Climate Change: What is the Worst that can Happen?
A Brontotherium, a creature similar to modern rhinos that lived up to some 35 million years ago in a climate that was about 10 degrees centigrade hotter than ours. In this scene, we see a grassy plain, but Earth was mostly forested. We may be moving toward similar conditions, although it is not obvious that humans could fare as well as Brontotheria did, at that time (image from BBC).
As it should have been predictable, the IPCC 6th assessment report, sank to the bottom of the memesphere like a dead weight after just a few days of presence in the news. Put simply, nobody is interested in sacrificing anything to reverse the warming trend and, most likely, nothing will be done.
So, what’s going to happen? Technological innovation offers the hope to mitigate the pressure on climate, but we may well have passed the point of non-return and be in free fall toward an unknown world. The question can be frame as “what’s the worst thing that can happen?” Here, we enter a domain where models can’t help us too much. Complex systems — and Earth’s climate is one — tend to be stable, but they change rapidly and unpredictably when they are not stable anymore. So, the best we can do is to imagine scenarios based on what we know, using the past as a guide.
Let’s assume that humans keep burning fossil fuels for a few more decades, maybe slowing down, but still bent at burning everything burnable. The atmosphere keeps warming, the ocean does that, too. Then, at some point, the system goes kinetic and undergoes a rapid transition to a condition compatible with the high concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
