{"id":63897,"date":"2022-10-22T13:25:16","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T18:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63897"},"modified":"2022-10-22T13:25:16","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T18:25:16","slug":"climate-change-and-the-threat-to-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63897","title":{"rendered":"Climate change and the threat to civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

Climate change and the threat to civilization<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n
\n
In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary Ant\u00f3nio Guterres lambasted \u201cthe empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world\u201d and warned that \u201cwe are on a fast track to climate disaster\u201d (1<\/a>). Although stark, Guterres\u2019 statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to \u201cthe collapse of our civilizations\u201d (2<\/a>). In their article, \u201cWorld Scientists\u2019 Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021\u201d\u2014which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries\u2014William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could \u201ccause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable\u201d (3<\/a>).<\/div>\n
\n
<\/header>\n
<\/a>
The consequences of climate change are likely to be dire\u2014and in some scenarios, catastrophic. Scholars need to start discussing the mechanisms whereby climate change could cause the actual collapse of civilizations. Image credit: Flickr\/Spencer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Because civilization cannot exist in unlivable or uninhabitable places, all of the above warnings can be understood as asserting the potential for anthropogenic climate change to cause civilization collapse (or \u201cclimate collapse\u201d) to a greater or lesser extent. Yet despite discussing many adverse impacts, climate science literature, as synthesized for instance by assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has little at all to say about whether or under which conditions climate change might threaten civilization. Although a body of scientific research exists on historical and archeological cases of collapse (4<\/a>), discussions of mechanisms whereby climate change might cause the collapse of current civilizations has mostly been the province of journalists, philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers…<\/div>\n

\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Climate change and the threat to civilization In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary Ant\u00f3nio Guterres lambasted \u201cthe empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world\u201d and warned that \u201cwe are on a fast track to climate disaster\u201d (1). Although stark, Guterres\u2019 statements were […]<\/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":[25886,33288,139,2090,141,150,33287,21895,822,826],"class_list":["post-63897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-antonio-guterres","tag-c-tyler-desroches","tag-civilization","tag-civilization-collapse","tag-climate-change","tag-collapse","tag-daniel-steel","tag-pnas","tag-un","tag-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63897","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=63897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63898,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63897\/revisions\/63898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}