displaced migrants wash over still viable regions.
The second news story helps explain why the likelihood of averting the worst is slim to none. I quote the lead from a Washington Post report on Sunday, June 9. “White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony last week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be ‘possibly catastrophic.’”
Trump and his creatures are busily suppressing fact-based climate analysis that warns our survival will require deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in favor of it’s own fake news. To their credit, many in the government have refused to be muzzled. For instance, “senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn that climate change could undermine America’s national security — a position President Trump rejects.”
In the latest instance, despite wide scientific agreement of the danger presented in analyses by international bodies, the Pentagon, NASA, and NOAA, Trump’s pet climate change deniers on the NSC and OMB saw to it that the testimony before Congress was suppressed, including that on nine tipping points that could transform the Earth’s systems and adversely effect human society. These include rapid ice melt, die-offs of critical species, and the release of vast quantities of methane from once frozen earth.
The head of the Council on Strategic Risks called the attempt to silence the sounding of an alarm “an intentional failure of the White House to perform a core duty: Inform the American public of the threat we face.”
Many believe only an immediate, massive mobilization of the world’s resources on a scale comparable to a World War can avert a catastrophe a mere thirty years in the future when today’s middle-aged adults may not be impacted but their children and grandchildren surely will suffer.
Alas, powerful forces in government and in industries likely to be adversely effected — notably fossil fuel, utility, and automotive— have a vested interest in refusing to confront the enormity of the problem and the need for rapid action to avoid the worst.
Not long ago, President Trump, with characteristic lack of thought before speaking, let slip a telling admission concerning the cyberwarfare that tainted the 2016 election. “I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.” That may or may not be true, but it is undeniable that he did nothing to stop it, and his administration is doing nothing to make sure the 2020 election isn’t rigged in his favor again.
Similarly, Trump can now boast that he is having nothing to do with preventing climate change from destroying millions of species and placing human civilization at risk by 2050. His excuse is an inability to tell fact from fiction and a self-interested desire to please crony capitalists who profit from greenhouse gas production.
What’s ours? If we blindly follow a blind man into the apocalypse, the fault is not in our leader or our stars but in ourselves. “O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes and see not, which have ears, and hear not…” Jer.5:21.