Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the center cannot hold.
Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-year storms, and lethal heat waves have become fixtures of the evening news and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.
But here’s where it gets really scary.
If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by perhaps more than 10 degrees Celsius and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. This is a warming spike comparable in magnitude to that so far measured for the End-Permian mass extinction.
If the worst-case scenarios come to pass, today’s modestly menacing ocean-climate system will seem quaint. Even warming to half of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved, or on which civilization has been built. The last time it was 4 degrees warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was hundreds of feet higher than it is today.
I met University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber at a diner near campus in Durham, New Hampshire. Huber has spent a sizable portion of his research career studying the hothouse of the early mammals, and he thinks that in the coming centuries it’s not impossible that we might be headed back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago, when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle.
The modern world will be much more of a killing field than the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum was, he said. Habitat fragmentation today will make it much more difficult to migrate. But if we limit it below 10 degrees of warming, at least you don’t have widespread heat death. In 2010, Huber and coauthor Steven Sherwood published one of the most ominous science papers in recent memory: An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress.
Lizards will be fine, birds will be fine, Huber said, noting that life has thrived in hotter climates than even the most catastrophic projections for anthropogenic global warming. This is one reason to suspect that the collapse of civilization might come long before we reach a proper biological mass extinction. Life has endured conditions that would be unthinkable for a highly networked global society partitioned by political borders.
Of course, we’re understandably concerned about the fate of civilization, and Huber says that, mass extinction or not, it’s our tenuous reliance on an aging and inadequate infrastructure perhaps, most ominously, on power grids coupled with the limits of human physiology that may well bring down our world.
Read more of the original article at Wired.
