{"id":48530,"date":"2019-09-18T08:38:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T13:38:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48530"},"modified":"2019-09-18T08:38:41","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T13:38:41","slug":"48530","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48530","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Creator of the \u2018ecological footprint\u2019 on life and death in a world 4 C hotter.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thetyee.ca\/Analysis\/2019\/09\/18\/WilliamERees.jpg\" alt=\"WilliamERees.jpg\"\/><figcaption>UBC professor emeritus William Rees provides the grim calculations for humanity if climate change goes unchecked.&nbsp;Photo by Nick Wiebe, Wikimedia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political status, primitive instinct and raw emotion tend to take the upper hand.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is not a good thing if the fate of society is at stake. Take \u201chope\u201d for example. For good evolutionary reasons, humans naturally tend to be hopeful in times of stress. So gently comforting is this word, that some even endow their daughters with its name. But hope can be enervating, flat out debilitating, when it merges with mere wishful thinking \u2014 when we hope, for example, that technology alone can save us from climate change.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As novelist Jonathan Franzen\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/what-if-we-stopped-pretending\">asks<\/a>: \u201cIf your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do 10 years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We needn\u2019t bother Roger Hallam with this question. He can scarcely be held up as a \u201cmessiah of hope.\u201d Quite the contrary. Hallam, a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Roger_Hallam_(activist)\">co-founder<\/a>of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Extinction_Rebellion\">Extinction Rebellion<\/a>, has been desperately&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=O_g3zoL8TFU\">warning<\/a>&nbsp;of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/xrblog.org\/category\/xr-authors\/roger-hallam\/\">societal collapse<\/a>for years.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But on Aug. 15, in a memorable session of the BBC\u2019s&nbsp;<em>HardTalk<\/em>, Hallam irritated multiple cultural nerves by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch%20v=9HyaxctatdA\">claiming<\/a>, on the basis of \u201chard science,\u201d that six billion people will die as a result of climate change in coming decades.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">More specifically, our ruling elites\u2019 inaction and lies on climate change will lead to climate turmoil, mass starvation and general societal collapse in this century. Normally unflappable\u00a0<em>HardTalk<\/em>\u00a0host, Stephen Sackur, just couldn\u2019t wrap his mind around Hallam\u2019s unyielding assertions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People Creator of the \u2018ecological footprint\u2019 on life and death in a world 4 C hotter. One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[1053,2602,17115],"class_list":["post-48530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-climate-crisis","tag-evolution","tag-william-e-rees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48531,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48530\/revisions\/48531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}