This paper is a non-peer reviewed preprint submitted to EarthArXiv.

It has not been

submitted to any journal for peer review.

Title: Human Civilization will Collapse (High Confidence)

Author: Demetrios Karis, Bentley University: [email protected]

Keywords: climate change, societal collapse, climate interventions, mitigation, IPCC,

climate strategy, geoengineering, climate crisis, conflict, mass migration, eco-anxiety

All comments welcome!

Corresponding author: Demetrios Karis – [email protected] or

[email protected]

Karis 1
 Human Civilization will Collapse
(High Confidence1)
Demetrios Karis
[email protected], [email protected]
January 10, 20242

1
“High Confidence” is one of the “calibrated uncertainty” terms of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). The thesis of this paper is that we should now have high confidence that human
civilization will collapse. However, quantifying this prediction with a high degree of certainty is impossible.
See Appendix 4 for details on how the IPCC expresses uncertainty using calibrated uncertainty language.
2
First draft, August 31, 2023

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© 2024. This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0.
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Cover Page Figure

“Box TS.3, Figure 1 in IPCC, 2021: Technical Summary. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (Chen, et al., 2021)”
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ figures/technical-summary

Opinion Hope for the future: A climate

conference hosted by a petrostate
By Edith Pritchett, Editorial cartoonist,December 1,
2023, Washington Post

Sultan al-Jaber is the president of COP 28. He is

the chairman of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company
(Adnoc), which pumped 2.7m barrels of oil a day in
2021, with plans to double that by 2027.

Karis 3
Abstract
Human civilization is now in serious jeopardy due to climate change. The earth is not in
energy balance because more energy is arriving at the earth from the sun than is being
radiated back out into space. This is occurring because we have been cutting down
forests and burning fossil fuels for the last 150 years at a furious rate, leading to a
greenhouse effect and the consequent warming of the earth’s land, oceans, and
atmosphere. There is now general agreement that continuing to burn fossil fuels will
lead to catastrophic consequences for human civilization as well as thousands of other
species.

This paper reviews the latest scientific findings on our climate, and provides evidence
that not only is the biophysical situation much worse than reported by much of the
scientific community, but that the consequences for human societies are also much
worse. In summary: The situation is already critical, and it will get much worse in the
near future. Climate change mitigation (the effort to limit greenhouse gases, GHG) has
failed, risks are consistently underestimated, and the required rapid decarbonization is
unlikely to occur. Staying below 1.5°C is impossible at this point, and it is also very
unlikely that we will be able to stay below 2°C. A 2°C increase will be catastrophic in
multiple areas and in multiple ways. Considering just ice sheets, “2°C will result in
extensive, potentially rapid, irreversible sea-level rise from Earth’s ice sheets”
(eventually up to 20 meters), and “Many ice sheet scientists now believe that by 2°C,
nearly all of Greenland, much of West Antarctica, and even vulnerable portions of East
Antarctica will be triggered to very long-term, inexorable sea-level rise, even if air
temperatures later decrease” (International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, 2023).

The probability that there will be a global societal collapse is high because the second
and third order effects of climate change, such as crop failures leading to starvation, are
not fully appreciated and will lead to intra- and interstate conflict. Compound hazards
and cascading effects will also increase the damage to individuals and society. Although
a global mobilization is required to deal with climate change, political forces in many
countries, as well as resistance from fossil fuel companies, are preventing the required
action. As climate disasters become even more extreme than those in 2023 and
continue to multiply around the world, mass movements demanding meaningful climate
action will increase, and eco-terrorism will, unfortunately, become inevitable.
Eco-anxiety, already common, will increase dramatically.

The direct effects of climate change will result in millions of deaths from extreme heat,
extreme flooding, and extreme storms, but many more will die from starvation, infectious
diseases, and especially from civil unrest and regional and international conflicts. The
extreme consequences of climate change will start first in “fragile” states. Climate

Karis 4
change has been described as a “threat multiplier,” and it will exacerbate existing
political instability via fights over water, mass migration, and from the pressures of crop
failures and extreme weather events.

The rapid introduction of renewable energy will not prevent societal collapse. Planting
trees will not save us, reducing methane will not save us, and removing CO2 from the
atmosphere via direct air capture will not save us. At this point, the only thing that really
matters is the amount of greenhouse gases we are emitting. This is a critical point that
many people don’t seem to understand: the amount, and price, of renewable energy is
basically meaningless with respect to the climate emergency we are experiencing if we
continue to pour carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is
also essentially meaningless what you as an individual in a rich country do so long as
other countries continue to build coal-fired power plants, cut down forests, and degrade
the other natural carbon “sinks” on our planet.

“Net zero” refers to a state in which greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere are
balanced by their removal from the atmosphere. Recent proclamations that after we
reach net zero warming will quickly stop are disingenuous. Reaching net zero will take
decades, and there are so many positive feedback loops and tipping points we may
soon cross that it is likely that a variety of biophysical processes will continue to warm
the earth even after we stop emitting greenhouse gases. When it is clear that we have
embarked on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway, geoengineering via solar radiation
management or other means will become inevitable. Some scientists now argue that
any realistic approach to the climate crisis must include “climate cooling” via
geoengineering.

This paper just “connects the dots”: there is consensus that at 1.5°C the situation will be
very bad, we are likely to cross several tipping points, and multiple feedback loops will
increase the release of GHG emissions. Given the political realities in the world today,
there will be no world-wide mobilization to rapidly transform our economies and power
production to reduce GHG emissions. That means we will almost definitely cross 2°C,
probably before 2050. The direct and indirect consequences of this increase will
dramatically impact the climate around the world, leading to all the negative
consequences listed above. As a result, societies around the world will start to collapse.
This is probable but not inevitable, and the paper ends by describing what you as an
individual should do, and what we as a society should do. In the short term, political
action, mass mobilization, and working for a carbon tax will be the most effective actions
for individuals. Only after there is agreement that a worldwide mobilization and extreme
actions are required will it be worthwhile to work on reducing one's carbon footprint.

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There is really no chance of remaining below either 1.5° or 2°C. And despite what we
are constantly told, we may now be at a point where every tenth of a degree no longer
matters. Several scientific organizations and initiatives are trying to sound the alarm,
proclaiming, for example, that, “As of 2023, some of the very lowest emission pathways
from IPCC no longer remain possible” (ICCI, 2023). It’s now inevitable that many
hundreds of millions will die. We still do, however, have a chance to save the human
race from extinction. To do that as a society we must, on a global scale, rapidly reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. This must be our number one priority; it is necessary but
not sufficient. Simultaneously, we must protect our biosphere’s carbon sinks and
actively cool the earth using geoengineering techniques such as solar radiation
management. Research and development on directly removing CO2 from the air should
continue, because in the future, even after net zero is reached, it will be necessary to
remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.

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Table of Contents
Introduction 9
The Current Situation 12
Code Red on Planet Earth 12
Planetary Boundaries 16
Warming is Accelerating 17
What Does it Mean to Say that Civilization, or Society, Will Collapse? 18
Summaries of the Current Situation 20
COP28 21
None of This is New 24
The Future 24
Glacial-Interglacial Cycles and Possible Future Trajectories 25
Continued Loss of Biodiversity 30
Tipping Points 31
Feedback Loops 33
Compound Hazard Analyses and Cascading Effects 34
A “Polycrisis” 36
Armed Conflict 37
International Efforts: Extensive but Ineffective 39
The IPCC, and Why the Risks of Climate Change are Underestimated 39
Magical Thinking 43
Rapid Decarbonization is Unlikely 44
A World-Wide Mobilization is Required 44
Renewable Energy and Nuclear Power Alone are Insufficient 45
Planting Trees Will Not Save Us 47
Mass Delusion: Reducing Methane will not Save Us 48
Direct Air Capture Will Not Save Us 49
Political Considerations 50
Political Problems in the United States 50
Not Just the U.S. 52
Economic Power to Political Power 52
Climate Change and “Fragile” Countries 54
Conflict can Exacerbate Fossil Fuel Use 55
The Rise of Nationalism and Right-wing Populist Leaders 55
Authoritarian Environmentalism 56
Indirect Effects: Economic Impacts, Food Production, and Migration 58
Economic Impacts 58
Global Food Production 60
Mass Migration 62
Related Topics 64
Paleoclimatology 64

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 Societal Collapse and Paleoclimatic Data 65
Climate Models 65
Geoengineering is Inevitable 68
Climate Anxiety is Inevitable 70
“Eco-terrorism” is Inevitable 73
New Technologies 73
Carbon Taxes (or Fee and Dividend) 74
Quantifying Collapse 75
Solutions 76
What Should You As an Individual Do? 76
Unbridled Optimism: Just Flip the Switch! 79
Collapse is Likely, But Not Inevitable: What Should We As a Society Do? 81
Facing Reality and Managing the Inevitable 83
Adaptation 83
Suggested Reading 85
Acknowledgements 86
Author Bio 86
References 88
Appendix 1: The Current Situation is Dire 96
Extreme Shortages of Fresh Water 96
Extreme Rainfall and Floods 97
Extreme Heat 98
Extreme Droughts 99
Extreme Fire 99
Extreme Tropical Cyclones 100
Extreme Sea Ice and Ice Shelf Loss 101
The Collapse of Ocean Currents 103
The Spread of Infectious Diseases 104
Mass Migration 105
Appendix 2: Relevant Figures from the Fifth National Climate Assessment (Crimmins et
al., 2023) 106
Appendix 3: Relevant Figures from IPCC, 2023 108
Appendix 4: A Warning from 1983, and IPCC Conferences and Uncertainty Language 110
A Warning from 1983 110
Climate Conferences: Progress and Failures 110
IPCC “Calibrated Uncertainty Language” 112
Appendix 5: Military Reports on the Climate and Conflict 113

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Introduction
Climate change is real, the earth is warming, but if we reduce our consumption of fossil
fuels the worst can be avoided. This is what we are told, over and over, but it is not true.
Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that there is a significant probability that human
civilization will collapse during the next 50 years, with extinction then possible. I am not
a climate scientist, which is why I quote extensively from several seminal papers, as
well as the major national and international organizations that collect, summarize, and
disseminate the latest science on climate change. In these articles, prominent climate
scientists explain how dire the current situation is. My contribution is to combine this
information from the climate literature with information about why the political situation
makes rapid decarbonization impossible, and how the effects of even “mild” warming
can have devastating effects on society. Here is a very simplified summary, supported in
the rest of the paper by references and copious quotations from the scientific literature:

The situation is already very bad. There are record-breaking heat waves, droughts,
fires, floods, and hurricanes. Glaciers and sea ice are melting, sea levels are rising, and
there is ocean acidification. Extreme weather events are becoming more common. In
particular, we are seeing far more extreme fire and rainfall events in 2023 than usual.3
“The inconvenient truth is that global temperatures are already dangerously hot; that the
Paris targets are not only unsafe but unachievable; and that even if NZE [net zero
emissions] succeeds in stopping further temperature increases, this will not produce a
safe, stable climate” (Taylor et al., 2023b).

The situation will get much worse. The pace of global warming has accelerated.
Positive feedback loops are also now occurring, and we may be reaching multiple
tipping points that will result in irreversible changes to the biosphere. The situation will
inevitably get worse because even if every country meets their long-term targets of
reducing greenhouse gases (targets that become increasingly difficult to meet every
year), temperatures will still rise to over 2°C (we’re currently at about 1.3°C). Even after
greenhouse gases are reduced, the accumulated heat in the ocean will continue to melt
sea ice and ice shelves and to heat the atmosphere. Adaptation is no longer a solution.

Climate change mitigation, the effort to limit greenhouse gases, has failed. Carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to increase in the atmosphere. In fact,
“...carbon emissions have continued soaring, and fossil fuels remain dominant, with
annual coal consumption reaching a near all-time high of 161.5 exajoules in 2022”
(Ripple at al. 2023b). Here is a recent headline from the Global Carbon Project: “Record
high in global fossil CO2 emissions set for 2023.” Global emissions from coal, oil, and

3
See Ripple et al.’s (2023b) Table 2 for a list of climate-related disasters since the end of 2022.

Karis 9
natural gas have all risen in 2023.4 Despite all the positive aspects of the recent Inflation
Reduction Act for creating clean energy jobs and reducing emissions, the United States,
under President Biden, pumped more oil than under President Trump, and more than
either Saudi Arabia or Russia. The U.S. recently pumped more oil than any other
country in history.

Risks are consistently underestimated. The estimates and descriptions of our future
world are increasingly dire, and yet scientists and scientific organizations have
consistently underestimated the rate and extent of climate change. There is evidence
that underestimates are continuing. As Taylor et al. (2023b) write, “...selective science
communication and unrealistically optimistic assumptions are obscuring the reality that
greenhouse gas emissions reduction and carbon dioxide removal will not curtail climate
change in the 21st Century.”

Rapid decarbonization is unlikely. A world-wide mobilization is required to rapidly

reduce greenhouse gases, and although theoretically possible, it is in practice
impossible given our current political environment and economic system. Consider this
headline from the NY Times on November 8, 2023:
“Nations That Vowed to Halt Warming Are Expanding Fossil Fuels, Report Finds
The world remains on track to produce far more oil, gas and coal than would be
consistent with relatively safe levels of heating, a new report found.”

Staying below 1.5°C is not possible. We are told not only that if we stay below 1.5°C
the worst effects of climate change can be avoided, but that this is still feasible. As
James Hansen and colleagues write in a recent communication (Hansen, Sato, &
Ruedy, 2023), “That is pure, unadulterated, hogwash.” In a recent paper, Hansen and
over a dozen coauthors argue that, “Thus, under the present geopolitical approach to
GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions, global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the 2020s and
2°C before 2050” (Hansen et al., 2023c).5 This view is not an outlier; for example, Taylor
et al. (2023b) write, “The presumption that the global climate can be safely stabilized at
1.5°C or 2°C above pre-industrial levels in the 21st Century is the most unrealistic
finding of various climate assessments.” The situation is changing rapidly, and in a
January 4, 2024 newsletter, Hansen et al. write that, “By May the 12-month
running-mean global temperature relative to 1880-1920 should be +1.6-1.7°C and not
fall below +1.4 ± 0.1°C during the next La Nina minimum. Thus, given the planetary
energy imbalance, it will be clear that the 1.5°C ceiling has been passed for all practical
purposes.”6

4
https://globalcarbonbudget.org/fossil-co2-emissions-at-record-high-in-2023/
5
Reaching a particular level of warming, such as 1.5°C or 2°C, means that an average over several years
has reached this point. In November, 2023, the earth reached 2°C on a single day for the first time.
6
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2024/Groundhog.04January2024.pdf

Karis 10
Deaths will increase, and most will die from indirect effects such as starvation
and armed conflict. Hundreds of thousands of people currently die every year from the
direct effects of climate change, and these numbers will increase dramatically in the
future, especially when there are compound hazards where multiple events interact.
Most deaths, however, will not result directly from heat, floods, or storms, but rather
from indirect causes, including starvation as a result of crop failures, the spread of
infectious diseases, as well as armed conflict and social unrest caused by water and
food scarcity and the pressures of mass migration. Regional conflicts are already
breaking out over water resources.

Only recently are scientists and economists predicting realistic deaths this century: “If
warming reaches or exceeds 2°C this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible
for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming”
(Pearce & Parncutt, 2023).7

In this report, I’ll describe what the situation looks like to a researcher who is not a
climate scientist, but has followed the field for the last 25 years. The proximal cause of
climate change is simple: the earth is not in energy balance, which just means that more
energy is arriving at the earth from the sun (as well as back radiation from the
atmosphere and clouds) than is being radiated back out into space. The reason is
well-known and universally accepted – we have been burning fossil fuels for the last
150 years at a furious rate and this has led to a greenhouse effect and the warming of
earth’s land, oceans and atmosphere.8

As Taylor et al. (2023b) argue cogently, there is no convincing evidence supporting the
following assertions, despite their being widely promoted by many scientists and the
media.

● “Current greenhouse gas emissions reduction and removal

methods can and will be ramped up in time to prevent dangerous
climate change;
● overshoot of Paris Agreement targets will be temporary;
● net zero emissions will produce a safe, stable climate;
● the impacts of overshoot can be managed and reversed;

7
Providing page numbers for quotations is difficult given the format of papers available online. All
citations are included in the list of References, with links to the papers, and all quotations can be found
easily by searching in the full-text documents.
8
For an excellent primer on climate change, see Emanuel (2016). See also MIT’s Climate Portal at
https://climate.mit.edu/

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 ● Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models and
assessments capture the full scope of prospective disastrous
impacts;
● and the risks of climate interventions are greater than the risks of
inaction.”

Why I wrote this paper. There are four interconnected reasons why I wrote this paper.
1. To educate non-scientists on climate change, providing the latest research up
through the end of 2023, with some of it in a tutorial format (e.g., explaining what
the IPCC is, or CMIP models, or thermohaline circulation). People who do not
believe in anthropogenic climate change are unlikely to read this paper, but many
people who read the secondary sources about climate change and believe we
are in a climate emergency still don’t understand how critical the situation is. My
hope is that this paper will help to convince these readers that the situation is
indeed “code red,” and unless we take immediate action a “ghastly future” awaits
us.
2. To fill a gap in the literature on climate change. There are many excellent
research papers and popular articles on climate change, but few focus on all the
related topics – not just the physical basis of climate change, but the
conservative nature of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
the underestimation of future problems, the political environment making it
impossible to take the necessary actions, the psychological effects of witnessing
extreme weather events, and geoengineering and new technologies. All this
information leads to descriptions of how societal collapse will unfold – not so
much from the direct effects of a warming planet, but from the indirect effects of
starvation, infectious diseases, mass migration, civil unrest, regional conflict, and
political instability – and how collapse will start in “fragile” states.
3. To make clear, given the current situation, what individual and national actions
are meaningful in the near term and which are not.
4. To encourage people to take action; after education there must be action. I lay
out the most important steps we need to take at the end of this paper, but they
will only happen if we overcome political and special interest opposition via mass
mobilization and mass protests.

The Current Situation

Code Red on Planet Earth
“We are now at ‘code red’ on planet Earth” according to a recent report titled,
“World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022” (Ripple et al., 2022).
Bradshaw et al. (2021) title another paper, “Underestimating the Challenges of
Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” and write, “The scale of the threats to the biosphere

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and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to
grasp for even well-informed experts.” Richardson et al. (2023), writing within a
planetary boundaries framework, find that we have passed six of nine planetary
boundaries and that “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for
humanity.”

Many scientists have realized that they can’t continue in a typical academic mode,
focusing on their research and writing, but must now become advocates for change to
avoid catastrophe. In 1992, 1,700 scientists signed a “World Scientists’ Warning to
Humanity,” but no one listened. Additional warnings followed, with more scientists
realizing that they must leave the laboratory and engage with the public. A recent
warning, mentioned above (Ripple et al., 2022), continues the extreme rhetoric (which
is, of course, justified):

We are now at “code red” on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally

facing a climate emergency. The scale of untold human suffering, already
immense, is rapidly growing with the escalating number of climate-related
disasters. Therefore, we urge scientists, citizens, and world leaders to
read this Special Report and quickly take the necessary actions to avoid
the worst effects of climate change.

2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the “World Scientists’ Warning to

Humanity,” signed by more than 1700 scientists in 1992. Since this original
warning, there has been a roughly 40% increase in global greenhouse gas
emissions. This is despite numerous written warnings from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a recent scientists’
warning of a climate emergency with nearly 15,000 signatories from 158
countries. Current policies are taking the planet to around 3 degrees
Celsius warming by 2100, a temperature level that Earth has not
experienced over the past 3 million years. The consequences of global
heating are becoming increasingly extreme, and outcomes such as global
societal collapse are plausible and dangerously underexplored. Motivated
by the moral urgency of this global crisis, here, we track recent
climate-related disasters, assess planetary vital signs, and provide
sweeping policy recommendations.9

Note that 3 degrees by 2100 is almost certainly an underestimate. 2023 has been a
year of some of the most extreme weather events in recorded history, in part perhaps

9
This quotation, and many of the other quotations in this paper include references, which I have omitted
for simplicity and clarity.

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due to the confluence of both continued warming, the start of the El Niño phase of the El
Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and a reduction in human-made aerosols. As one
climate scientist recently said, “Temperatures are rising at the rate we thought they
would, but the effects are more severe, more frequent, more critical. It’s crazy and
getting crazier.”10 As Pope Francis writes in a recent Apostolic Exhortation (Pope
Francis, 2023), “...the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the
breaking point.”

Ripple and his colleagues now provide yearly updates, and their 2023 report indicates
the situation continues to deteriorate; we are “under siege” and are now “in uncharted
territory” (Ripple et al., 2023b).

Boehm et al. (2023), in a massive report, examined historical data to track the changes
in 42 indicators of efforts to mitigate climate change. Their key findings were not
encouraging, as “Recent rates of change for 41 of the 42 indicators across power,
buildings, industry transport, forests and land, food and agriculture, technological
carbon removal, and climate finance are not on track to reach their 1.5°C-aligned
targets for 2030.” The only indicator on track to reach its target in 2030 is the share of
electric vehicles in passenger car sales (“Increase the share of EVs to 75–95% of total
annual LDV [light-duty vehicle] sales.”).

The three main greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous
oxide (N2O).

The latest analysis of observations from the WMO [World Meteorological

Organization] Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) in situ observational
network shows that the globally averaged surface concentrations for
carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) reached
new highs in 2022, with CO2 at 417.9±0.2 ppm, CH4 at 1923±2 ppb and
N2O at 335.8±0.1 ppb. These values constitute, respectively, increases of
150%, 264% and 124% relative to pre-industrial (before 1750) levels.
(WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, 2023)

See Appendix 2 for a plot of US and Global Changes in Average Surface Temperature,
and Appendix 3, which is titled, “Human Activities Responsible for Global Warming.”

Coal

10
Michael Flannigan, a climate scientist studying the interaction of fire and climate, as reported in Serge
Schmemann’s article in the NYTimes, Aug. 23, 2023, “It Is No Longer Possible to Escape What We Have
Done to Ourselves, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/opinion/canada-wildfires-climate-change.html

Karis 14
Burning coal is the worst thing we can do with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, air
pollution, and environmental damage, and much has been made of the transition in
some areas from burning coal to natural gas. Coal power plants, however, are still being
built, and at an increasing rate in China, currently the world's largest greenhouse gas
emitter. Here are the disturbing results from a recent report by the Centre for Research
on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and the Heinrich Böll Foundation:

Investments in coal-based power capacity have accelerated. Since the

start of 2022, Chinese authorities have granted permits to 152 gigawatts
(GW) and started construction on 92 GW of new coal power capacity.
Even if we assume existing coal capacity will be retired at an accelerated
pace, China’s coal-fired power capacity is still on track to increase 23% by
2030 from existing levels. (Myllyvirta et al., 2023)

To put this in perspective, the average nuclear power plant produces 1 gigawatt,
while most power plants in the United States generate less than half a gigawatt.

A Global Health Emergency

Over 200 health journals coordinated editorials they published on October 25,
2023 titled, “Time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global
health emergency” (Abbasi et al., 2023).

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political

leaders, and health professionals to recognise that climate change
and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled
together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall
environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health
emergency.

The world is currently responding to the climate crisis and the

nature crisis as if they were separate challenges. This is a
dangerous mistake. The 28th UN Conference of the Parties (COP)
on climate change is about to be held in Dubai while the 16th COP
on biodiversity is due to be held in Turkey in 2024. The research
communities that provide the evidence for the two COPs are
unfortunately largely separate, but they were brought together for a
workshop in 2020 when they concluded: “Only by considering
climate and biodiversity as parts of the same complex problem …
can solutions be developed that avoid maladaptation and maximize
the beneficial outcomes.”

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The editorial summarizes all the ways in which human health is damaged by both the
climate crisis and the nature crisis, and all the interrelationships between the two. For
example, “Restoring one subsystem can help another—for example, replenishing soil
could help remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere on a vast scale.”

Planetary Boundaries
Richardson et al. (2023)11 have updated the planetary boundaries framework, and for
the first time define control variables for each that can be measured to determine the
extent of anthropogenic influence.

The planetary boundaries framework draws upon Earth system science. It

identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and
resilience of Earth system as a whole. All are presently heavily perturbed
by human activities. The framework aims to delineate and quantify levels
of anthropogenic perturbation that, if respected, would allow Earth to
remain in a “Holocene-like” interglacial state.

The planetary boundaries framework delineates the biophysical and

biochemical systems and processes known to regulate the state of the
planet within ranges that are historically known and scientifically likely to
maintain Earth system stability and life-support systems conducive to the
human welfare and societal development experienced during the
Holocene.12

The six planetary boundaries that have been crossed include biosphere integrity (NPP,
net primary production, a “proxy for photosynthetic energy and materials flow into the
biosphere”), land system change (reduction in forest cover), biogeochemical flows of
nitrogen and phosphorus, freshwater change (surface and ground water as well as soil
moisture available to plants ), climate change (atmospheric CO2), and “novel entities”
(synthetic chemicals released into the environment). Stratospheric ozone depletion,
atmospheric aerosol loading, and ocean acidification are now either in the safe zone or
are at the margin of the safe operating space. Simulations using earth models indicate
that two of these systems (land system change and climate) had already moved out of a
safe zone by about 1988.

11
There were 29 scientists from eight different countries involved in this research.
12
From Wikipedia: “The Holocene is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 9,700 years
before the Common Era. It follows the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial
retreat.”

Karis 16
Passing these six boundaries is further confirmation that we are in a “code red”
situation, and that we are on a trajectory to a new earth system state in which it will be
very difficult for humans to survive.

Warming is Accelerating
In a recent guest essay, Zeke Hausfather, a climate research scientist at Berkeley Earth,
presents his view that, “there is increasing evidence that global warming has
accelerated over the past 15 years rather than continued at a gradual, steady pace.”
Although there is disagreement among climate scientists, his arguments are convincing:

…the data we’re getting from three sources tells a worrying story about a
world warming more quickly than before. First, the rate of warming we’ve
measured over the world’s land and oceans over the past 15 years has
been 40 percent higher than the rate since the 1970s, with the past nine
years being the nine warmest years on record. Second, there has been
acceleration over the past few decades in the total heat content of Earth’s
oceans, where over 90 percent of the energy trapped by greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere is accumulating. Third, satellite measurements of
Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between energy entering the
atmosphere from the sun and the amount of heat leaving — show a strong
increase in the amount of heat trapped over the past two decades. If
Earth’s energy imbalance is increasing over time, it should drive an
increase in the world’s rate of warming.13

Not only is the earth’s energy imbalance increasing, but the effects of warming are
exacerbated because there has been a “large, persistent increase of absorbed solar
radiation,” since 2015, probably due to a decrease in particulate air pollution.

The only known mechanism capable of such a large forcing is a decrease

of cloud albedo. Indeed, we concluded elsewhere that decreased
particulate air pollution in the past decade should cause such a decrease
of cloud albedo and thus an acceleration of global warming in the
post-2010 period. The most distinct and probably the most effective
aerosol reduction is due to limitations on the sulfur content of ship fuels
imposed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in January 2015
and strengthened in January 2020. (Hansen, Sato, & Ruedy, 2023)

13
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/opinion/climate-change-excessive-heat-2023.html?smid=em-share

Karis 17
There has been a decrease in the sulfur content of ship fuels, which has reduced air
pollution and so is a health benefit. However, this air pollution was acting to cool the
earth, and now that it has been reduced there is an increase in global warming.

Radiative forcing is an important concept:

In accordance with the basic laws of thermodynamics, as Earth absorbs
energy from the sun, it must eventually emit an equal amount of energy to
space. The difference between incoming and outgoing radiation is known
as a planet’s radiative forcing (RF). In the same way as applying a pushing
force to a physical object will cause it to become unbalanced and move, a
climate forcing factor will change the climate system. When forcings result
in incoming energy being greater than outgoing energy, the planet will
warm (positive RF). Conversely, if outgoing energy is greater than incoming
energy, the planet will cool. Another way to refer to climate forcings is to
call them climate drivers. Natural climate drivers include changes in the
sun’s energy output, regular changes in Earth’s orbital cycle, and large
volcanic eruptions that put light-reflecting particles into the upper
atmosphere. Human-caused, or anthropogenic climate drivers include
emissions of heat-trapping gases (also known as greenhouse gases) and
changes in land use that make land reflect more or less sunlight energy.
Since 1750, human-caused climate drivers have been increasing, and their
effect dominates all natural climate drivers.14

All climate scientists agree that global warming will continue, but not all think that the
rate of warming is increasing. Some of those who disagree don’t think there is enough
data to be definitive, but that within just the next few years we should be able to know
for sure. I agree with those scientists who think that global warming has accelerated.

What Does it Mean to Say that Civilization, or Society, Will Collapse?

Widespread collapse will not happen all at once, but will build up after multiple local and
regional collapses. It will happen first in fragile countries (as defined later in this paper),
and even within wealthy industrialized countries it will happen sporadically at first, and in
some regions before others. The process may start when there is a series of events,
often interrelated, and often involving extreme weather and crop failures. Even fragile
countries will be able to recover from one or two, but when multiple extreme events
continue – droughts, floods, storms, and heat waves, there will not be enough resources
to help the affected regions (not just food and water, but also emergency shelters,
medical supplies, construction equipment to clear roads and debris, and so on). Some

14
https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/climate-data-primer/predicting-climate/climate-forcing

Karis 18
of these storms or extreme weather events will cause serious damage to critical
infrastructure, including dams, roads, water and sewage treatment plants, and the
electrical grid.

Consider what happened in Libya during the summer of 2023. It is a fragile country
divided by civil war with poor maintenance of infrastructure and a weak central
government. When extreme rainfall led to the collapse of two dams, a large part of the
city of Derna was swept away and over 10,000 people died. Roads were washed out
and fresh water and food were almost immediately in short supply. International aid
arrived, as did aid from the regional government, but not enough, and slowly, and more
people died. What if no international aid had arrived and there were other climate
emergencies sapping the limited resources of the government? Then there would be an
almost immediate regional societal collapse as described in the next paragraph.

During societal collapse, there will be serious disruptions or dysfunction of the political
system, and city, state, and national services will be disrupted or cease to exist,
including state and regional policing, water, oil, and gas delivery to businesses, homes
and apartments, garbage pickup, and even mail delivery and other more “minor”
services. Food production and distribution will be disrupted or collapse, leading to
hunger and starvation. Supply chains will be disrupted or collapse, leading to difficulty
(or the impossibility) of obtaining gasoline, clothing, and household supplies. The
financial system will be severely disrupted or collapse. Mass transit and airplane travel
will be disrupted or collapse. Hospitals and medical care will deteriorate and then
collapse. Deaths will accelerate due to starvation, disease and lack of medical care,
plus violence.15

Only recently are climate scientists writing about how serious the effects on society will
be. For example, Ripple et al., 2023b, in their most recent annual report, write that,
“Conditions are going to get very distressing and potentially unmanageable for large
regions of the world, with the 2.6°C warming expected over the course of the century,
even if the self-proposed national emissions reduction commitments of the Paris
Agreement are met. We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic
systems in such a world where we will face unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather
events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and
increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict.”

15
Violence will be worse in countries and regions where guns are easy to acquire. Consider the United
States. Although it’s hard to know exactly how many guns are in circulation within the U.S., examining
figures of gun production and then subtracting the number that are broken, destroyed or illegally exported
each year, a reasonable estimate is over 400 million
(https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/).

Karis 19
“Climate scientists say that even if the world blows past the 1.5°C target, every tenth of
a degree matters, and 2.5°C of warming would be much safer than 4°C.”16 This is from
a climate newsletter, and I have seen this exact statement, or one almost identical,
dozens of times. It is partly true, as every tenth of a degree does matter – with respect
to warming – but it is not necessarily the case that 2.5°C is safer than 4°C – because if
2.5°C is enough to destroy human civilization, then it is no different from 4°C in terms of
safety. Getting shot with one bullet is generally better than getting shot with two, but if
the first bullet kills you then one bullet is just as dangerous as two. One goal of this
paper is to convince you of the unfortunate fact that we may now be at a point where
every tenth of a degree no longer matters.

Summaries of the Current Situation

There are many excellent summaries of the current situation and reviews of the
literature, and readers are directed to a short list of the most comprehensive
reports in the Suggested Reading section at the end of this document. The most
serious direct consequences of climate change on human civilization are
presented in Appendix 1, and they can be summarized succinctly by listing the
sections within that appendix: extreme shortages of fresh water, extreme rainfall
and floods, extreme heat waves, extreme droughts, extreme fires, extreme
tropical cyclones, extreme sea ice and ice shelf loss, extreme loss of biodiversity,
the collapse of ocean currents, ocean acidification and sea level rise, and the
spread of infectious diseases. These changes will lead to crop failures and
starvation, regional conflicts, and mass migration.
.
We don’t need to reach the “hothouse” earth scenario described by Steffen et al.
(2018) for civilization as we know it to collapse. We just need enough climate
stresses to lead to armed conflict and civil unrest, which will then make it even
more difficult to adapt to a warmer world, leading to continued conflict. See the
causal loop diagram in Figure 1 for a visual representation of how the different
aspects of climate change connect and interrelate.

Richards et al. (2021) review an extensive body of literature in order to create more
complex causal loop diagrams (CLDs) that present the relationships among climate
change, food insecurity, and societal collapse. He describes the benefits of CLDs:

“A key benefit of CLDs is that they simply present a myriad of information

in a single diagram; in doing so, CLDs enable comprehension of the
structure and behaviour of complex systems, including feedbacks,

16
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/20/three-surprising-findings-latest-un-emissions-report
/

Karis 20
 intervention points and far-reaching interdependencies. Our CLD visually
depicts a system of 39 variables, 105 links and 32,000 feedback loops,
integrating information from different fields including climate science, food
security, conflict, migration and health research.”

Although these CLDs present the relationships among multiple variables, they do not
offer predictions about the future. They may, however, be useful in guiding data-driven
projects to define thresholds and to develop quantitative modeling.

Hansen and his colleagues summarize the overall situation in the title of a recent
communication17: “‘A Miracle Will Occur’ is Not Sensible Climate Policy.”

COP28
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has a yearly
Conference of the Parties (COP). COP28, the 28th meeting, ended on December 12,
2023. Those who don’t follow the COP meetings will not believe the big breakthrough
that just happened. For the first time in 28 years the final document mentioned “fossil
fuels.” Even more amazing, the final document included a statement that we should
transition away from fossil fuels – but in an “orderly and equitable manner.” Most
countries wanted the stronger terms of “phasing out” rather than “transitioning away” but
that was too radical for the petrostates. Of course, nothing in any of the agreements are
in any way legally binding, and there are no enforcement mechanisms for any of the
goals that are mentioned. And there are many loopholes. The stock of major oil and gas
producers went up immediately after the conference released its final report. Continuing
the unreality of the moment, attendees kept talking throughout the conference about the
magical goal of remaining below 1.5°C. A resolution calling for the transition away from
fossil fuels should have been adopted during the first COP in 1995. There are 198
participating countries in COP, and all must consent to any agreement, which is why it is
so difficult to agree to anything of substance. Why not require only a super majority for
agreements (75-80%)? This would prevent a handful of countries from vetoing
meaningful action.

The 1.5°C Method of Evaluation

When you read or hear something to the effect that we must do X or Y to remain below
the Paris agreement limit of 1.5°C, then you know that the paper or speaker is not
serious. They are either ignorant or dishonest. Many scientists and public figures
probably have what they consider good reasons for being dishonest, or perhaps don’t
consider themselves dishonest. Perhaps they believe it will be too upsetting to tell the

17
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/Miracle.2023.12.07.pdf

Karis 21
truth, or that the truth will lead to defeatism. My position is that only the truth will
convince us to take the drastic measures necessary.

Karis 22
Figure 1. (This is Fig. 3 from Kemp et al., 2022) “Cascading global climate failure. This is a causal loop
diagram, in which a complete line represents a positive polarity (e.g., amplifying feed-back; not
necessarily positive in a normative sense) and a dotted line denotes a negative polarity (meaning a
dampening feedback).”

Karis 23
 None of This is New
Many point to James Hansen’s testimony before congress on June 23, 1988 as
the first significant warning about the dangers of climate change,18 but five years
earlier, in 1983 (40 years ago!) Seidel (1983), an EPA scientist, published a long,
detailed report with the title, “Can we delay greenhouse warming?”19 In the early
1980s the relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change was
clear, but scientists were warning of negative consequences in the 1950s. For
example, the physical oceanographer Roger Revelle testified before congress in
1956 and 1957. During his second appearance he said, “The last time that I was
here I talked about the responsibility of climatic changes due to the changing
carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and you will remember that I
mentioned the fact that during the last 100 years there apparently has been a
slight increase in the carbon dioxide because of the burning of coal and oil and
natural gas….in the future… southern California and a good part of Texas,
instead of being just barely livable as they are now, would become real
deserts.”20 As far back as the 1880s there were newspaper articles about how
the “pollution of the air” from the burning of coal and the carbon dioxide it
produced would produce a “marked change on the climate of the world”. You can
find copies of these newspaper articles, and much more, in Brad Johnson’s, “A
Timeline of Climate Science and Policy,” which starts with an entry from 1856.21

The Future
Over 90% of the extra energy from global warming is taken up by the oceans.
Although heat mixes rapidly down to about 150 feet, it can take a thousand years
for heat to mix completely throughout the ocean. This creates an extreme
thermal lag. Even if we completely eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions and
remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sea level will
continue to rise, probably for hundreds of years, as the oceans will continue to
release the heat they have been accumulating, and glaciers and ice sheets will
continue to melt. Land and atmospheric temperature will drop only slightly during
that time. We can prevent the world from heating up to an extreme state via rapid
decarbonization, but the earth will not cool by itself after we stop burning fossil
18
From Wikipedia, quoting the NYTimes article published the day after the testimony: “Hansen testified
that ‘Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a
cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming...It is already
happening now’.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#:~:text=Climate%20change%20activism-,US%20Senate%2
0committee%20testimony,Resources%20on%20June%2023%2C%201988)
19
The abstract, with warnings similar to those we still hear today, is included in Appendix 4. As an
interesting aside, Seidel thanks Hansen for his assistance in the acknowledgments of his paper.
20
https://www.hillheat.com/articles/2020/09/10/in-1957-climate-scientist-warned-congress-the-continued-b
urning-fossil-fuels-could-turn-california-into-a-desert
21
https://climatebrad.medium.com/climate-hearings-af27a3886a43

Karis 24
fuels. We can cool the earth via geoengineering, but without additional research
and testing, this may have devastating consequences, as described below.

Consider the recent projections on sea-level rise (International Cryosphere

Climate Initiative, ICCI, 2023):

The most recent projections show a slow, but continuing pattern of

sea-level rise (SLR) for many centuries even with “low emissions”
(SSP1-2.6). This is an emissions pathway that peaks at 1.8°C and
returns close to 1.6°C by 2100; yet the models show SLR
continuing at this slow pace, indicating some level of ice loss has
been irreversibly triggered even by this brief period of overshoot.

Our inability to act decisively on a global scale means that this low emission
pathway is already out of our reach.

Glacial-Interglacial Cycles and Possible Future Trajectories

During the last million years, the earth has gone through multiple
glacial-interglacial cycles following similar “trajectories”. We may now be headed
on a new, dangerous, and unprecedented trajectory that is likely to lead to the
collapse of human civilization. In the following passages, Steffen et al. (2018),
describe our future in terms of this new trajectory (which is illustrated in Figures 2
and 3 below). In subsequent sections I provide additional information on the
feedbacks and tipping elements that he mentions.

Earth System dynamics can be described, studied, and understood

in terms of trajectories between alternate states separated by
thresholds that are controlled by nonlinear processes, interactions,
and feedbacks. Based on this framework, we argue that social and
technological trends and decisions occurring over the next decade
or two could significantly influence the trajectory of the Earth
System for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and potentially
lead to conditions that resemble planetary states that were last
seen several millions of years ago, conditions that would be
inhospitable to current human societies and to many other
contemporary species.

The Anthropocene represents the beginning of a very rapid

human-driven trajectory of the Earth System away from the

Karis 25
 glacial–interglacial limit cycle toward new, hotter climatic conditions
and a profoundly different biosphere.

In the future, the Earth System could potentially follow many

trajectories, often represented by the large range of global
temperature rises simulated by climate models. In most analyses,
these trajectories are largely driven by the amount of greenhouse
gases that human activities have already emitted and will continue
to emit into the atmosphere over the rest of this century and
beyond—with a presumed quasilinear relationship between
cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature rise.
However, here we suggest that biogeophysical feedback
processes within the Earth System coupled with direct human
degradation of the biosphere may play a more important role
than normally assumed, limiting the range of potential future
trajectories and potentially eliminating the possibility of the
intermediate trajectories. [Emphasis added]

Beyond this threshold [2°C], intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks in the

Earth System could become the dominant processes controlling the
system’s trajectory. Precisely where a potential planetary threshold might
be is uncertain. We suggest 2°C because of the risk that a 2°C warming
could activate important tipping elements, raising the temperature further
to activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take
the Earth System to even higher temperatures. Such cascades comprise,
in essence, the dynamical process that leads to thresholds in complex
systems.

This analysis implies that, even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to
2.0°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a
cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a
“Hothouse Earth” pathway. (References within the quotation have been
omitted.)

Note that the “next decade or two” will be critical, and we have already gone
through half a decade since this paper was published. Also note that many
scientists now suggest that it is unlikely we can stay below 2°C, a potential
threshold that, once crossed, may lead to the “Hothouse Earth” pathway. In the
rest of this paper, I’ll explore some of the biogeophysical feedbacks mentioned
above, and support the claim that we’re now on a trajectory toward a new and

Karis 26
dangerous state. Unfortunately, it is likely that we are about to cross – or have
already crossed – the “planetary threshold” that Steffen et al. mention.

Consider Figures 2 and 3 on the next two pages: These two figures, from Steffen
et al. (2018), may seem intimidating at first, but I encourage you to take the time
to read the notes under them and study them for a few minutes. They really
provide an excellent framework for thinking about our current environmental
crisis.

Karis 27
 Possible Future Pathways

Figure 2. (Figure 1 from Steffen et al., 2018)“A schematic illustration of possible future pathways of the
climate against the background of the typical glacial–interglacial cycles (Lower Left). The interglacial state
of the Earth System is at the top of the glacial–interglacial cycle, while the glacial state is at the bottom.
Sea level follows temperature change relatively slowly through thermal expansion and the melting of
glaciers and ice caps. The horizontal line in the middle of the figure represents the preindustrial
temperature level, and the current position of the Earth System is shown by the small sphere on the red
line close to the divergence between the Stabilized Earth and Hothouse Earth pathways. The proposed
planetary threshold at ∼2 °C above the preindustrial level is also shown. The letters along the Stabilized
Earth/Hothouse Earth pathways represent four time periods in Earth’s recent past that may give insights
into positions along these pathways: A, Mid-Holocene; B, Eemian; C, Mid-Pliocene; and D, Mid-Miocene.
Their positions on the pathway are approximate only. Their temperature ranges relative to preindustrial
are given in [an Appendix].”

Karis 28
 Pathways of the Earth System out of the Holocene

Figure 3. (Figure 2 from Steffen et al., 2018) “Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth
System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the
hotter Anthropocene. The fork in the road in Fig. 1 [Figure 2 above in this paper] is shown here as the two
divergent pathways of the Earth System in the future (broken arrows). Currently, the Earth System is on a
Hothouse Earth pathway driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases and biosphere degradation
toward a planetary threshold at ∼2 °C (horizontal broken line at 2 °C in Fig. 1), beyond which the system
follows an essentially irreversible pathway driven by intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks. The other
pathway leads to Stabilized Earth, a pathway of Earth System stewardship guided by human-created
feedbacks to a quasistable, human-maintained basin of attraction. “Stability” (vertical axis) is defined here
as the inverse of the potential energy of the system. Systems in a highly stable state (deep valley) have
low potential energy, and considerable energy is required to move them out of this stable state. Systems
in an unstable state (top of a hill) have high potential energy, and they require only a little additional
energy to push them off the hill and down toward a valley of lower potential energy.”

Another informative way to describe future temperature risks and trajectories is in

Figure 4.

Karis 29
Figure 4. (Figure 1 from Taylor et al. (2023b). “Possible global temperature risks and
trajectories. Taylor and Vink, 2021.”)

The only way to prevent disaster and enter a safe state, according to Taylor et al.
(2023b), is via CDR and SRM (carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation
management).

Continued Loss of Biodiversity

There has already been a catastrophic loss of biodiversity, and the rate of loss is
accelerating. The loss of biodiversity means “reduced carbon sequestration,
reduced pollination, soil degradation, poorer water and air quality, more frequent
and intense flooding and fires, and compromised human health” (Bradshaw et
al., 2021).

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Bradshaw et al. (2021) make clear the enormous biodiversity loss resulting from
climate change and the increase in human population:

Since the start of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the biomass
of terrestrial vegetation has been halved, with a corresponding loss
of >20% of its original biodiversity, together denoting that >70% of
the Earth's land surface has been altered by Homo
sapiens….Population sizes of vertebrate species that have been
monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over
the last five decades, with certain population clusters in extreme
decline, thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species.
Overall, perhaps 1 million species are threatened with extinction in
the near future out of an estimated 7–10 million eukaryotic species
on the planet, with around 40% of plants alone considered
endangered. Today, the global biomass of wild mammals is <25%
of that estimated for the Late Pleistocene, while insects are also
disappearing rapidly in many regions.
…
As telling indicators of how much biomass humanity has transferred
from natural ecosystems to our own use, of the estimated 0.17 Gt
of living biomass of terrestrial vertebrates on Earth today, most is
represented by livestock (59%) and human beings (36%) — only
~5% of this total biomass is made up by wild mammals, birds,
reptiles, and amphibians. As of 2020, the overall material output of
human endeavor exceeds the sum of all living biomass on Earth.

Tipping Points
Climate “tipping points” (CTP) are “critical thresholds where a certain degree of change
triggers self-accelerating and potentially irreversible cascades of changes” (WMO
Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, 2023). What makes tipping points so dangerous is that when
one is crossed a system can flip from one state to another, and there may be no way to
return to the previous state. For example, after permafrost thaws it continues emitting
CO2 and methane even when the temperature drops below zero. In fact, when “These
emissions are irreversibly set in motion,” they “will not slow for 1–2 centuries, meaning
that future generations must offset them (draw down carbon) at scales the size of a
major emitter” (ICCI, 2023). In another example, when deforestation in a part of the
Amazon rainforest reaches a certain threshold, it may transform into a dry savannah
and this, in turn, can have profound effects on global weather patterns. As described by
an editorial in the Washington Post on December 6:

Karis 31
 Today, roughly 17 percent of the Amazon is gone and more than 75
percent of what remains has been weakened. As trees disappear, the
Amazon’s ability to return moisture to the atmosphere declines, leading to
less rainfall, higher temperatures and a dry forest. Unless levels of
deforestation drop dramatically, this feedback loop could transform over
half of the Amazon into savanna within decades.22

Changes in large parts of the climate system are now occurring that could lead to the
crossing of up to 15 tipping points, and it’s possible that the West Antarctic ice sheet
may have already passed a tipping point. “Current global warming of ~1.1°C above
pre-industrial already lies within the lower end of five CTP uncertainty ranges. Six CTPs
become likely (with a further four possible) within the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to
<2°C warming, including collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets,
die-off of low-latitude coral reefs, and widespread abrupt permafrost thaw” (McKay et
al., 2022). In addition, “Crossing these CTPs can generate positive feedbacks that
increase the likelihood of crossing other CTPs.” Cascading tipping points are discussed
in a section below.

Randers & Goluke (2020)

...report that in the ESCIMO climate model the world is already past a
point-of-no-return for global warming. In ESCIMO we observe
self-sustained thawing of the permafrost for hundreds of years, even if
global society stops all emissions of man-made GHGs immediately….The
thawing (in ESCIMO) is the result of a continuing self-sustained rise in the
global temperature. This warming is the combined effect of three physical
processes: (1) declining surface albedo (driven by melting of the Arctic ice
cover), (2) increasing amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere (driven
by higher temperatures), and (3) changes in the concentrations of the
GHG in the atmosphere (driven by the absorption of CO2 in biomass and
oceans, and emission of carbon (CH4 and CO2) from thawing permafrost).
This self-sustained, in the sense of no further GHG emissions, thawing
process (in ESCIMO) is a causally determined, physical process that
evolves over time. It starts with the man-made warming up to the 1950s,
leading to a rise in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere—further
lifting the temperature, causing increasing release of carbon from thawing
permafrost, and simultaneously a decline in the surface albedo as the ice
and snow covers melts. To stop the self-sustained warming in ESCIMO,
enormous amounts of CO2 have to be extracted from the atmosphere.

22
https://wapo.st/47V4Fd0

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In a major review of tipping elements, Wang et al.(2023) come to a somewhat less
pessimistic view, arguing that most tipping elements will not lead to abrupt changes to
the climate within the very near future.23 However, “Overall, even considering remaining
scientific uncertainties, tipping elements will influence future climate change and may
involve major impacts on ecosystems, climate patterns, and the carbon cycle starting
later this century.”

See Appendix 1 for evidence that Canadian forests have already crossed a tipping
point, now being a source for carbon rather than a “sink” (a sink would mean that they
absorb more carbon than they release). Also in Appendix 1 are details from a new
paper on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, which brings warm
water from the tropics to the North Atlantic and cold water south. The AMOC may cross
a tipping point and collapse as soon as 2050, with devastating consequences.

McKay, the lead author on the influential 2022 study cited above, has recently been
working as part of a large team, led by Tim Lenton, from the University of Exeter, to
summarize the literature on tipping points (Lenton et al., 2023). The project is funded by
the Bezos Earth Fund, and was released during COP28. It is aimed at a non-academic
audience, and is an excellent and comprehensive summary of the existing literature,
filled with interesting charts and figures. On the negative side, the full report, at almost
500 pages, is padded with many glossy and graphically-rich points, and although one
aim is to summarize the existing literature for policymakers, it is also clearly a marketing
exercise, both to emphasize the seriousness of the problem and to offer (of course) a
solution.24 News articles always repeat the report’s assertion that over 200 authors
were involved, but this seems like marketing hyperbole, as I think they must have
counted everyone who reviewed any of the chapters. (Only 15 authors are actually
listed as editors.) The report spends significant space describing all the positive tipping
points in social, political, and economic systems that can still save us, but is very
Pollyannish in its overall outlook.

Feedback Loops
Amplifying climatic feedback loops are one of the main reasons why pessimism is
warranted.25 “An amplifying, or positive, feedback on global warming is a process
whereby an initial change that causes warming brings about another change that results

23
Although published in 2023, given publication lags, the Wang et al. paper does not review the most
recent 2023 Ditlevsen paper on the collapse of the AMOC, although it does cite an older paper by
Lohmann & Ditlevsen, 2021.
24
The authors obviously focused on trying to make the report readable and visually interesting to
non-scientists, but there are so many introductions and summaries and main points and key messages
that the overall organization is a complete mess.
25
The IPCC publishes papers titled, Reasons for Concern, but it would be more apt to call these,
Reasons for Pessimism.

Karis 33
in even more warming. Thus, it amplifies the effects of climate forcings — outside
influences on the climate system such as changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. In
part because of positive climate feedbacks, a very rapid drawdown in emissions will be
required to limit future warming” (Ripple et al., 2023a). As discussed below, a rapid
drawdown is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely to happen in the near future.
Ripple et al. (2023a) discuss 27 positive (reinforcing) feedback loops. The most
commonly reported physical feedback is the melting of sea ice in the Arctic as the
climate warms. Water has a lower albedo (reflectivity) than ice, so when sea ice melts
more energy is absorbed by the ocean rather than being reflected back into space. In
addition, as the Arctic warms there is a biological feedback as permafrost thaws,
releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, which leads to further
warming. At some point – and no one knows when this point will be reached – even if
humans stop releasing greenhouse gases, these amplifying feedback loops will
continue to lead to increased warming. Scientists currently have little detailed
knowledge of many feedback loops, which is another reason, discussed below, that
current predictions are an underestimate of future warming. Note that the Arctic is
warming much faster than the rest of the planet, and when the earth reaches 2°C above
pre-industrial levels the Arctic will reach somewhere between 4° and 8°C (ICCI, 2023).

“There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to
an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state …. In particular, poorly
understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming....For
instance, recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be
lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing
an additional ∼8°C global warming” (Kemp et al., 2022).

Note that water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and as temperature rises, the amount of
water vapor also rises, which results in one of the most important positive feedback
loops.

Compound Hazard Analyses and Cascading Effects

Risk assessments rarely focus on what might happen when events interact and risks
cascade and spread dramatically.

A thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread,

interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses, but even
simpler “compound hazard” analyses of interacting climate hazards and
drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world. For
example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population
vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave. (Kemp et al., 2022)

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See the causal loop diagram in Figure 1 above on a cascading global climate failure.
What makes compound hazards involving interactions with human infrastructure and
populations more likely is the interaction among tipping elements themselves. As Klose
et al. (2021) write, there are several ways in which multiple tipping elements may
interact (some causal and some not),26 but the troubling outcome is that cascading
effects are a “possible mechanism for creating a potential planetary-scale tipping point
(of the biosphere)...we may approach a global cascade of tipping points via the
progressive activation of tipping point clusters through the increase of global mean
temperature. This could potentially lead to undesirable hothouse climate trajectories.”27
“Undesirable” indeed, when “hothouse” earth scenarios involve large regions of the
earth becoming uninhabitable.

Tipping elements at risk at low levels of warming may trigger elements that are normally
at risk only at higher levels of warming. “For example, tipping (loss) of the Greenland Ice
Sheet [at risk at only 1-3°C] could trigger a critical transition in the Atlantic Meridional
Ocean Circulation (AMOC) [at risk at 3-5 °C], which could together, by causing sea-level
rise and Southern Ocean heat accumulation, accelerate ice loss from the East Antarctic
Ice Sheet [at risk at >5°C]….” (Steffen et al., 2018).

Compound events “refer to the combination of multiple drivers and/or hazards that
contribute to societal and/or environmental risk” (IPCC, 2023).

With every increment of warming, climate change impacts and risks will
become increasingly complex and more difficult to manage. Many regions
are projected to experience an increase in the probability of compound
events with higher global warming, such as concurrent heatwaves and
droughts, compound flooding and fire weather. In addition, multiple
climatic and non-climatic risk drivers such as biodiversity loss or violent
conflict will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks
cascading across sectors and regions. Furthermore, risks can arise from
some responses that are intended to reduce the risks of climate change,
e.g., adverse side effects of some emission reduction and carbon dioxide
removal (CDR) measures. (high confidence) (IPCC, 2023)

26
Klose et al. (2021) identify three types of tipping dynamics: two phase cascades, domino cascades, and
joint cascades.
27
Tipping points and tipping cascades are an active research area, and much is unknown, including the
exact conditions under which they will start, the temperatures required, and the possible outcomes.

Karis 35
 A “Polycrisis”
One of the goals of this paper is to argue that climate change should not be
considered separately from other crises we are facing. In military terms, it is a
“threat multiplier” that can exacerbate existing political instability, which will then
make mitigation efforts more difficult. The causal loop diagram above (in Figure
1) shows how there can be a cascading series of events caused by climate
change, but of course it is an oversimplification. The World Economic Forum,
focusing primarily on economic activity, nevertheless takes a broad view of risks;
all risks, after all, can impact economic activity. Over the last several years, the
concept of a “polycrisis” has emerged at the World Economic Forum’s Annual
Meeting in Davos, and described in reports on global risks. A polycrisis is “a
cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall
impact exceeds the sum of each part” (Global Risks Report 2023, 2023). Figure
5, on the next page, presents global risks in five categories: economic,
environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological.

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Figure 5.

Armed Conflict
The U.S. military has been one of the first governmental organizations to take
seriously the security threats introduced by climate change. They have
contracted with the Rand Corporation to survey the literature and produce reports
for the U.S. Central Command. These are described in Appendix 5, with a focus
on the second report, titled “Pathways from Climate Change to Conflict in U.S.

Karis 37
Central Command” (Chandler et al., 2023) This report provides details on the
various “causal pathways from climate change to conflict.” See Figure 6 below for
a simplified conceptualization of the six step process from climate hazard to
conflict.

Figure 6. This figure is from the second Rand Corporation report for the U.S. Military,
Pathways from Climate Change to Conflict in U.S. Central Command (Chandler et al.,
2023).

The Rand Reports conclude that although climate hazards may directly lead to violence,
it is more often a multistep process. They summarize the causal pathways like this:

The causal pathways from climate hazard to conflict vary but often
begin with a hazard that results from a form of insecurity (such as
food, livelihood, physical, or health insecurity) that then combines
with climate impacts on state capacity, population flows, and other
factors. When filtered through individuals' and armed groups'

Karis 38
 incentives to mobilize around greed or grievance, the impacts of
these hazards culminate in conflict.

International Efforts: Extensive but Ineffective

There are multiple efforts and organizations focusing on climate change; the largest is
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).28 Another major effort, by the
U.S. Global Change Research Program, is the National Climate Assessment (USGCRP,
2018; USGCRP, 2023; the full reports are over 1,500 pages), which focuses on the
effects of climate change on the United States. Although very conservative (see below),
these organizations survey the literature and provide excellent technical summaries,
although their summaries for policy makers and the public are problematic because they
neglect to present the risks of extreme outcomes accurately.

For several decades there have been a series of international meetings sponsored by
the IPCC and United Nations, during which member countries have made pledges on
how much they will reduce their use of fossil fuels.tAll these efforts to reduce
greenhouse gases have failed. The only thing that really matters is how much carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere. Yes, there
have been pledges, and some reductions, but these efforts and organizations have not
been effective because the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere
continues to increase. We may have reduced the rate of increase, but that doesn’t
matter. The only thing that really matters is how much carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere – and we continue to pump
enormous quantities. Pledges of future reductions are just more “blah, blah, blah” as
Greta Thunberg so eloquently explains.29

The IPCC, and Why the Risks of Climate Change are Underestimated
The IPCC’s primary mandate is to present the consensus on climate change and advise
policy makers (see Appendix 4 for a brief history of IPCC conferences). Thousands of
scientists and editors are involved in reviewing the literature and writing reports, and
with over 100 governments required to approve the results, the IPCC is inherently
conservative in nature.30 In addition, Brysse et al. (2012) make a compelling case that

28
The IPCC produces multiple reports. I suggest starting with IPCC (2023a), which is listed in the section
on Suggested Reading and in the Reference section; it is titled, “Summary for Policymakers”.
29
Greta Thunberg gave a speech at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan Italy on September 28, 2021,
where she said, “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050.
Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not
led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.”
30
“About 830 Authors and Review Editors from over 80 countries were selected to form the Author teams
that produced the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).They in turn drew on the work of over 1,000
Contributing Authors and about 2,000 expert reviewers who provided over 140,000 review comments.”
From

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the scientists involved, “...are biased not toward alarmism but rather the reverse: toward
cautious estimates, where we define caution as erring on the side of less rather than
more alarming predictions.” This conservative bias likely results from the “...adherence
to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and
moderation.” In many areas, the IPCC has underestimated both the impacts and rate of
climate change, including in sea level rise, temperature rise, CO2 emissions, and both
continental ice-sheet melt and arctic sea ice decline.31 The IPCC reports also do not
include the latest research, as they include in their analyses only well-established and
peer-reviewed scientific papers. They are, in effect, several years behind the state of
the art.

The IPCC has presented a “reasons for concern” synthesis in its reports for over 20
years. There are five primary concerns, and over the last several IPCC reports, greater
risks were found at lower global mean temperatures in each successive report. At 1.2°C
to 4.5°C, only two of the five were rated as a very high concern in the Fifth Assessment
Report, but all five were rated as very high in the Sixth (most recent) report. Clearly, the
IPCC has underestimated the dangers of climate change in the past, and they are doing
the same thing now.32 Indeed, recent IPCC reports do note that risks are now higher
and have increased dramatically from the fifth to the sixth report:

For a given level of warming, many climate-related risks are assessed to

be higher than in AR5 (high confidence). Levels of risk for all Reasons for
Concern (RFCs) are assessed to become high to very high at lower global
warming levels compared to what was assessed in AR5 (high confidence).
This is based upon recent evidence of observed impacts, improved
process understanding, and new knowledge on exposure and vulnerability
of human and natural systems, including limits to adaptation. Depending
on the level of global warming, the assessed long-term impacts will be up
to multiple times higher than currently observed (high confidence) for 127
identified key risks, e.g., in terms of the number of affected people and
species. Risks, including cascading risks… and risks from overshoot …,
are projected to become increasingly severe with every increment of
global warming (very high confidence). (IPCC, 2023)

https://archive.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_structure.shtml#:~:text=The%20Panel%20and%20the%
20Plenary%20Sessions&text=Currently%2C%20the%20IPCC%20has%20195,countries%20and%20from
%20observer%20organizations.
31
For details on the underestimation of sea level rise, see Garner et al. (2018), Oppenheimer & Alley
(2016), in addition to Brysse et al. (2012)
32
Despite these criticisms of the IPCC, it has done amazing work over the last 35 years.

Karis 40
Not only is the IPCC conservative in its estimates, but it has not studied extreme
outcomes. From Kemp et al. (2022):

As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),

there have been few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts
from warming of 3°C or above. Text mining of IPCC reports similarly found
that coverage of temperature rises of 3°C or higher is underrepresented
relative to their likelihood. Text-mining analysis also suggests that over
time the coverage of IPCC reports has shifted towards temperature rise of
2°C and below. Research has focused on the impacts of 1.5°C and 2°C,
and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises
are sparse.

Kemp et al. (2022) suggest this focus on the lower bounds of warming is related, in part,
to the IPCC working by consensus. Kemp et al. also point out that the damages and
negative consequences of climate change are likely to be nonlinear and have “fat tails”
of “low probability, high-impact extreme outcomes.” In 2023 we are started to see some
of these low probability but high-impact outcomes in terms of extreme weather events,
especially extreme rainfall leading to catastrophic flooding, as well as extreme forest
fires.

A Fundamentally Flawed Approach?

Not only is the IPCC conservative, but some now argue that the approach of the IPCC
and practically every other national and international organization is fundamentally
flawed. Taylor et al. (2023b) describe the situation in a preprint that is getting a lot of
attention.

The current narrow approach to managing climate change risks is

fundamentally flawed because the risks and costs of failure are both likely
and catastrophic.

The IPCC has done indispensable work in collating peer-reviewed studies

and identifying key issues and trends for consideration by policymakers.
Still, due to serious errors and omissions, the summary reports fail to
convey the reality and severity of the climate crisis and urgent need to act.
Because reports are arrived at by consensus—a process that allows
self-interested governments to moderate or veto the final wording—many
key issues have been ignored or downplayed. These include the dangers
of passing climate tipping points, the role of fossil fuel interests in

Karis 41
 obstructing mitigation efforts, and the need for humanity to shift away from
meat-based diets. (Taylor et al., 2023b)

Taylor et al. (2023b) present a summary of fallacies and facts. Here is the fallacy about
IPCC assessments and the facts they present:33

Fallacy: Climate models represent all possible future risks from climate
change, and IPCC assessments and international agreements are
objective and accurate.
Fact 1: The Paris Agreement has created confusion by focusing on
maximum acceptable temperatures, rather than on the need to reduce the
EEI [earth energy imbalance].
Fact 2: Most models do not include long-term feedbacks identified
in paleoclimate research, and thus do not simulate the full climatic
responses evident in the Earth’s climatic history.
Fact 3: Models incorrectly assume that rising temperatures will
have incremental impacts, and that overshoot can be managed with
adaptive measures and reversed within decades.
Fact 4: Analyses tend to minimize the likelihood and risks of
high-temperature scenarios, although these are already occurring and are
the most dangerous.
Fact 5: Because IPCC reports are developed through a political
process requiring consensus, many key issues are downplayed or
ignored.
Fact 6: Risk assessments need to be informed by reality as
evidenced by current and past data.

Another problem is that the conclusions in the most read IPCC reports, the
summary reports, are produced by politicians, not scientists. Taylor et al. (2023b)
continue:

Although the IPCC’s scientific inputs are not directly manipulated or biased
by politicians, the summary reports are arrived at by consensus of
governments, not scientists—a process that allows governments to
change or veto the content at the very last step of communication with
policymakers and the public — many key issues are either entirely ignored
or downplayed. These include the dangers of passing climate tipping
points, the role of fossil fuel interests in obstructing mitigation efforts, and
the need for humanity to shift away from meat-based diets.

33
This is Fallacy 4 and the facts are 4.1, 4.2, and so on. I’ve removed the “4”s for clarity.

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What Should be Done?
Because the IPCC has been so ineffective, Taylor et al. (2023b) suggest a two track
approach.
Ambitious change is being obstructed by the UNFCCC’s requirement for
consensus. To accelerate change, a two-track approach could be used,
with UNFCCC agreements complemented by climate “coalitions of the
willing”: e.g., agreements among nations willing to impose meaningful
internal carbon taxes matched by tariffs on all imported goods and
services. A two-track approach will allow the simultaneous application of
both the Paris Agreement and a supplemental plan for managing
overshoot risks.

Magical Thinking
Greenhouse gases have been accumulating in the atmosphere for decades, and
climate scientists have been warning that the situation is serious, but often write, “If we
act soon to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, the worst can be avoided” (my
words). After decades with no meaningful action it becomes difficult to continue with this
refrain and continue saying that we must act soon; “soon” can’t last forever. The IPCC,
the most prestigious climate organization in the world, presents a way out of this
problem by adding in a fudge factor, “negative emissions,” or the removal of carbon
from the atmosphere. However, as one prominent scientist has written, this is magical
thinking, because there is no economical way to do this at the scale needed .

These models [of the IPCC] present pathways to carbon reductions that
may permit us to keep climate change below two degrees Celsius. They
rely heavily on technologies that don't yet exist, such as ways to store
carbon in the ground safely, permanently and affordably.

Stop and think about this for a moment. Science — that is to say,
Euro-American science — has long been held as our model for rationality.
Scientists frequently accuse those who reject their findings of being
irrational. Yet depending on technologies that do not yet exist is irrational,
a kind of magical thinking. That is a developmental stage kids are
expected to outgrow. Imagine if I said I planned to build a home with
materials that had not yet been invented or build a civilization on Mars
without first figuring out how to get even one human being there. You'd
likely consider me irrational, perhaps delusional. Yet this kind of thinking
pervades plans for future decarbonization. (Oreskes, 2022)

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Long-term global emission scenarios are critical for research in climate change and
modeling different future outcomes, and within the IPCC there were extensive
discussions and critiques of how to define different scenarios. Pedersen et al. (2022)
discuss the different scenarios adopted by the IPCC and how they evolved over the last
30 years. The IPCC didn’t just cavalierly introduce Negative Emissions Technologies
(NETs) into their scenarios, but wanted to create low-emission scenarios in alignment
with the Paris Agreements of 2015. Nevertheless, including NETs was unrealistic, and in
retrospect was immensely damaging, because when examining scenarios it is easy to
forget that the low-emission scenarios are not at all realistic. In fact, the Paris
Agreements goal of 2°C (with an aspirational goal of 1.5°C) is best thought of as an
outcome of magical thinking.

Rapid Decarbonization is Unlikely

A World-Wide Mobilization is Required
The earth will continue to warm, but how much it warms will depend primarily on the
amount of additional carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we pump into the
atmosphere. There is universal consensus that this is true. The argument in this paper
is that all our current plans to reduce greenhouse gases are far from sufficient, and the
most likely outcome is insufficient decarbonization to prevent societal collapse. In fact,
fossil-fuel subsidies are actually increasing worldwide!34 “Fossil fuel subsidies from G20
countries in 2022 amounted to at least USD 1 trillion, more than four times the annual
average in the previous decade, driven by vast consumption subsidies in response to
the energy crisis.”35

Theoretically, we could limit warming enough to prevent catastrophe by very rapidly

decreasing our use of fossil fuels.36 This would require a world-wide mobilization similar
to what the US did during WWII, when industry focused exclusively on supporting the
war effort. During the war it was impossible to buy a new car or washing machine, but
hundreds of thousands of planes, ships, tanks, trucks, rifles and other armaments were
produced. This required the government to take control of the economy and allocate

34
“Fossil-fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion last year…. subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas are
costing the equivalent of 7.1 percent of global gross domestic product. That’s more than governments
spend annually on education (4.3 percent of global income) and about two thirds of what they spend on
healthcare (10.9 percent).”
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies-surged-to-record-7-trillion
35
https://www.energypolicytracker.org/G20-fossil-fuel-support
36
Consider the following Gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment: if there were no individual nations
and one supreme leader of the entire earth, and everyone followed that leader religiously, how quickly
could the world reduce its use of fossil fuels? Most meat would be banned, air travel would be drastically
curtailed, renewable and nuclear energy would be expanded dramatically, fossil-fuel run vehicles would
be rapidly phased out, and so on. Tourism and airlines would collapse, as would the fossil fuel industry
and the meat industry, but millions of new jobs would be created to complete the transition to renewable
energy and a plant-based diet, the rapid expansion of mass transit, insulation of buildings, and so on.

Karis 44
resources to industry. Consider the likelihood of that happening today, when major
segments of the population don’t believe climate change is a serious threat, believe the
government is the problem, and want to defund major government agencies. There are
still many elected officials who deny the science of climate change and organizations
(some supported by the fossil fuel industry) that are actively trying to stop the transition
to renewable energy. There will continue to be incremental improvements, but no quick
and radical decarbonization.

A tax on carbon is probably the most effective way to rapidly reduce fossil fuel use but
despite efforts by several organizations, this is very unlikely to happen in the near
future.

Renewable Energy and Nuclear Power Alone are Insufficient

Increasing renewable energy by itself is meaningless unless it replaces fossil fuels.
Renewable energy is being rolled out much more quickly than expected and the prices
have fallen dramatically over the last 15 years – up to 90% by some estimates. For
much of the world, solar power is now the cheapest form of electricity. This is
impressive, and wonderful. However, people forget that it doesn’t really matter how
much renewable energy we install or how cheap it is. All that matters is the amount of
greenhouse gases that we inject into the atmosphere, and that has been going up, not
down. We could increase power generated from renewables by a factor of ten, and it
wouldn’t matter if demand also increased and the amount of fossil fuels we burned
remained the same. We could generate 90% of our power from renewables and it really
wouldn’t matter if we also kept burning fossil fuels. Yes, the world will warm less with
90% renewables compared to 10%, but with respect to catastrophic consequences for
human civilization, the percentage of renewables doesn’t matter if we continue to pump
significant quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

It’s quite amazing how the rapid introduction of renewable energy has blinded people to
the realities of climate change. In the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) recent report,
they emphasize that, “The path to 1.5 °C has narrowed, but clean energy growth is
keeping it open” (Net Zero Roadmap, 2023).37

Nuclear energy is also a clean option, but very few nuclear plants are being
constructed, even though they are much safer than fossil fuel and far cheaper (yes,
cheaper). Although most people think that nuclear power is very expensive, this is not
true if you consider the costs to society from burning fossil fuels (the term in economics
is “externality”). The burning of fossil fuels kills millions every year from air pollution, so
nuclear power is also much safer. It is comparable to solar and wind, which are not

37
The IEA does, however, do an excellent job in tracking all the subsidies for fossil fuels.

Karis 45
perfectly safe because there can be accidents (e.g., helicopters crashing into wind
turbines). Nuclear energy “...results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal [i.e., lignite];
99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar
are just as safe”.38

Research on nuclear technology is advancing on multiple fronts, but even more

needs to be done. Although rarely acknowledged, the development of small
modular nuclear reactors is almost as important as the development of solar and
wind turbine technologies. Microreactors offer one very encouraging new
technology. Along with small modular reactors, they can be composed of
modules constructed in factories, which can dramatically reduce costs. As Black
et al. (2023) write in their comprehensive review,

This technology has disruptive potential as an alternative to

carbon-intensive energy technologies based on its mobility and
transportability, resilience, and independence from the grid, as well
as its capacity for long refueling intervals and low-carbon
emissions. Microreactors may extend nuclear energy to a new set
of international customers, many of which are located where energy
is at a price premium and/or limited to fossil sources. Developers
are creating designs geared toward factory production where
quality and costs may be optimized.

A good example is Radiant’s Kaleidos (https://www.radiantnuclear.com/), a 1.2 MW

high-temperature, gas-cooled nuclear microreactor that is assembled, fueled, and
tested in the factory and can be delivered by truck one day and be running at full power
the next day. It can also generate up to 1.9 MW of thermal power. Kaleidos could
replace diesel generators for both the military and commercial users and can be used in
remote locations without site preparation. After five years of operation, when the fuel is
depleted, the entire container can be shipped back to the factory for refueling. It is one
of three microreactor designs funded in part by the US Department of Energy, and
Radiant is supposedly on track to submit the design for regulatory review in 2024 and
demonstrate the first fueled operation by 2027. There is no information about the cost of
the unit or of the electricity generated, but Radiant’s intention is that it be cheaper than
diesel generators. I have not been able to find any independent assessments of the
technology, and the information above about its performance and ease of use are just
marketing claims at this point… but it sure sounds good!

38
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

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 Planting Trees Will Not Save Us
Some of the current plans to plant trees stem from a 2019 study in the journal Science
that drew immediate scientific rebuttals, and the first author of that study, Thomas
Crowther, now says, “If no one had ever said, ‘Plant a trillion trees,’ I think we’d have
been in a lot better space.”39 In the original study, Brastin et al. (2019; Crowther was the
last author) calculated that there was room for over two billion acres of additional tree
canopy cover, which could store over 200 gigatonnes of carbon. That original article
(and an earlier 2015 paper) led to the United Nation’s Trillion Trees Campaign and
many other initiatives to plant trees. Crowther now points out, in an excellent section of
his lab’s website (“What’s the potential of a trillion trees”40) that planting a trillion trees is
not even theoretically possible. “While tree planting can play a role in certain restoration
projects,” Crowther writes on his website, “the tree potential paper is not a prescription
for tree planting. Instead, it points to the tremendous capacity the Earth has for forested
ecosystems and to the benefits we would see if we created the conditions where a
trillion more trees could naturally flourish.” He goes on to write, “Tree restoration is not a
quick fix for climate change. Restored trees will accumulate carbon slowly over the rest
of this century and beyond.”

In a current study, which is much more rigorous than the one in 2019, Mo et al. (2023;
Crowther is the last of over 150 authors) conclude:

At present, global forest carbon storage is markedly under the natural

potential, with a total deficit of 226 Gt (model range = 151–363 Gt) in areas
with low human footprint. Most (61%, 139 Gt C) of this potential is in areas
with existing forests, in which ecosystem protection can allow forests to
recover to maturity. The remaining 39% (87 Gt C) of potential lies in
regions in which forests have been removed or fragmented (Mo et al.,
2023).

Therefore, it’s better to preserve existing forests than planting new trees, and mass
plantings or monoculture plantations are definitely not the way to proceed, because
“...almost half of global forest production can be directly or indirectly attributed to the
role of biodiversity, highlighting that the full carbon potential cannot be achieved without
a healthy diversity of species. Ecologically responsible forest restoration does not
include the conversion of other natural ecosystem types, such as grasslands, peatlands
and wetlands, that are equally essential” (Mo et al., 2023).

39
https://www.wired.com/story/stop-planting-trees-thomas-crowther/; see also
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/climate/trillion-trees-research.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HE0.3d
fV.boz-4csZou7m&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share
40
https://crowtherlab.com/whats-the-potential-of-a-trillion-trees/

Karis 47
Unfortunately, even these revised estimates of the positive contributions of forests for
carbon mitigation are probably overly optimistic, because they depend on reductions of
fossil fuel emissions. If emissions continue – as they most certainly will in the near
future – then rising temperatures, drought, and fire will reduce the ability of forests to
store carbon. In summary, it has been a fantasy to think that planting trees can save us,
and the misinterpretation of the research on trees and carbon reduction has set back
mitigation efforts by many years.

Mass Delusion: Reducing Methane will not Save Us

Methane can trap more heat in the atmosphere than CO2 because of the way it
interacts with infrared light leaving the earth. “Methane has more bonds between atoms
than CO2, and that means it can twist and vibrate in more ways that absorb infrared light
on its way out of the Earth’s atmosphere.”41 There are, however, common
misinterpretations about the relative importance of methane versus carbon dioxide, and
how it’s misleading to describe methane as 80 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.
Jessica McKenzie, an editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, interviewed
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford about this
common but misleading view.

Pierrehumbert: The 80 times figure comes from the standard Global

Warming Potential framework, which was introduced in the very first IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, but what everybody
forgot was that it was introduced as an example of how to do a
comparison, and not as something people should actually use to make
decisions. Nonetheless it stuck.

The main thing is that there is no true equivalence between carbon dioxide
emissions and methane emissions, because the climate responds in
different ways to a short-lived gas than to a long-lived gas….There is a
way to compare them, which is to compare the actual amount of warming
produced by different strategies.

McKenzie: I sat in on a press call with some of the congressional

representatives who have gone to COP, and [US Senator] Sheldon
Whitehouse said his number one priority was methane. What’s your
message for the politicians who have taken methane as their guiding star,
and the journalists who are supporting this narrative, that methane is the
big thing that we should be focusing on?

41
http://tinyurl.com/2h5bhxh5

Karis 48
 Pierrehumbert: It’s a mass delusion and wishful thinking, based on a
fundamental failure to understand the different ways that a short-lived gas
like methane affects the climate versus a long-lived gas like carbon
dioxide. The basis of the fallacy is the total amount of warming you can
avoid by any likely amount of methane reduction is small, compared to
what needs to be done. And it just comes from a fundamental lack of
understanding of basic climate physics.

It is useful to reduce methane, but it’s not going to really help us towards
net zero. The only real solution to the climate crisis is to get carbon
dioxide emissions down to as close to zero as we can.
…
They [politicians and journalists] can easily be seduced by statistics like
methane is responsible for 30 percent of the warming now, which implies
that we can get rid of that much warming by aggressively acting on
methane. But that ignores how much methane is due to natural sources
we can’t control. It is a mass delusion. Even the IPCC has been very
resistant to moving away from this false global warming potential
equivalence, which goes back to the very first IPCC report.42

Direct Air Capture Will Not Save Us

Removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere, called direct air capture (DAC), can be
done anywhere on the planet, and receives a lot of attention, especially since some
plants are already running and removing CO2 from the atmosphere (although at only
demonstration scales). This will probably be necessary (and is assumed in IPCC
models), but is not a solution to our problems. DAC is currently extremely expensive:

IPCC models now indicate that CDR must be coupled with NZE to reduce
total atmospheric GHG concentrations. Present estimated costs of this
removal are $100 to $200 per tonne of CO2. With estimates of how much
CO2 must be removed every year ranging from 5-16 Gt per year, this
represents a multi-trillion dollar per year unfunded problem that the world’s
nations will have to manage. (Taylor et al., 2023b)

Even if we can scale up DAC by a factor of 100 in the next few decades, that isn’t
enough. It needs to scale up by a factor greater than a million! With respect to carbon
dioxide capture and storage, the physicist Pierrehumbert says (in the same interview
quoted from above):

42
Jessica McKenzie, December 18, 2023, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://tinyurl.com/3vpjmwkc

Karis 49
 Just about everybody agrees we’ll need a certain amount of that, once
we’ve gotten carbon dioxide emissions down to nearly zero, but right now,
as Pierre Friedlingstein has said recently, the existing air capture projects
are capturing one-one-millionth of what they would need to, and even
under outrageously optimistic projections, where they improve by a factor
of 1,000, or even 10,000, that’s still not going to do the job of
decarbonization.

The role of carbon dioxide air capture, or capture and sequestration, is in

dealing with the last 10 percent or so of emissions that we can’t easily
avoid. That would include things like hard-to-decarbonize sectors, maybe
aircraft, it would include rogue nations; you know, North Korea isn’t likely
to sign on to emission reductions. Whether you call it a phase-down or a
phase-out, the fact is that we have to get emissions down by about 90
percent before we can even think about a possible role of air capture in
sopping up the rest. So while it is useful to have another entity putting
money in to develop the technology, because we will need some of it, it’s
not the game changer. It only becomes an important part of the strategy
once we get down to within shouting distance of net zero.

Although direct air capture will not save us in the short term, it is probably part of the
long-term solution. Even after we reach net zero, there will still be far too much CO2 in
the atmosphere, and direct air capture will be required to remove some and return us to
a safe level.

Political Considerations
Political Problems in the United States
In the first U.S. Republican presidential debate (August 23, 2023), the eight candidates
(Trump was absent) were asked if they believed that “human behavior is causing
climate change.” Most candidates refused to answer, and one, Vivek Ramaswamy, said
that, “The climate change agenda is a hoax” and that we should “unlock American
energy, drill, frack, burn coal.”43 Ramaswamy’s poll numbers went up after the debate.
All the candidates believed that we should continue expanding the extraction of fossil
fuels. When this is the view of one of the two major political parties in the United States,
how likely is rapid decarbonization? The candidates reflect the views of most
Republicans, as 58% say we should prioritize expanding the production of oil, coal, and
natural gas rather than prioritizing alternative energy sources (Tyson et al., 2023). Even
though many in the U.S. now realize that climate change should be a top priority, it is far

43
Ramaswamy has a page on his website called, “Truth.” (https://www.vivek2024.com/truths/). Number
three is, “Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.”

Karis 50
down the list of national issues: “Overall, 37% of Americans say addressing climate
change should be a top priority for the president and Congress in 2023, and another
34% say it’s an important but lower priority. This ranks climate change 17th out of 21
national issues included in a [Pew] Center survey from January [2023]” (Tyson et al.,
2023).

Recent surveys and interviews make clear how difficult it will be to move quickly on
climate change. “Overall, 46% of Americans say human activity is the primary reason
why the Earth is warming. By contrast, 26% say warming is mostly caused by natural
patterns in the environment and another 14% do not believe there’s evidence the Earth
is warming at all” (Pasquini et al., 2023). Pasquini et al. (2023) conducted in-depth
interviews with people who don’t think there is a climate crisis that provide insights into
their thought processes: although they are in agreement that the earth’s climate is
changing, they think this is due to natural patterns and variability. Although most of
these people trust climate scientists, they are concerned that some scientists may have
political or personal biases. In contrast, most do not believe what they hear from the
national news media, and are especially skeptical when told there is a crisis and we
must take immediate action. Most stress the importance of individual freedom, so do not
want to be told, for example, that gas-powered vehicles must be phased out. If there are
transitions from fossil fuels, these people say, they should be gradual.

But surely Republicans in congress are more responsible than presidential candidates,
who may need to make outrageous statements to get attention. Unfortunately, this is not
the case. On September 14th, 2023, the US House of Representatives voted 222-190
to pass a Republican-led bill, H.R. 1435, “To amend the Clean Air Act to prevent the
elimination of the sale of internal combustion engines.” This bill would prohibit states
from banning the sale of gas-powered cars. It will not become law, given opposition in
the Senate and a certain presidential veto, but it illustrates the view among House
Republicans about fossil fuel and climate change.44

After a month of chaos in the US House of Representatives, the Republicans finally

chose a new speaker. Here is a headline from the NYTimes from October 26, 2023 that
summarizes some of his views:
“New House Speaker Champions Fossil Fuels and Dismisses Climate Concerns
Representative Mike Johnson comes from Louisiana oil country and has said he does
not believe burning fossil fuels is changing the climate.”

44
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1435/text?utm_source=newsletter&utm_mediu
m=email&utm_campaign=wp_climate202&wpisrc=nl_climate202&s=1&r=1&q=%7B%22search%22%3A
%5B%22preserving+choice%22%5D%7D

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 Not Just the U.S.
In Australia, Tranter et al. (2023) studied a nationally representative sample and found
that “only a slim majority (approximately 55%) of Australians trust two operationalised
projections from the IPCC. The IPCC projections we model refer to estimates of 1.5°
warming occurring between 2030 and 2052, and that coral reefs will decline in size by
between 70% and 90% at 1.5° warming.”
Over a third of those who had little or no trust in these IPCC projections
[20% of the total sample] believe scientists stand to benefit by overstating
the impact of climate change, while close to one third claimed climate
models were not reliable enough to predict the climate of the future. A
further 17% of those with low trust believed human activities do not cause
global warming or that global warming does not cause climate change.”
(Tranter et al., 2023)

Economic Power to Political Power

Former Vice President Gore explains succinctly how economic power in a capitalist
society translates to political power:

The banks and the other large lenders, and associated industries, have,
for more than a hundred years, built up a legacy network of political and
economic influence. Shockingly, they have managed to convert their
economic power into political power with lobbying, and campaign
contributions, and the revolving-door phenomenon—where fossil-fuel
executives go into the government.

I mean, the last President of the United States made the C.E.O. of
ExxonMobil the Secretary of State. It’s almost hard to believe, but that is a
symbol of how fossil-fuel companies have penetrated governments around
the world.
…
The polluters have gained a high degree of control over the processes of
self-government. I’ve often said that, in order to solve the crisis, we have
to pay a lot of attention to the democracy crisis. Our representative
democracy is not working very well. We have a dual hegemonic ideology
called democratic capitalism, and the democracy part of our ideology has
been cannibalized, to some extent, by economic actors, who have found
ways to convert wealth into political influence. Wealth has always had its
usefulness in the political sphere, but much more so in an era in which the
candidate who raises the most money, and can buy the most media
presence, almost always wins the election.

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 …
They [the fossil-fuel industry] have taken over one of our two major
political parties, lock, stock, and oil barrel. It’s really quite shocking.
…
This year, the annual United Nations Climate Conference is in the United
Arab Emirates, and they have named the head of their national oil
company, Sultan al-Jaber, as the president of the conference.
…
It’s absurd to put the C.E.O. of one of the largest and, by many measures,
least responsible oil and gas companies in the world in charge of the
climate conference. At last year’s conference, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt,
the delegates from oil and gas companies outnumbered the combined
delegations of the ten most climate-affected nations. The year before, in
Glasgow, the fossil-fuel delegates outnumbered the largest national
delegation. They have dominated this U.N. process the same way they’ve
dominated so many state governments in the U.S., and the national
government much of the time.45

COP28 is no different, with many news outlets reporting that the fossil fuel industry is
sending more delegates than any single country. Kick Big Polluters Out is a coalition
trying to eliminate the influence of fossil fuel companies and their associated industry
organizations. They recently reported their analysis of COP attendance:

Disclosed delegates tied to the world’s biggest polluting oil and gas firms
and their trade groups have attended UN-led climate talks at least 7200
times over the last 20 years, according to a new analysis from the Kick Big
Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition.

“The UN has no conflict-of-interest rules for COPs,” said George

Carew-Jones, from the YOUNGO youth constituency at the UNFCC.46
“This unbelievable fact has allowed fossil fuel lobbyists to undermine talks
for years, weakening the process that we are all relying on to secure our
futures.47
45
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/al-gore-doesnt-say-i-told-you-so. Also, see
https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_what_the_fossil_fuel_industry_doesn_t_want_you_to_know for a TED
talk in which Gore rails against fossil fuel companies for 25 minutes.
46
“YOUNGO is the official children and youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC). YOUNGO is a vibrant, global network of children and youth activists (up
to 35 years) as well as youth NGOs, who contribute to shaping the intergovernmental climate change
policies and strive to empower youth to formally bring their voices to the UNFCCC processes.”
https://unfccc.int/topics/education-youth/youth/youngo
47
https://kickbigpollutersout.org/articles/release-fossil-fuel-lobbyists-attend-un-climate-talks-more-7000-tim
es

Karis 53
For a book-length exploration of the role of capitalism, read Naomi Klein (2014), This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. For a short treatise on how the “ethical
decadence” of the power of the “technocratic paradigm” has led to the current crisis,
read Pope Francis’ (2023) recent Apostolic Exhortation.

Climate Change and “Fragile” Countries

Unfortunately, future warming will occur most often in politically vulnerable states as
measured by the Fragile States Index,48 which examines economic, political, and social
indicators as well as cohesion indicators based on the security apparatus in a country,
factionalized elites, and group grievances. Kemp et al. (2022) presents a figure showing
the “striking overlap” between state fragility and extreme heat. Many of these fragile
countries are less wealthy countries without industrialized economies and with less
resiliency than most rich countries, and they will likely be the first to experience
catastrophic effects of climate change.

Sofuoğlu & Ay (2020) examined the relationship between climate change and political
instability in 18 Middle East and North African (MENA) countries between 1985 and
2016. From their abstract:

For empirical analysis, temperature and precipitation data representing

climate change, political instability, and conflict data are employed.
According to the findings, there is a causal relationship from climate
change to political instability in 16 countries and to conflict in 15 countries.
In addition to this, at least one causal relationship is determined from
climate change to political instability or conflict in all MENA countries.
Therefore, empirical results support the assumption that climate change
acts as a threat multiplier in MENA countries since it triggers, accelerates,
and deepens the current instabilities.

Climate change will be a factor in increasing political instability, and fragile countries will
not have the infrastructure and resources to deal effectively with extreme weather and
climate change. Consider what happened in Libya in September, 2023 – which was just
48
“The Fragile States Index is based on a conflict assessment framework – known as “CAST” – that was
developed by FFP [The Fund for Peace] nearly a quarter-century ago for assessing the vulnerability of
states to collapse. The CAST framework was originally designed to measure this vulnerability and assess
how it might affect projects in the field, and continues to be used widely by policy makers, field
practitioners, and local community networks. The methodology uses both qualitative and quantitative
indicators, relies on public source data, and produces quantifiable results. Twelve conflict risk indicators
are used to measure the condition of a state at any given moment. The indicators provide a snapshot in
time that can be measured against other snapshots in a time series to determine whether conditions are
improving or worsening” (https://fragilestatesindex.org/indicators/).

Karis 54
one of multiple extreme weather events during the year. The background: “Libya’s
infrastructure has suffered repeated blows during a civil war that broke out after the fall
of Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country now remains divided between rival
governments in the east and the west.”

Thousands are feared to have died in floods that engulfed Libya’s east
after Storm Daniel smashed into the North African country, swallowing
whole neighborhoods and, with them, an unknown number of residents.
The city of Derna has been most acutely affected, after raging torrents of
water tore through two dams and swept entire buildings into the sea….“I
expect numbers of dead will rise to 10,000,” he [Othman Abdul Jalil, the
health minister] told the [local television] channel early on Tuesday.49

What happened in Libya will, unfortunately, happen in many other countries: political
instability leads to poor planning and a deterioration of already weak infrastructure.
Limited maintenance leads to poor roads and weak dams, and then when a major storm
arrives (Storm Daniel, in this case) and 16 inches of rain fall within 24 hours, with most
falling within a six-hour period, dams collapse and there is catastrophic flooding in
low-lying vulnerable areas. Then, as in other fragile states, there are not enough search
and rescue teams, good communication systems, trucks that can drive through deep
water, helicopters, ambulances, bulldozers, backhoes and other heavy equipment, and
stockpiles of emergency supplies. There was also catastrophic flooding in Greece and
Turkey from Storm Daniel, but with effective central governments and the ability to react
quickly to disasters, only a few dozen people died.

Conflict can Exacerbate Fossil Fuel Use

During wars or regional conflicts, attention is focused on military operations, and
ongoing mitigation strategies may be put on hold. There may also be more direct
consequences. The Ukraine war was not precipitated by climate change, but is having a
negative effect. Although Europe has accelerated its move to renewable energy to
reduce dependence on Russian gas, other regions have switched from Russian gas to
coal. The conflict has also led to a more than doubling of fossil fuel subsidies in order to
reduce price increases for consumers.

The Rise of Nationalism and Right-wing Populist Leaders

It is also likely, as several political scientists have pointed out, that mass migration and
resource scarcity will lead to nationalistic and authoritarian political regimes. This is
problematic with respect to climate change because, as Conversi (2023) writes,
“...nationalism remains a key impediment to successful climate action, since a global
49
Sarah Dadouch, Washington Post, September 12, 2023, “Thousands missing and feared dead after
floods submerge eastern Libya.” https://wapo.st/44SkTl4

Karis 55
calamity such as the climate emergency can only be comprehended and tackled on a
world-wide basis and through synchronised global action.”

Over the last decade, right-wing populist leaders with anti-environmental views and
policies have gained power in the US, Brazil, Australia, Hungary, and several other
countries. Now we can add Argentina to the list, for in November, 2023, Javier Milei, an
admirer of Donald Trump, became Argentina’s president.

A far-right economist and television pundit with no governing experience,

Milei has called climate change a “socialist lie” and has claimed that “all
the policies that blame humans for climate change are false.” He has also
said companies should be allowed to pollute rivers “as much as they want
to.”50

Some commentators are now even talking about the possibility of a far-right European
Union, because the center right and far right are coming together in some countries,
especially on issues of immigration, religion, and cultural identity. The EU is already
treating the Mediterranean as a Trumpian wall, and basically paying other countries to
stop migrants from getting to Europe. (I’ll discuss mass migration in more detail below.)

Authoritarian Environmentalism
Nationalistic and authoritarian leaders currently tend to scoff at the climate crisis, in part
because solutions require multilateral cooperation and agreements that limit national
choices with respect to energy generation. Limiting “freedom” and being forced to follow
rules devised by international committees does not fit with the modus operandi of most
current authoritarian leaders. “Authoritarian environmentalism,” however, is already
here, and may expand in the future. Mittiga, 2021, defines authoritarian
environmentalism as follows:

This mode of governance, typically associated with China, is often

juxtaposed to the “democratic environmentalism” of wealthy, postindustrial
states like the United States, Australia, Germany, and Japan. The
essential idea behind these encomiums is that, while authoritarianism is in
general lamentable, having a government unencumbered by democratic
procedures or constitutional limits on power could be advantageous when
it comes to implementing urgently needed climate action.

50
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/21/heres-how-many-fossil-fuel-lobbyists-have-attende
d-un-climate-talks/

Karis 56
I am certainly not an advocate for authoritarian environmentalism, “but given the failures
of democratic countries to act decisively, the allure is clear, and the ability to effectively
address the climate crisis may offer some political legitimacy to authoritarian power.”51
[check quote] Mittiga advances some compelling arguments in discussing when an
authoritarian regime could be considered legitimate.

In times of war, for instance, authoritarian impositions of power, including

those that curtail democratic processes or basic rights, are often thought
legitimate to the extent they are necessary for protecting citizens and
restoring normal conditions. Likewise, as those who have survived
COVID-19 can attest, during a health emergency, severe and enduring
limitations of rights to free movement, association, and speech can
become legitimate techniques of government, even in robustly
liberal-democratic states. As these examples suggest, in crisis moments,
political legitimacy may not only be compatible with authoritarian
governance but actually require it. Conversely, stringent adherence to
liberal democratic constraints may diminish legitimacy insofar as it inhibits
effectively addressing credible security threats.

If an existential threat to a nation state by a belligerent neighbor justifies abandoning

some democratic principles and norms, and the same applies to a deadly pandemic,
why not also for the climate crisis, which is an existential threat to all humankind? The
allure of authoritarian environmentalism may be strong if you believe that “liberal
democratic norms, principles, and institutions impede urgently needed climate action.”
In that case, then, “legitimacy may permit—or even require—relaxing or abandoning
those constraints.” Consider nuclear power, where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
in the U.S. can take up to five years to approve a new license. The process is much
quicker in China, and there is also a very limited ability for citizens or local municipalities
to stall large projects via lawsuits.52 When climate change becomes even more extreme,
it is authoritarian leaders who will be more likely to decide unilaterally to start
geoengineering. As described below, a single country can start effective
geoengineering, but some of the regional consequences may be disastrous.

Mittiga also discusses how the climate crisis may “precipitate a more substantial and
enduring shift in what counts as an ‘acceptable’ use of political power…. Imagine, for
instance, if democratic representation came to be understood in intergenerational terms,

51
Mittiga’s definition: “I use ‘authoritarian’ in a fairly generic and expansive sense throughout to refer to
political arrangements or modes of governance that are illiberal (i.e., rights- and freedom-constraining),
undemocratic, and characterized by a concentration of executive power.”
52
China currently has over 20 nuclear power plants under construction, far more than the United States or
any other country.

Karis 57
such that only those governments that awarded formal standing to future people were
considered legitimate; or, if individual human rights were thought to be predicated on,
and therefore limited by, a more basic biotic right to continued existence, shared by all
living beings.”

Indirect Effects: Economic Impacts, Food Production, and Migration

Climate scientists have done amazing work over the last 50 years, but climate scientists
are not experts in predicting the consequences of global warming on human societies.
For that you need scientists from multiple other disciplines, including biology, medicine,
psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, as well as city
planners and military strategists.

Economic Impacts
Economic impacts will manifest in multiple areas, but yet most economic analyses are
relatively modest in their predictions of future losses. Rising et al. (2022), in a paper
titled, “The missing risks of climate change,” explains why this is so.

There is overwhelming evidence that the risks and impacts from

increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are
very significant, will impact nearly every aspect of human life and the
environment, and could ultimately prove to be devastating. An apparent
incongruity exists between the pervasiveness of anticipated physical
changes and the relatively modest total losses often estimated in
economic evaluations. Part of the explanation for this mismatch comes
from ‘missing risks’: the risks that are not currently included in economic
evaluations because of their uncertainty, because of our limited
understanding of them or because existing economic models do not
capture them in sufficient detail. (Rising et al., 2022)

On an individual level, a recent report by the U.S. Department of Treasury focuses on

the effects of flooding, wildfire, and extreme heat because these three hazards account
for the greatest costs to individual households in the United States (The Impact of
Climate Change on American Household Finances, 2023) . According to the report, half
of U.S. counties “face heightened future exposure to at least one” of these climate
hazards. In terms of household finances:

Some climate hazards cause widespread physical damage and force

interruptions and closures of normal operations of businesses,
governments, and other critical services. As a result, households could
face significant financial strain from lost employment income due to job

Karis 58
 loss, reduced working hours, or from interruptions in access to income
supports or other public benefits. (The Impact of Climate Change on
American Household Finances, 2023)

Direct property damages can be devastating, and in 2021 10% of homes in the United
States were affected by climate hazards. Hurricanes can be especially damaging, and
they are getting stronger and intensifying more rapidly. “Hurricane Katrina damaged
about 70 percent of all Louisiana properties, with approximately 17 percent remaining
unrepaired and about 8 percent uninhabitable five years later” (The Impact of Climate
Change on American Household Finances, 2023). Flooding and wildfires can not only
damage homes, but can damage businesses and key infrastructure, including power
systems, roads, and Internet service. See Appendix 2 for a figure showing Damages by
State from Billion-Dollar Disasters from 2018-2022.

For those who work outdoors, “future heat conditions could place approximately $55
billion, or about $1,700 per worker, of annual earnings at risk due to reduced working
hours” (The Impact of Climate Change on American Household Finances, 2023).
Already, some farmers are working at night to escape the heat, and working during the
day under extreme heat significantly reduces productivity.

Disruptions to transportation can have a major impact on commerce and industry.

Consider what happens when drought reduced shipping routes during 2023, as reported
by Sengupta in the New York Times:

Drought, aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels, is slowing down the

ship traffic that carries goods in and out of the United States through the
slender and vital Panama Canal, while heat and drought in the Midwest
are threatening to dry out the Mississippi River, a crucial artery for
American corn and wheat exports, in the months ahead.
…
Last year, for instance, as Europe faced its worst dry spell in 500 years,
ships carried a fraction of the cargo they normally do along the Rhine in
Germany, one of the continent’s most important thoroughfares. The
Rhine’s water levels are better this year, but the river faces a longer-term
climate risk: The mountain snow and ice that feeds the Rhine is declining.

Last year, drought also slowed down ships on China’s most important river
route, along the Yangtze, forcing companies to move their goods to
Chinese ports by road, which is costlier. The Mississippi River shut down
briefly in some parts last fall, too, because river levels were so low.

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 Exceptionally hot, dry conditions across the middle of the country this
summer means that could happen again this fall. That’s bad news for
American agriculture. Grains, grown in the Midwest, make their way down
the Mississippi River by barge before being shipped through the Panama
Canal and then transported across the ocean.
…
The area around the Panama Canal is experiencing an exceptionally dry
year. That’s bad for the canal, because every ship that goes through
needs millions of gallons of freshwater to float on, depending on how
many containers it’s carrying and how heavy it is.
…
Ships have had to watch their weight this year, which means reducing
cargo volumes. Fewer ships are going through each day; the Panama
Canal Authority, which runs the waterway, has restricted the number to 32
per day now, compared with 36 to 38 at other points.53

In South America, severe drought in parts of the Amazon region this year has led to
extremely low water levels in some rivers and disrupted shipping (especially around
Manaus), with boats running aground.54

Increased temperatures will also require increased expenditures for air conditioning in
much of the country, and health care costs will go up due to climate related
hospitalizations, medical care, and drugs. As one example, increased wildfire smoke,
such as that from Canadian fires experienced throughout large parts of the United
States during 2023, can lead to coughing, asthma attacks, headaches, chest pain, and
there are long-term effects of COVID-19 complications, increases in deaths from heart
disease, and multiple other effects.

Global Food Production

Disruptions to food supplies in major cities can lead to severe shortages and civil
unrest. Just imagine what would happen in a city of many millions if grocery stores ran
out of food due to a breakdown of the distribution system, with food trucks failing to
arrive at stores to restock shelves. Getting food into consumers hands in large cities is a
complex process, from crop production, transportation, processing, and distribution into
retail outlets. Climate change is likely to cause problems at several stages of this
process, and it’s clear that food scarcity and price increases can lead to conflict.

53
Somini Sengupta, Climate Risks Loom over Panama Canal, a Vital Global Trade Link. New York Times,
August 25, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/climate/panama-canal-drought-global-trade.html
54
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/amazon-drought-stalls-shipping-boats-run-aground-low-rivers-2
023-10-11/

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 When the price of staple crops like wheat, maize, and rice rose
substantially between 2007 and 2008, it sparked unrest in many countries.
In Bangladesh, thousands of workers rioted near Dhaka, smashing
vehicles and vandalising factories, while expressing their anger at rising
food prices and low wages. At the time, there were instances of protests in
15 countries across Africa, South America and Asia owing to food price
hikes. In Burkina Faso, soaring prices led to riots in several parts of the
country before thousands of demonstrators marched to Ouagadougou, the
capital, to force the government to subsidise the cost of some cereals.55

Major crops such as wheat, maize, soybeans, and rice are grown in multiple regions
around the world, so if there is shortage in one region another can pick up the slack. But
what if there are simultaneous failures across regions? Gaupp et al. (2020), “...combine
region-specific data on agricultural production with spatial statistics of climatic
extremes56 to quantify the changing risk of low production for the major food-producing
regions (breadbaskets) over time….We show an increasing risk of simultaneous failure
of wheat, maize and soybean crops across the breadbaskets analysed.” There was not,
however, an increase in simultaneous failures of rice production across different
breadbaskets.

Rezaei et al. (2023) review the literature on crop yields in response to warmer
temperatures, elevated carbon dioxide, and water availability for major cereal crops.
From their abstract:

Elevated CO2 can have a compensatory effect on crop yield for C3 crops
(wheat and rice), but it can be offset by heat and drought. In contrast,
elevated CO2 only benefits C4 plants (maize, millet and sorghum) under
drought stress. Under the most severe climate change scenario and
without adaptation, simulated crop yield losses range from 7% to 23%.
The adverse effects in higher latitudes could potentially be offset or
reversed by CO2 fertilization and adaptation options, but lower latitudes,
where C4 crops are the primary crops, benefit less from CO2 fertilization.
Irrigation and nutrient management are likely to be the most effective
adaptation options (up to 40% in wheat yield for higher latitudes compared

55
C40: Food Security,
https://www.c40.org/what-we-do/scaling-up-climate-action/adaptation-water/the-future-we-dont-want/food-
security/#:~:text=Food%20scarcity%20can%20also%20lead,sparked%20unrest%20in%20many%20coun
tries.
56
The climate extremes vary by crop and region. As one example, “for soybean in China, the critical
climate indicator is the number of days above 30°C during the growing season.”

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 with baseline) but require substantial investments and might not be
universally applicable, for example where there are water resource
constraints.

Mass Migration
When there is not enough food and water to survive, or it is too hot, or the rising ocean
makes towns and cities unlivable, or storms destroy homes and livelihoods, people will
migrate. Migration is complex, and there are political, economic, social, and
demographic factors in addition to climate. Consider the impact of devastating
hurricanes on Honduras, a fragile state, as reported by Miriam Jordan in the NYTimes57:

First came the hurricanes — two storms, two weeks apart in 2020 — that
devastated Honduras and left the country’s most vulnerable in dire need.
In distant villages inhabited by Indigenous people known as the Miskito,
homes were leveled and growing fields were ravaged.

Then came the drug cartels, who stepped into the vacuum left by the
Honduran government, ill-equipped to respond to the catastrophe.
Violence soon followed.

“Everything changed after the hurricanes, and we need protection,”

Cosmi, a 36-year-old father of two, said, adding that his uncle was killed
after being ordered to abandon the family plot.

Cosmi, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of concern for
his family’s safety and that of relatives left behind, was staying at a squalid
encampment on a spit of dirt along the river that separates Mexico and
Texas. Hundreds of other Miskito were alongside him in tiny tents, all
hoping to claim asylum.

The story of the Miskito who have left their ancestral home to come 2,500
miles to the U.S.-Mexico border is in many ways familiar. Like others
coming from Central and South America, they are fleeing failed states and
street violence.
…
While they await the outcome of their cases, asylum seekers are allowed
to remain in the United States, and they become eligible for employment
authorization after six months.

57
November 28, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/us/climate-migrants-asylum.html

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There is now research that examines the relationship between climate, conflict and
migration. Abel et al. (2019) examined applications for asylum for 157 countries
between 2006 and 2015. “Our results indicate that climatic conditions, by affecting
drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, played a significant role as an
explanatory factor for asylum seeking in the period 2011–2015. The effect of climate on
conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period
2010–2012 during when many countries were undergoing political transformation.”

It is inevitable that migration across borders will accelerate due both to environmental
problems caused by climate change and political instability. It is unlikely that these
migrants will be welcome, but likely that uncontrolled migration will become a major
political issue, as it has in both the U.S. and the EU. In June (2023) Florida governor
Ron DeSantis suggested using “deadly force” against migrants entering the U.S. who
were smuggling drugs, but didn’t explain how to tell who was a smuggler. The Miskito,
described in the quote above, are fleeing central America primarily due to economic and
safety reasons. Even if their asylum requests are weak, they will be allowed to stay in
the United States until their cases are heard, which can take years given the current
backlogs. As the number of migrants increases even further, and as extreme climate
events in the United States negatively impact the economy, it is inevitable that these
rules will be changed. Just as Europe is already taking extreme actions to keep out
migrants, so will the United States.

Human Rights Watch documented the killing of hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and
asylum seekers who were trying to cross into Saudi Arabia from Yemen in March and
June of 2023 (see Appendix 4 for more details). Greek authorities failed to prevent a
ship filled with 700 migrants in the Mediterranean from sinking and hundreds were
drowned or missing. In the future, when even wealthy western countries are struggling
to deal with climate change, it is inevitable that killings at the borders and on the high
seas will increase. As Lydia Polgreen wrote in a NYTimes opinion article:

Despite the many international agreements and norms around the

movement of people, everything from wanton disregard for the lives of
migrants right up to deliberate, maximum deadly force seems to be on the
table.
…
Indeed, the moral standard in how we treat those seeking safety and
freedom across borders has unquestionably been set by the West. It was
the European Union that decided to open its coffers to the murderous
Libyan Coast Guard to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean.
Europe has paid Turkey’s government billions of euro in exchange for

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 keeping millions of Syrian refugees out of Europe. Britain’s Conservative
government is trying to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, of all places,
rather than accept its obligation under international law to admit
refugees.58

Related Topics
Paleoclimatology
There is evidence in the paleoclimatic data that the earth has warmed very rapidly in the
past, where “rapid” is on a human scale of decades rather than a geological scale of
thousands or millions of years. For example, during Meltwater Pulse 1A (MWP-1A)
about 14,650 years ago, sea level rose at a rate of slightly more than two inches per
year. That’s almost two feet a decade! Meltwater Pulse 1A was also referred to as a
catastrophic rise event; are we at the beginning of another catastrophic rise event? It
seems probable.

There are cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit that occur over tens of thousands of
years and lead to changes in the climate (e.g., Milanković forcing), including the
triggering of ice ages. But considering only Milanković cycles, the earth should now be
cooling (and, in fact, since 1980 there has actually been a slight decrease in solar
energy reaching the earth, based on precise satellite measurements).

Note that CO2 can act as either a forcing agent or a response:

A very close and careful analysis of the records of temperature and CO2 in
ice cores shows that during Milanković cycles, CO2 mostly lags
temperature, suggesting that the CO2 variations were caused by the
warming and cooling, not the other way around. In this case, the CO2 was
acting as a positive feedback, amplifying the Milanković oscillations. But in
the last 100 years, the huge increase in CO2 drove the temperature
change. (Emanuel, 2016)

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) transports heat to the north
Atlantic, warming the air by up to 10°C. As Rahmstorf (2023) writes, “We know from
paleoclimatic data that there have been a number of drastic, rapid climate changes with
focal point in the North Atlantic due to abrupt AMOC changes, apparently after the
AMOC passed a tipping point. They are known as Heinrich events and
Dansgaard-Oeschger events...”. Dansgaard-Oeschger (D/O) events involve abrupt
58
Polgreen, L. (Aug. 24, 2023). “In a Report From a Distant Border, I Glimpsed Our Brutal Future.”
NYTimes Opinion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/opinion/saudi-arabia-ethiopians-border-politics.html

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warming followed by gradual cooling. They can occur in less than 30 years. The point
here is not that these events will be involved in climate change this century, but that
very rapid changes in the climate have occurred in the past – and it is thus not
unreasonable to assume they could also occur in the future.

The paleoclimatic record has critical information about how the climate system
operates, and one of the serious flaws in climate models is that they have not
incorporated this information.

Because there is little pre-industrial data, and due to the focus on shorter
timescales, most models ignore the paleoclimatic record. However,
historical evidence indicates that high GHG concentrations are likely to
cause much higher temperatures than are indicated by current modelling.
In fact, given that the present anthropogenic carbon release rate has no
precedent since the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 66 million
years ago, some scientists argue that climate conditions are increasingly
entering ‘no-analogue’ state that cannot be readily modelled (Taylor et al.,
2023b).

Societal Collapse and Paleoclimatic Data

Using anthropological, archaeological, and paleontological data, along with data from
paleoclimatology, many researchers have claimed that natural climate change has been
a major factor in past societal collapse. Both solar and volcanic forcing have resulted in
changes to the climate, often resulting in collapse via extended droughts. Richards et al.
(2021) reviews some of the literature on the collapse of over a dozen societies going
back two thousand years BCE and occurring in multiple locations around the world.

Climate Models
There are several dozen different climate models used by various scientific
organizations around the world. These models continue to improve, but don’t
adequately capture the complexity of clouds, ocean currents, and other physical
phenomena. Clouds, for example, depending on their type and altitude, can either
reflect sunlight, producing a cooling effect, or absorb and reradiate infrared radiation
producing a warming effect. Because exactly how climate change will affect clouds is
unknown, cloud formation is not represented well in climate models. Some significant
feedbacks and tipping points that could lead to high greenhouse gas concentrations are
also missing from climate models. Note that these are models based on physics and not

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statistical models. They “describe how energy flows through the atmosphere and ocean,
as well as how the forces from different air masses push against each other.”59

The spatial resolution of climate models is relatively low, with a three-dimensional grid of
boxes that are often 100 km square and 1 km thick, although some models can use
boxes as small as 50 km square.

For models to work, you need to feed in the amount of future greenhouse gas
emissions, and this requires a lot of guesswork – how fast will population and
economies expand, how much energy will be produced by nuclear or renewable
sources, and so on.

To deal with all this, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC) came up with a set of just four “representative concentration
pathways” (RCPs),60 expressing plausible evolutions of greenhouse gases
and other anthropogenic influences on climate, such as aerosols. These
are labeled with the associated net radiative forcing in the year 2100; so,
for example, RCP 6.0 has a radiative forcing of 6 watts per square meter
by the year 2100. (For comparison, doubling CO2 produces a radiative
forcing of about 4 watts per meter squared.) (Emanuel, 2016)

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the Coupled Model
Intercomparison Project (CMIP)
The WCRP coordinates research on climate around the world. One of their most
important initiatives is CMIP, which tries to compare and assess climate models from
multiple research groups. CMIP6 models are now being used, and CMIP7 models will
be available within a few years. The output from CMIP models are used extensively in
the IPCC reports.

The primary objective of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project

(CMIP) is to better understand past, present, and future climate changes
arising from natural, unforced variability or in response to changes in
forcing in a multi-model context. Successive generations of CMIP have
seen the project grow in scope, with increasing process-specific Model
Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) to better address specific scientific

59
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/11/a-distraction-due-to-errors-misunderstanding-an
d-misguided-norwegian-statistics/
60
RCP2.6 (very low future greenhouse gas concentrations), RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5 (very high
concentrations)

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 questions, while continuing to play a critical role in the IPCC Assessment
Reports.61

CMIP models have been fairly reliable when compared against both future or historical
climate changes. For more information, just search for “CMIP climate models” or
something similar.

The current IPCC scenarios are presented in Figure 7.

Figure 7 (FIGURE 1.4 from Crimmins et al., 2023, the Fifth National Climate Assessment). “The five
scenarios shown (colored lines) demonstrate potential global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions pathways
modeled from 2015 through 2100, with the solid light gray line showing observed global CO2 emissions
from 2000 to 2015. See Table 3 in the Guide to the Report for scenario definitions. Many projected
impacts described in this report are based on a potential climate future defined by one or more of these
scenarios for future CO2emissions from human activities, the largest long-term driver of climate change.

61
https://www.wcrp-climate.org/wgcm-cmip/call-members-cmip7

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The vertical dashed line, labeled “Today,” marks the year 2023; the solid horizontal black line marks
net-zero CO2 emissions. Adapted with permission from Figure TS.4 in Arias et al. 2021.”

Geoengineering is Inevitable
We have been engaged in a global geoengineering experiment for the last 100 years
and have now succeeded in warming the planet. From a physics perspective, there are
effective techniques for cooling the planet, such as solar radiation management (SRM;
also called solar geoengineering, stratospheric aerosol injection, and climate cooling).
This involves the injection of aerosols (typically sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere to
reflect sunlight. There are also techniques for thinning cirrus clouds in the troposphere,
and marine cloud brightening at low altitudes near the ocean. Not all techniques involve
clouds or the atmosphere, and there are now literally dozens of various geoengineering
techniques.

The problem is that scientists currently don’t know enough to be able to predict what will
happen on a regional basis, and there is consensus that changes in global weather
patterns could be significant. If the earth cools, but the summer monsoon rains over
Asia and Africa are disrupted and millions die from starvation, this can hardly be called
a success. Another problem is “termination shock,” or the warming rebound that will
occur if geoengineering ever stops.

Injecting aerosols into the atmosphere would require fleets of aircraft flying at high
altitudes, and would cost billions. However, this is inexpensive enough for any one of
the dozen richest countries to embark upon alone. Should one country decide to begin
geoengineering unilaterally and there are negative consequences for other countries,
this is a clear recipe for conflict.

Solar Radiation Management is by far the most studied and discussed type of
geoengineering, in part because there seems to be agreement that it would not only be
effective, but it would also be technically and economically feasible in the immediate
future. Several organizations within the United Nations have been studying solar
geoengineering, as well as many other international organizations, nations, NGOs,
professional societies, and the private sector. To create an overview of the field, The
Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering and the Forum on Climate
Engineering Assessment collaborated to produce a comprehensive report (Burns &
Talati, 2023, “The Solar Geoengineering Ecosystem: Key Actors Across the Landscape
of the Field”). Although the report focuses on all the agreements, pronouncements, and
warnings about solar geoengineering, and not the technical and scientific aspects, I
highly recommend it.

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Another type of geoengineering now receiving attention, which may be even cheaper
than SRM, involves adding iron to the oceans. The iron would fertilize algae and
plankton, they would convert carbon dioxide in the air to organic carbon, and this carbon
would then sink and be sequestered at the bottom of the ocean. This approach would
augment natural processes that occur when iron-rich dust blows from the land to the
seas. Toxic algae blooms are possible, however, and more research is needed. Some
scientists predict that after ten years of experiments that involve spreading iron over
several thousand square miles of ocean we may know enough to proceed on a global or
regional scale.

It is time to start studying geoengineering seriously and discard the “moral hazard”
excuses that it would undermine mitigation efforts. Buck and Nicholson (2023) present a
promising proposal on the advantage of a “global network of climate action research
centers that would provide appropriate conditions to produce reliable and legitimate
solar geoengineering research.”

When the effects of climate change lead to a sufficiently high level of disruption and
death, and it becomes clear that it is too late to reduce greenhouse gases in a
meaningful way, then the only recourse is geoengineering. When the choice is societal
collapse or geoengineering, then geoengineering will surely win. Some argue that we
have already lost the fight against climate change using mitigation, adaptation, and the
new techniques for directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We thus
need to start geoengineering now. Taylor et al. (2023b) call this “climate cooling” and
summarize the risks of not proceeding.

Choosing not to deploy climate cooling means to accept global

temperatures rising by at least 2°C above pre-industrial levels within a few
decades. This increase will destroy coral reefs and other vital ecosystems,
doom thousands of species to extinction, contribute to massive crop
failures, and induce heat waves that will make many tropical regions
uninhabitable and trigger mass population migrations. Several climate
tipping points have already been passed and it is probable that a 2°C
increase will cause half a dozen more significant climate tipping points to
be exceeded, setting off cascades of feedbacks that will further raise
temperatures and amplify associated impacts. Without climate intervention
within the next two to three decades, it is projected that global average
temperatures will rise by 3°C or more by the end of this century. Many
scientists believe that an increase of 4°C would threaten the survival of
human civilization.

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Many climate scientists mention human extinction at 4° or 5°C, but they do not take into
account all the disruptive effects of climate change and the second and third-order
effects that can lead to intra and interstate conflict (see Appendix 5). Given these
effects, 2°C is likely to lead to global societal collapse, but it is unclear when extinction
will occur.

Note that we are now starting on another geoengineering experiment, this time
inadvertently. Thousands of rockets are now launched annually, and this number is
rising quickly. Pollutants from these rockets are left in the stratosphere, and scientists
currently have little detailed understanding of their effects. Neither the Montreal
Protocol, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications
Commission (which licenses satellite launches), or the Federal Aviation Administration
currently examines or regulates the environmental impact of rockets in the stratosphere.

Climate Anxiety is Inevitable

All countries will suffer from the effects of climate change, but in some fragile countries
there will be societal collapse in the near future. Watching the extreme suffering in
these countries and worrying about whether you will be next, as well as personally
experiencing the effects of multiple extreme weather events, will lead to what some call
“eco-anxiety.” Consider what is happening already. During the summer of 2023, parts of
Italy, Greece, and several other countries experienced multiple extreme weather events
related to heat, fires, and flooding. Some news reports, perhaps slightly exaggerating,
wrote that “Europe is a continent on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” One news
report described the situation in Italy:

Italy was in the grip of extreme heat waves, hellish wildfires and biblical
downpours, and a nerve-wracked young Italian woman wept as she stood
in a theater to tell the country’s environment minister about her fears of a
climatically apocalyptic future.

“I personally suffer from eco-anxiety,” Giorgia Vasaperna, 27, said, her

eyes welling and her hands fidgeting, at a children’s film festival in July. “I
have no future because my land burns.” She doubted the sanity of
bringing children into an infernal world and asked, “Aren’t you scared for
your children, for your grandchildren?”

Then the minister, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, started crying.

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 “I have a responsibility toward all of you,” he said, visibly choked up. “I
have a responsibility toward my grandchildren.”62

In the United States, many therapists are seeing various forms of climate anxiety in their
clinical practice, and in the Pacific Northwest, extreme smoke from wildfires can
exacerbate anxiety. The beautiful summers in the northwest became something to
dread rather than exalt in.

… those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in
occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and
blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers,
though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting
longer. The sun turned blood-red or was all but blotted out, disappearing
along with the city skyline; the sky turned gray, or sepia, or eerily
tangerine, and ash floated down like snow. Sometimes there were weeks
when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside.
Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to
breathe the outside air at all.

In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan

Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have
“significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They
described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living
through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the
psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing
with disruptive changes. All of these, they wrote, would make the climate
crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of
biodiversity and geophysics.”

Many of these predictions have since been borne out. Studies have found
rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American
Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of
environmental doom.”63

62
Jason Horowitz, “How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety.” The New York
Times, Sept. 16, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/world/europe/italy-greece-eco-anxiety.html
63
“Climate Change is Keeping Therapists Up at Night: How anxiety about the planet’s future is
transforming the practice of psychotherapy,” Brooke Jarvis, NYTimes, Oct. 21, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/magazine/climate-anxiety-therapy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4k
w.usFv.0IJkUa89HlTk&smid=url-share

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There is now academic research on all the various aspects of climate anxiety. As
Cianconi et al. (2023) write:

The threat to humankind [from climate change] is not only physical (ie,
heat waves, floods, droughts) but also psychological, especially for some
groups. Insecurity, danger, chaos, and an unstable system due to climate
change have both short- and long-term psychological effects. In this
scenario, the need for new psychological categories is emerging, namely,
eco-emotions and psychoterratic syndromes which include eco-anxiety,
ecological grief, climate worry, and climate trauma.

Psychoterratic syndromes are, “Earth-related mental syndromes where people’s mental

wellbeing (psyche) is threatened by the severing of healthy links between themselves
and their home/territory.” Cianconi et al. define almost twenty overlapping mental states
related to climate change, including climate change distress (eco-distress), eco-guilt
and eco-shame, eco-fear, eco-phobia, eco-PTSD, and eco-paralysis, among others.
This is, perhaps, bordering on the ridiculous, but ecoanxiety is certainly real. Here is the
definition of eco-anxiety by Cianconi et al.:

It refers to anxiety related to the ecological crisis, and frequently used to

refer to anxiety related to climate change in general, that is a reaction to
the changing state of the planetary ecosystem, a “chronic fear of
environmental doom”, as the differences become blurred because climate
change has an effect on many ecological problems. It emerges directly
from an experienced environmental problem (sometimes traumatic), but
often indirectly from the simple awareness of the problem (eg, through the
media), because it is principally a “forward looking” emotion concerned
with upcoming threats about which there is uncertainty, unpredictability,
uncontrollability, and that is taking away the future. It is characterized by
frustration, powerlessness, feeling overwhelmed, hopelessness,
helplessness, and it may show a combination of clinically relevant
symptoms, such as worry, rumination, irritability, sleep disturbance, loss of
appetite, panic attacks, physical symptoms of anxiety. (Cianconi et al.,
2023)

There are even now psychometric tests available for validating eco-emotions and
psychoterratic syndromes, including The Inventory of Climate Emotions, the Climate
Change Worry Scale, the Eco-anxiety Scale, and the Ecological Grief Questionnaire.

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Can there be any doubt that eco-anxiety and other climate-related mental states will
become more common and more severe? When they do, how will they affect people’s
decisions to have children? There is actually little research on this topic, but it is
obviously of great impact, as fewer people mean less GHG emissions. Dillarstone et al.
(2023) identified 13 relevant studies in the last decade, and summarized them as
follows:

Climate change concerns were typically associated with less positive

attitudes towards reproduction and a desire and/or intent for fewer children
or none at all. Four themes explaining this relationship were identified:
uncertainty about the future of an unborn child, environmentalist views
centred on overpopulation and overconsumption, meeting family
subsistence needs, and environmental and political sentiments. The
current evidence reveals a complex relationship between climate change
concerns and reproductive decision-making, grounded in ethical,
environmental, livelihood, and political considerations.

Since some of these studies were published several years ago (as far back as 2012 and
2013), the relationship between climate change concerns and decisions on having
children is probably now stronger.

“Eco-terrorism” is Inevitable
Nonviolent mass movements, such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion,
will grow rapidly, but as the climate crisis continues, despair and rage will drive offshoots
of these organizations that will engage in acts of violence and sabotage. Radical
environmentalists and other groups have engaged in a variety of tactics over the years,
including tree spiking, arson, “monkeywrenching,” and sometimes bombing. The impact
of these acts have been minimal, but my expectation is that they will increase
dramatically in the future. The best predictions of what might happen come from fiction,
including books such as The Deluge, by Markley (2023), and The Ministry for the
Future, by Robinson (2020).

New Technologies
Apart from geoengineering, there are a variety of new technologies that will help in the
future, assuming I’m wrong and there is not a global societal collapse. It is unlikely,
however, that these technologies will arise soon enough to solve our problems, given
the feedback loops and tipping points discussed above.

CRISPR

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Using CRISPR scientists can precisely edit the DNA in living organisms. CRISPR has
already been used to create rice plants resistant to both disease and drought, and more
genetic engineering is certainly inevitable, despite opposition from some groups. The
collection of microbes living within our bodies, and the bodies of cows and other
mammals, is called the microbiome. CRISPR, along with metagenomics (used to
understand the species in a complex microbiome), can be used for precision
microbiome editing, and there are plans and efforts to reduce methane emissions from
farm animals, landfills, wastwater, rice paddies, and other sources. In the future, this
could have a major impact on the emission of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Fusion
In 1970 fusion was 30 years away. In 2000 fusion was 30 years away. Today fusion is
still 30 years away.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the “Singularity”

When artificial intelligence programs can learn and improve upon themselves, or create
other more intelligent programs, then there will be an exponential increase in
intelligence and capabilities that may result in a superhuman “singularity.” Some
researchers believe this will happen within the next few decades, others think it will
never happen. If it does happen, and the resulting superhuman intelligence is
benevolent, then surely it will be able to help us solve the climate crisis. This is possible,
but it’s impossible to assign a probability to it happening, and is obviously not something
we should be counting on. The large lange models (LLM) such as Chat GPT and
Google Bard and Gemini demonstrate dramatically how useful these LLMs can be. AI is
advancing quickly, and even without reaching a singularity it is clear that it will help
speed scientific research, helping with everything from planning experiments to
analyzing data.

Carbon Taxes (or Fee and Dividend)

Most economists think that some type of carbon tax or fee is the best way to rapidly
reduce emissions, and in fact over 30 countries have introduced some type of carbon
pricing (although often at a very low rate). “There exists a general consensus among
economists that an efficiently designed carbon pricing policy is preferable to nonmarket
and regulatory instruments to reduce GHG emissions” (Timilsina, 2022). Here is a
simplified description from Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL):

CCL supports an economy-wide carbon tax, where the money is given to

people, typically referred to as a carbon fee and dividend or carbon tax
and dividend. With a carbon tax, a fee is applied wherever fossil fuels
enter the economy. This price flows through the economy, incentivizing

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 businesses and people to switch to clean energy. Fossil fuels such as oil,
natural gas, and coal all contain carbon. When burned, they release
potent greenhouse gases (GHG) and carbon dioxide (CO2) into the
atmosphere. Putting a price on carbon involves placing a fee on these
fossil fuels and carbon pollution. This fee is based on the metric tons of
carbon dioxide (CO2) the fuel would generate, and it would be assessed at
the earliest point of sale into the economy—as close as possible to the
well, mine, or port.

What happens when goods enter a country? To ensure that imported goods don’t have
an unfair advantage, the European Union (EU) implemented a “carbon border
adjustment” that adds a fee to imported goods based on the carbon cost in the EU
(often abbreviated as CBAM, with M for “mechanism”; this happened in October of
2023). MIT’s Climate Portal page on Carbon Border Adjustments presents CBAM
clearly, and explains how carbon pricing can spread when exporters want to escape
from the CBAM:

…if the exporting country has its own carbon price, then the CBAM
is lowered to only cover the difference between the two prices. This
prevents “double taxing” of carbon emissions. It also has the happy
effect of nudging other countries to enact their own carbon prices.
Since their exporters will pay a fee for their carbon emissions
anyway, policymakers might well decide it would be better to collect
that fee themselves than let it go to a foreign government.64

Other countries are indeed already considering their own carbon pricing. There are
various complexities involved, such as being able to measure the carbon output of
foreign industries, but this is still probably the best way to rapidly reduce emissions. For
a review of the literature since 1970, see Timilsina (2022). For a summary of emissions
trading systems around the world, see the World Bank Report on the State and Trends
of Carbon Pricing 2023 (World Bank, 2023).

Quantifying Collapse
There’s no accurate way to quantify the probability of collapse, or even the extent of
climate change several decades from now. There are just too many variables: will there
be a world-wide mobilization to mitigate climate change? Will new technologies
emerge? Will feedback loops and tipping points lead to dramatic accelerations? Will
authoritarian nationalist regimes come to power and ignore or rollback climate change

64
http://tinyurl.com/yckzkvcb

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mitigation strategies? Will individual countries take it upon themselves to engage in
solar geoengineering? Will climate change lead to wars and regional conflicts over
resources and mass migration that derail any existing mitigation efforts?

Although we can’t assign probabilities, we know the situation will get much worse
because global warming is not only continuing but accelerating. As Kemp et al. (2022)
write. “We don’t know the probabilities attached to different outcomes, the exact chain of
cause and effect that will lead to outcomes, or even the range, timing, or desirability of
outcomes. Uncertainty, deep or not, should motivate precaution and vigilance, not
complacency.”

Solutions
What Should You As an Individual Do?
1. Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
There are two classes of action that you, as an individual, can take. The first involves
reducing your carbon footprint and is certainly worthwhile, but this will make no
difference whatsoever in preventing catastrophic global warming. You can reduce your
carbon footprint by insulating your home, putting up solar panels, switching from heating
with fossil fuel to heat pumps, driving an electric car, and reducing air travel. Not
everyone, however, can take these steps. First, because most people don’t have the
extra disposable income,65 and second, because for all those living in cities and
apartment buildings, or renting, installing solar panels is typically not possible (although
it may be possible to participate in a community solar farm project). These city dwellers
and renters also may not have permission or the ability to increase insulation or install
heat pumps. Consequently, if those who were able took these steps, the reduction in
fossil fuel usage would be minimal, given where greenhouse gas emissions come from
in the United States. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 25% of
greenhouse gas emissions come from producing electricity, 23% from industry, and 10%
from agriculture, so right off the bat, 58% of greenhouse gas emissions are outside of
an individual’s direct control. Twenty-eight percent comes from transportation, with
much of this coming from trucks, ships, trains, and planes, so an increase in personal
electric vehicles will not have a major effect, especially in the short term (e.g., during the
next decade). Thirteen percent comes from heating and cooling of residential and
commercial buildings, but given the relatively small percentage of private homes that
are able to add insulation and switch to heat pumps, the total amount from heating and
cooling will not go down dramatically either. The situation in Europe is similar, so even if
everyone in the United States and Europe who had the means made a serious effort to
do all of these things, but the rest of the world continued on its current path, the effect

65
In a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Board, about 63% of people in the U.S. said they did not
have the cash to deal with a $400 emergency. URL here.

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would be negligible,66 and certainly not enough to prevent us from crossing multiple
tipping points.

If you live in Phoenix, Arizona, which had a month of temperatures above 110°F in
2023, will you give up your air conditioning? How then can you deny air conditioning
and refrigerators to those coming out of poverty in India, China, and Africa? Power
usage is increasing, so despite the increase in renewable energy, hundreds of new
coal-fired plants are still being built. Fossil fuel-powered cars, trucks, farm and
construction equipment, planes, and ships will be operating for at least several more
decades,67 and houses and office buildings are still being built heated by oil, gas, and
wood. Cement production, a major source of emissions, will also continue. There are
also no serious efforts to eliminate or replace plastics, which are made from fossil fuels.
Given this state of affairs, what you as an individual choose to do in your personal life is
effectively meaningless on a global scale in the short term, although there are other
reasons to do these things. However, as Pope Francis (2023) points out, “a broad
change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a
significant long-term impact.”

2. “Control Political Power” and Protect the Biosphere

The second class of actions you can take can make a difference, and this is where you
should focus your efforts. You should support and vote for politicians who will act
decisively on climate change. You should support organizations promoting a carbon tax,
such as Citizens Climate Lobby.68

You should help organize and participate in non-violent civil disobedience and mass
movements to combat climate change. As Pope Francis (2023) writes, quoting a 2015
Encyclical Letter:

The demands that rise up from below throughout the world, where
activists from very different countries help and support one another, can
end up pressuring the sources of power. It is to be hoped that this will
happen with respect to the climate crisis. For this reason, I reiterate that

66
I will try to quantify this.
67
the average
The following is quite amazing to me, and indicates how long the transition will take: “...
age of cars and light trucks in the US has risen again this year to a new record of 12.5
years, up by more than three months over 2022,” and the average for passenger cars is
13.6 years. From
https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/average-age-of-light-vehicles-in
-the-us-hits-record-high.html#:~:text=With%20more%20than%20284%20million,analysi
s%20from%20S%26P%20Global%20Mobility.
68
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/

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 “unless citizens control political power – national, regional and municipal –
it will not be possible to control damage to the environment”.

Eating less meat and promoting a primarily vegetarian diet can also lead to significant
improvement to land and water usage and a reduction in the use of fossil fuels.69 Not
only do cattle produce methane during digestion, but the land currently used to raise
cattle can typically produce much more nutrition by growing grains and vegetables.
Returning grazing land to forests (as in the Amazon), can also have dramatic effects.
And, as Richardson et al. (2023) write, “...one of the most powerful means that humanity
has at its disposal to combat climate change is respecting the land system change
boundary. Bringing total global forest cover back to the levels of the late 20th century
would provide a substantial cumulative sink for atmospheric CO2 in 2100.”

You should also contact your Senators and congressional representative and advocate
for nuclear power, negative emissions technologies, and additional funding for climate
research and monitoring. More satellites and autonomous underwater vehicles (such as
are used in the Argo program) are needed to collect data, and more planes are needed
to track hurricanes and other extreme weather events (e.g., there were not enough
specially equipped planes to track Hurricane Idalia before it hit Florida on August 30th,
2023). More monitoring on land is also required, such as that proposed by the World
Meteorological Congress in its new program of the Global Greenhouse Gas Watch
(GGGW).

Shaming the Superrich

Joe Fraser, in an opinion piece in the NYTimes, talks about how carbon shaming and
taxes on the ultra-wealthy can have dramatic impacts, both psychologically and with
respect to rapidly reducing emissions.70 The five thousand superyachts on the seas
today pollute as much as entire nations, Fraser writes, and private jets are even worse.
This can discourage ordinary people from taking small steps to reduce their carbon
footprints. From the Fraser article:

Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to

behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being

69
There are exciting new ways to create high-protein food in vats using precision fermentation processes.
70
The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft, By Joe Fassler, The New York
Times, April 10, 2023. https://tinyurl.com/29sth47e. Also from the article: “On an individual basis, the
superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take,
for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David
Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s
boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere
annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.”

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 asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some
are not doing their part,” the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and
Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

Carbon shaming can work, both on the ultrarich, and on government officials.

Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing
private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from
activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private
jets as a climate-saving measure.

Unbridled Optimism: Just Flip the Switch!

Former Vice President Al Gore has probably done more than anyone else to warn of the
dangers of climate change, deservedly winning the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the
IPCC, in 2007. In a recent New Yorker interview, he explains many of the serious
problems facing us, but then misrepresents recent climate research. Gore is a brilliant
man, and I can only assume that he believes his dishonesty is warranted in this
situation to prevent despair and spur people to action. In the interview, Gore says,

I’ve used the metaphor of flipping a switch, and some people have
objected to that. But, really, we have a switch we can flip. The climate
crisis is really a fossil-fuel crisis. There are other components of it, for
sure, but eighty per cent of it is the burning of fossil fuels. And scientists
now know—and this is a relatively new finding, a very firm
understanding—that, once we stop net additions to the overburden of
greenhouse gases, once we reach so-called net zero, then temperatures
on Earth will stop going up almost immediately. The lag time is as little as
three to five years. They used to think that temperatures would keep on
worsening because of positive-feedback loops—and some things,
tragically, will. The melting of the ice, for example, will continue, though we
can moderate the pace of that; the extinction crisis will continue without
other major changes. But we can stop temperatures from going up almost
immediately, and that’s the switch we need to flip.71

According to most of the models in the new research, warming will stop within a few
decades, not three to five years, and some models suggest it may take even longer.
The new finding (a “very firm understanding”) that Gore mentions is also based in part
on computer models that examine the effects of zero-emission scenarios assuming that
zero emissions were to happen today. Even the most optimistic estimates put zero

71
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/al-gore-doesnt-say-i-told-you-so

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emissions at least 30 years out, at which point we will almost certainly have passed
multiple tipping points and locked in several carbon-cycle feedback processes. The
metaphor of flipping a switch is based on pure conjecture at this point, and in my
opinion is dishonest. Whether it is warranted as a way to prevent climate despair and
inaction is an open question.

Unfortunately, even if Gore is correct and warming were to stop immediately at net zero,
we would still be in an extremely undesirable state, because after the temperature stops
going up it will not come down, based on natural processes, for at least several hundred
years. In reality, reaching net zero will take decades, and we will have already reached
a catastrophic degree of warming before the temperature stops increasing. As Le Page
(2023) writes, contradicting Gore’s very firm understanding, “The longer it takes to reach
net zero, the greater the risk that global warming will continue for decades or millennia
even after we have cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to an assessment by
climate researchers.” Since we are on track to exceed 2°C, continued warming after net
zero is inevitable. Consider one of the many pessimistic conclusions of the International
Cryosphere Initiative (ICCI, 2023):

2°C – and even 1.5°C – is too high to prevent extensive permafrost thaw
and resulting CO2 and methane emissions that will cause temperatures to
continue to rise, even once human emissions reach zero, unless offset by
extensive negative emissions/carbon drawdown….

Net Zero by 2050?

MIT has a Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and recently
released a major report, the 2023 Global Change Outlook (Paltsev et al., 2023). In their
Current Trends scenario, which assumes the Paris Agreement NDCs (Nationally
Determined Contributions) are implemented through 2030 (which is very unlikely to
happen), they predict that global greenhouse gas emissions will stay relatively constant
for the next decade and then decrease slightly by 2050. Greenhouse gas emissions will
go from 47 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (Gt CO2e) in 2020 to about 48 Gt CO2e in
2030, and then decrease to 45 Gt CO2e in 2050. So rather than net zero, there will be
very little change from 2020 to 2050!

As Taylor et al. (2023b) explain, reaching net zero is exceedingly difficult.

Achieving NZE [net zero emissions] is an extremely difficult and complex

challenge. It is unlikely that this goal will be reached by 2050, let alone
2030, due to different national commitments, political resistance
(particularly from fossil fuel producers), structural inertia from existing

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 institutions, infrastructure and technologies), and because the
technologies do not yet exist to allow the rapid decarbonization of the
global economy in many sectors, e.g., agriculture and aviation.

Collapse is Likely, But Not Inevitable: What Should We As a Society

Do?
We are now on a “hothouse earth” trajectory that will end human civilization as we know
it. Humans are capable, however, of creating a new pathway to what Steffen et al.
(2018) call “Stabilized Earth” by taking actions that result in negative feedbacks that will
keep the global temperature at 2°C or less.

The negative feedback actions fall into three broad categories: (i) reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, (ii) enhancing or creating carbon sinks (e.g.,
protecting and enhancing biosphere carbon sinks and creating new types
of sinks), and (iii) modifying Earth’s energy balance (for example, via solar
radiation management, although that particular feedback entails very large
risks of destabilization or degradation of several key processes in the
Earth System). (Steffen et al., 2018)

Although there are efforts in the first two categories, overall they are failing. We are not
reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and we are not protecting carbon sinks such as
the Amazon and boreal forests. In fact, deforestation continues in the Amazon and it
may be reaching a tipping point that turns part of it into a dry savanna. Forest fires are
now destroying millions of acres of boreal forests in Canada and Russia, and these fires
are likely to get even worse.

The third category above is geoengineering, which Taylor et al. (2023b) call climate
cooling, arguing that it is now essential. They write that three approaches must be
combined: “(1) rapidly reducing GHG emissions; (2) deploying large-scale CDR [carbon
dioxide removal] to reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations; and (3) using climate
cooling measures across a range of scales to maintain temperatures within safe limits
until GHG concentrations have been reduced to a sustainable level that stabilizes the
climate.”

International cooperation will be required to reduce the use of fossil fuels. “Absent
international coordination, constraining supply from some countries can increase
economic incentives for others to increase production” (van Asselt & Newell, 2022). Van
Asselt & Newell discuss different types of international cooperation, including an
International Coal Elimination Treaty and a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. (See
Burke and Fishel, 2020, for details on a Coal Elimination Treaty.)

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There is little disagreement among scientists about the seriousness of our situation.
There is disagreement, however, about not only what led to the current crisis, but what
we should do about it. Bradshaw et al. (2021) focus on the negative effects of
population and economic growth more than others. In their conclusion they write,

The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global

capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of
perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from
fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition,
reigning in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women.72

These all make sense, and are probably necessary, except for “the abolition of
perpetual economic growth.” Growth has been destructive in the past, but there is no
logical reason why economic growth can’t be sustainable and decoupled from negative
environmental impacts. Growth cannot continue as in the past, of course, and perhaps
the definition of “economic growth” may need to change.

Radical Changes are Required

Change is possible, but it is not happening, and time is running out.

Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not

enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental
transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the
threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway; these include
changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values.
(Steffen et al., 2018)

Given the current political realities, and the dangers from crossing tipping points and
feedback loops, it is unlikely that we will be able to prevent a global societal collapse. I
hope I am wrong, and that we do have more time than I think. If so, we need to use this
time to bring about “fundamental transformations.” To do this, I recommend that we
each should work to do the following:
● Elect politicians who will take action on climate change
● Work to pass a tax on carbon (a “fee and dividend” if “tax” scares you)

72
Blustein et al. (2021), in their critique of the Bradshaw et al. paper, write that they have no
disagreement with the “diagnosis of the severity of the crises,” but argue that Bradshaw et al. “focus on
the role of human population growth as a central driver” of the crises they elaborate, rather than
emphasizing “the role of European colonization and fossil capitalism.” Blustein et al. argue that there
should be more focus on inequality and the role of capitalism, and scientists “should help expose the
structural causes and drivers of inequality, overproduction and overconsumption.”

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 ● Support research on negative emissions technology, nuclear power, and
geoengineering
● Protect our biosphere, especially carbon sinks such as peat bogs, the Amazon
and boreal forests
● Convince your family, friends, community, and as many other people as possible
that there is a climate emergency that requires immediate action
● Organize and participate in a mass movement to combat climate change
● Participate in non-violent civil disobedience

Facing Reality and Managing the Inevitable

If I am correct, and global societal collapse will be starting in the near future, then a new
question arises, how can we “manage” this collapse? Even if it is too late to prevent this
catastrophe, surely there must be things we can do to reduce suffering. Given the
increasing frequency of extreme weather events, one imperative is to increase
information sharing between multiple governmental institutions and local authorities.
There are now organizations trying to disseminate climate information to regional
authorities. For example, there is an initiative called Regional Information for Society
(RIfS) organized by the World Climate Research Program, which “coordinates new
research required to provide actionable climate information at the regional scale….The
focus of RifS is to grow the foundations for effective links between climate research and
the information needs of society.”73 There have been five International Conferences on
Regional Climate, also organized by the World Climate Research Program, where these
issues are discussed.

Norway provides a good example of how this can work. “...the Norwegian
Meteorological Institute collaborates with various institutions and authorities, such as
the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE), the Norwegian Institute
of Public Health (NIPH), the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection, power
production (StatKraft) and grid (Statnett), road authorities, aviation, rail, and defense.
Our experience is that relevant information flows quite well within such a professional
network.”74

Adaptation
The best way to manage collapse, at least in the early stages, is via adaptation, and
Working Group II of the IPCC has an entire report as part of their sixth assessment on
Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.75 Chris Field, a scientist from Stanford, includes
adaptation as a core component in his recommendations. He uses the acronym CARE:

73
https://www.wcrp-climate.org/rifs-overview
74
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/10/the-5th-international-conference-on-regional-cli
mate/
75
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

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cutting emissions, adapting, removing greenhouse gases, and exploring sunlight
reflection.76 Even if there is a global societal collapse, as I predict, effective adaptation
may make our final days as a species slightly less horrible. But as Taylor et al. (2023b)
list as one of the facts they present: “It is impossible to adapt to irreversible,
catastrophic impacts like species extinction, the loss of glaciers, rising sea levels, and
the release of methane from permafrost and oceans.”

76
Lecture at Harvard University, October 19, 2023.

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Suggested Reading
I suggest reading the following papers in this order.

Emanuel (2016): Read this first. Even if you follow the news about climate change, start
by reading this 16-page primer on “Climate Science and Climate Risk” by Kerry
Emanuel (2016), a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at MIT (now retired).
He provides a brief history of 200 years of climate science research, explains the
greenhouse effect, and reviews the sources of information that climate scientists rely
on. I also suggest MIT’s Climate Portal at https://climate.mit.edu/

Pope Francis (2023). Read this Apostolic Exhortation second. I don’t know how much
Pope Francis actually wrote, but it is a masterful summary of the scientific literature,
along with his explanation of how the “ethical decadence” of the power of the
“technocratic paradigm” (the term “capitalism” is never used) has led to the current
crisis. He also talks about justice and the suffering of people not responsible for the
crisis, and how we must not see ourselves as separate from nature.

Taylor et al. (2023b). I had already completed this document when I discovered this
paper (available as a preprint and still not peer reviewed at the end of 2023). Had I
found it earlier I might just have focused on how climate change will lead to societal
collapse, because Taylor et al. refer to almost all of the climate science I cover, and
extensively discuss the problems with the IPCC. Apart from repeating all of the main
points several times (which I assume will be corrected in the final version) the Taylor
paper is excellent.

ICCI, 2023: This detailed report from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative is
excellent, and lays out clearly the consensus among scientists studying the cryosphere
that “Two degrees is too high,” because “We cannot negotiate with the melting point of
ice.”

IPCC, 2023: Read the 30-page Summary for Policymakers within this larger 186-page
report. Despite my criticisms about the IPCC’s conservatism and underestimation of
climate change, the IPCC is the gold standard for climate information. The IPCC has
produced dozens of different reports, totalling over a thousand pages.

Fifth National Climate Assessment (Crimmins et al., 2023 in the Reference list
below): This is the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which focuses on how climate
change will impact the United States. Like the IPCC, it is a comprehensive work by
hundreds of scientists.

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Steffen et al. (2018): I quote heavily from this paper, on the “Trajectories of the Earth
System in the Anthropocene.” It focuses on climate science, but is readable by
non-climate scientists.

Ripple et al. (2022): I quote from this “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate
Emergency” at the beginning of this paper.

Lynas, M. (2021). Our Final Warning:Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.

This book is for a general audience. I read the first edition of this book, published in
2008, which was great. There is a chapter for what happens for each degree of
warming. From the description on Amazon:
At one degree – the world we are already living in – vast wildfires scorch California and
Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice
cap melts away, and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to
run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are
too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate
refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a
mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of
the end of all life on Earth.

Fiction
What will happen as climate change intensifies even more? The best accounts probably
come from science fiction. Consider the description of a heat wave that kills millions in
The Ministry for the Future, or the eco-terrorism and mass movements in The Deluge.

● Stephen Markley (2023), The Deluge.

● Kim Stanley Robinson (2020), The Ministry for the Future.
● Neal Stephenson (2021), Termination Shock.

Acknowledgements
Many people gave me feedback on an earlier version of this paper, and the paper
improved dramatically from their feedback. They do not, of course, agree with all of my
arguments and the views presented here are mine alone. I would like to thank Tony
Jagodnik, Sharon Rider, Joel Angiolillo, Greg Cermak, Steve Goldfinger, Michael
Northrop, and Rich Fakelman for all of their comments and feedback. Two college
interns, Grant Hines and Ethan Moreland, working as part of a “micro internship,”
provided detailed feedback and suggestions throughout the report.

Author Bio
Demetrios Karis received a B.A. in Psychology from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from Cornell University, and an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship

Karis 86
at the University of Illinois. For most of his career he has worked as a user experience
researcher, researching, designing, and evaluating consumer products and services for
Verizon, GTE, Grumman Aircraft Systems, and the University of Illinois. Demetrios
holds multiple patents and has published widely in diverse areas, including usability
evaluation methodologies, CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), automation
using speech recognition, autobiographical memory, and cognitive psychophysiology.
He is now an independent consultant and has worked as a contractor at Google,
Fidelity, as well as several small consulting firms. He is also an adjunct faculty member
at Bentley University, where he has taught courses in the User Experience Certificate
program as well as the graduate program in Human Factors in Information Design. He
currently works as a volunteer user experience researcher for the Trial Court of
Massachusetts. Demetrios has no formal training in climate science, although he has
read widely and taken online courses. Over 20 years ago he started ranting to his
friends about how climate change would lead to the end of human civilization. Some of
them thought he was a nut; now they are not so sure.

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 References
Most citations of newspaper articles and websites are included in footnotes, while peer-reviewed research
papers are included here.

Abbasi, K., Ali, P., Barbour, V., Benfield, T., Bibbins-Domingo, K., Hancocks, S., Horton, R.,
Laybourn-Langton, L., Mash, R., Sahni, P., Sharief, W. M., Yonga, P., & Zielinski, C. (2023). Time
to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency. BMJ, 383,
p2355. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p2355

Abel, G. J., Brottrager, M., Crespo Cuaresma, J., & Muttarak, R. (2019). Climate, conflict and
forced migration. Global Environmental Change, 54, 239–249.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.12.003

Armstrong McKay, D. I., Staal, A., Abrams, J. F., Winkelmann, R., Sakschewski, B., Loriani, S.,
Fetzer, I., Cornell, S. E., Rockström, J., & Lenton, T. M. (2022). Exceeding 1.5°C global warming
could trigger multiple climate tipping points. Science, 377(6611), eabn7950.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7950

Bastin, J.-F., Finegold, Y., Garcia, C., Mollicone, D., Rezende, M., Routh, D., Zohner, C. M., &
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 Appendix 1: The Current Situation is Dire
The IPCC goes through the current situation in great detail (IPCC, 2023), over hundreds
of pages, but here I want to provide a summary of some of the disturbing aspects of
each of the major parts of the climate crisis, along with some newspaper-style human
interest stories.

Extreme Shortages of Fresh Water

Water is critical for food and meat production, producing electricity, industrial production,
and of course basic human needs. When a country is in extreme water stress, it is using
at least 80% of its supply, which can lead to a crisis when there is a drought or the
population increases. Here is the key finding from a new data analysis from the
Aqueduct™️ 4.0 water risk framework:

​ The world is facing an unprecedented water crisis. New data from WRI’s
Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas finds that 25 countries – one-quarter of the world’s
population - are currently exposed to extremely high water stress annually.
Globally, around 4 billion people, half the world’s population are exposed to water
stress for at least one month a year. By 2050, that number could be closer to
60%. (Kuzma et al., 2023)

Many serious water problems are caused by mismanagement and then exacerbated by
climate change. The Aral Sea is a prime example, as it was once the fourth-largest lake
in the world, but it started drying up after the Soviet Union began diverting water from
the rivers that fed it. Most of the lake is now gone, and what used to be the eastern
basin is now the Aralkum Desert. The effects on the ecology and economy of the region
have been devastating.77

Current predictions with respect to mountain glaciers and snow cover will have dramatic
negative effects on freshwater supplies.

2°C will result in extensive, long-term, essentially irreversible ice loss from
many of the world’s glaciers in many major river basins, with some
disappearing entirely. Snow cover also will greatly diminish.

If 2°C warming is reached, projections show that nearly all tropical glaciers
(north Andes, Africa) and most mid-latitude glaciers outside the Himalayas
and polar regions will disappear, some as early as 2050. Others are large
enough to delay complete loss until the next century, but have already

77
Search for “Aral sea ecological disaster” or something similar to find a variety of articles.

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 passed a point of no return. Even the Himalayas are projected to lose
around 50% of today’s ice at 2°C.

Losses in both snowpack and glacier ice will have dramatic impacts on
downstream dry season water availability for agriculture, power
generation, and drinking. Impacts may be extreme in especially vulnerable
river basins, such as the Tarim in northwest China and the Indus. (ICCI,
2023).

Conflict over water

Consider the following example of potential conflict over fresh water.78

Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan

Ethiopia started construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2011 and
started filling the reservoir in 2020 by diverting water from the Blue Nile (the reservoir is
still filling). From the beginning there were complaints from Egypt, which gets over 90%
of its water for both irrigation and drinking from the Nile, and Egypt has demanded
restrictions on how Ethiopia operates the dam. Egypt has threatened to go to war over
the dam, and the United Nations Security Council has encouraged negotiation. The
Ethiopian government has gone so far as to purchase several air defense systems to
prevent possible air strikes on the dam (presumably from Egypt).

Iran and Afghanistan

Fueled in part by a prolonged drought, tensions over water between Iran
and Afghanistan have escalated this year, with Iran accusing Taliban
leaders of violating a long-standing agreement to share water from the
Helmand River, which flows from Afghanistan into Iran. In late May,
clashes near the river reportedly killed at least two Iranian border guards
and one Taliban fighter.

Researchers estimate the amount of Helmand River water reaching Iran

has dropped by more than half over the past 2 decades, in part because
of the construction of new dams and the expansion of irrigation in
Afghanistan. (Kumar, 2023)

Extreme Rainfall and Floods

Extreme rainfall is typically explained by invoking a thermodynamical explanation of
increased evaporation in a warmer climate and the fact that warmer air can hold more

78
Here’s a headline from the NYTimes on September 15, 2023: “Dominican Republic Will Close Border
With Haiti Amid Water Dispute.”

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moisture. There are also dynamical aspects that can lead to extreme rainfall due to
changes in winds and cloud structures.79

In 2023, Beijing experienced the heaviest rainfall in recorded history and had to
evacuate over a million people. On the other extreme, Iran, also in 2023, was unable to
provide sufficient water and electricity during its heat wave in August.

Glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs, occur when an avalanche in the mountains
results in a lake breaking through its barriers and causing an “inland tsunami” that races
down mountain valleys destroying everything in its path. There are thousands of
potential GLOFs around the world, primarily in the Himalayas, Andes, Alps,and Pacific
Northwest, and Taylor et al. (2023a) “show that 15 million people globally are exposed
to impacts from potential GLOFs. Populations in High Mountains Asia (HMA) are the
most exposed and on average live closest to glacial lakes with ~1 million people living
within 10 km of a glacial lake. More than half of the globally exposed population are
found in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru, and China.”

Extreme Heat
The IPCC (2023) concludes with very high confidence that, “In all regions increases in
extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality and morbidity.”

It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become

more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the
1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less
frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-caused climate
change is the main driver of these changes. Marine heatwaves have
approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence),
and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at
least 2006. (IPCC, 2023)

Focusing on children from 3 to 36 months in five West African countries, Blom et al.
(2022) found that, “extreme heat exposure increases the prevalence of both chronic and
acute malnutrition. We find that a 2°C rise in temperature will increase the prevalence of
stunting by 7.4 percentage points, reversing the progress made on improving nutrition
during our study period.”

79
Explained briefly by Rasmus Benestad, RealClimate,
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/09/old-habits/

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 Extreme Droughts
“Human-caused climate change has contributed to increases in agricultural and
ecological droughts in some regions due to increased land evapotranspiration (medium
confidence)” (IPCC, 2023).

Extreme Fire
We are now seeing extreme fire behavior in North America, Europe, and Russia.

“The number of days of high or extreme fire danger in southern Europe is

already at levels we thought we wouldn’t see until 2050,” said Jesus San
Miguel, a senior researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research
Centre. “Because of climate change, we are going much faster than we
thought.”80

David Wallace-Wells, in an opinion piece in the NY Times titled, “Forests Are No Longer
Our Climate Friends,”81 starts his column like this:

Canadian wildfires have this year burned a land area larger than 104 of
the world’s 195 countries. The carbon dioxide released by them so far is
estimated to be nearly 1.5 billion tons — more than twice as much as
Canada releases through transportation, electricity generation, heavy
industry, construction and agriculture combined. In fact, it is more than the
total emissions of more than 100 of the world’s countries — also
combined.

But what is perhaps most striking about this year’s fires is that despite
their scale, they are merely a continuation of a dangerous trend: Every
year since 2001, Canada’s forests have emitted more carbon than they’ve
absorbed. That is the central finding of a distressing analysis published
last month by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer, ominously
headlined “Our forests have reached a tipping point.”

In fact, Saxifrage suggests, the tipping point was passed two decades
ago, when the country’s vast boreal forests, long a reliable “sink” for
carbon, became instead a carbon “source.” In the 2000s, the effect was

80
Anthony Faiola and Elinda Labropoulou (2023), How wildfires are threatening the Mediterranean way of
life, The Washington Post, September 2, 2023 at 4:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/02/greece-fires-2023-rhodes/
81
September 6, 2023, https://tinyurl.com/4sbmf4fj

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 relatively small. But so far in the 2020s, Canada’s forests have raised the
country’s total emissions by 50 percent.

Extreme Tropical Cyclones

There is a general consensus among climate scientists that although cyclones may not
become more frequent as the climate warms, they will become more powerful.82 In the
future, we will have more major hurricanes, defined as category 3, 4, or 5, than in the
historical record.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are the most damaging natural hazard to regularly
impact the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. From 2012 to 2022, over 160
“billion-dollar” weather and climate disasters impacted the U.S; 24 of these
events were TCs, including the six costliest disasters on record during this
time. Many of the most damaging TCs to impact the U.S. in recent years
have been notable for the speed at which they have intensified. (Garner,
2023)

Garner (2023) found a significant increase in the intensification rates of North Atlantic
tropical cyclones:

An analysis of observed maximum changes in wind speed for Atlantic TCs

from 1971 to 2020 indicates that TC intensification rates have already
changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the
planet and oceans. Mean maximum TC intensification rates are up to
28.7% greater in a modern era (2001–2020) compared to a historical era
(1971–1990).

Garner studied Atlantic cyclones, but since rapid intensification depends on a warming
ocean, and in particular sea surface temperatures, it will be a global phenomena. On
October 25, 2023, Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco as a Category 5
hurricane with winds at 165 mph and caused catastrophic damage. It intensified by 115
mph within 24 hours, faster than any other hurricane in the eastern Pacific except
Hurricane Patricia. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) had predicted it would make
landfall as a tropical storm with 70 mph winds only 24-hours before it hit land – giving
over a million people in Acapulco little warning or time to evacuate.

82
“Tropical cyclone” is the term typically used by meteorologists and climate scientists, and refers to the
same phenomena as “hurricanes” and “typhoons”. Hurricane is used for storms in the Atlantic, while in
the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, the generic term tropical cyclone is used.

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 Extreme Sea Ice and Ice Shelf Loss
The extent of sea ice in both the arctic and around Antarctica is rapidly declining. In
September, 2023, with the end of the Antarctic winter, sea ice reached a record low.

"It’s not great news,” said Gail Whiteman, an expert on global risks
resulting from polar climate change and professor of sustainability at the
University of Exeter. “Polar ice is one of the world’s biggest insurance
policies against runaway climate change, and we can see in both the
North and the South sea ice, we’ve got problems and alarm bells are
ringing.”83

Not only is there albedo feedback because darker ocean waters absorb more heat than
ice, but in addition, “...sea-ice acts as an insulator between air and sea. When it
retreats, it opens up for more heat and moisture exchange between the ocean and the
atmosphere, and the strongest warming can be found where the sea-ice has
retreated.”84

In addition to this effect of the loss of sea ice, ice shelves in the Antarctic are incredibly
important. Ice shelves stabilize large parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet by “buttressing” the
ice sheets and slowing their speed. When ice shelves thin they can “reduce the
buttressing force provided by the ice shelf, leading to an increase in the speed of the
upstream grounded ice and an increase in the ice sheet contribution to global sea level
rise” (Davison et al., 2023). Davison et al. (2023) “make use of high-resolution satellite
datasets to produce an annual record of ice shelf mass balance and its constituent
components for all Antarctic ice shelves from 1997 to 2021….Out of 162 ice shelves, 71
lost mass, 29 gained mass, and 62 did not change mass significantly.” What is
especially concerning is that not only did almost 44% of the ice shelves lose mass, but
two thirds of the ice shelves that lost mass lost more than 30% of their initial mass. This
means that the buttressing force will be reduced, and also that the reduction in mass
translates to approximately 67,000 gigatons of freshwater released into the Southern
Ocean.

Recent research from Naughten et al. (2023) has garnered a lot of attention because of
their shocking conclusion – it may be too late to prevent the collapse of the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet (rather than “shocking,” they write, “sobering outlook”). No matter
how much we reduce greenhouse gases, ocean warming around the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet will continue, and the ice sheet will continue to lose mass and contribute to

83
Kasha Patel, “Antarctica just hit a record low in sea ice — by a lot.” Washington Post, September 25,
2023.
84
Rasmus Benestad, RealClimate, https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/09/old-habits/

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sea-level rise. The authors simulate five scenarios in their model: The Paris 1.5 °C and
Paris 2 °C scenarios and the RCP 4.5 (Representative Concentration Pathways) and
RCP 8.5 scenarios follow. This is a good range, as Naughten et al. consider both the
1.5 °C and RCP 8.5 unrealistic. (See Figure 7 above on the different RCP pathways.)

We find that rapid ocean warming, at approximately triple the historical

rate, is likely committed over the twenty-first century, with widespread
increases in ice-shelf melting, including in regions crucial for ice-sheet
stability. When internal climate variability is considered, there is no
significant difference between mid-range emissions scenarios and the
most ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement. These results suggest that
mitigation of greenhouse gases now has limited power to prevent ocean
warming that could lead to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Warming and melting trends in each scenario are presented below in Figure 7.
Here is some background from the Introduction:

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is losing mass and is Antarctica’s
largest contributor to sea-level rise . This ice loss is driven by interactions
with the Southern Ocean, particularly the Amundsen Sea region of the
continental shelf seas. Enhanced basal melting of ice shelves, the floating
extensions of the ice sheet, has reduced their buttressing and caused
upstream glaciers to accelerate their flow towards the ocean. Continued
trends in ice-shelf melting have the potential to cause irreversible retreat
of the WAIS glaciers, which together contain enough ice to raise global
mean sea-level by 5.3 m. (Naughten et al., 2023)

The relevance to sea level rise is clear:

Increased ice-shelf basal melting can result in a loss of buttressing,
increased mass flux across the grounding line and ultimately sea-level
rise. Because our ocean simulations are not coupled to an ice-sheet
model, we cannot quantify the sea-level rise contribution implied by our
findings. However, we can indirectly assess their importance for sea-level
rise on the basis of the spatial distribution of the basal melting trends.

What should we do? We should consider adaptation more seriously, Naughten et al.
write, because, “The opportunity to preserve the WAIS in its present-day state has
probably passed, and policymakers should be prepared for several metres of sea-level
rise over the coming centuries.”

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Figure 8. “Ocean temperature trends are plotted in red (left axis); ice-shelf basal mass loss trends in
blue (right axis). The scenarios are described in Extended Data Table 1; note different time spans and
ensemble sizes (n = 5 for Paris 1.5 °C and the Fixed BCs scenarios, and n = 10 for all others).
Temperature is averaged over the continental shelf and the depth range 200–700 m. Basal mass loss is
integrated over the ice shelves between Dotson and Cosgrove inclusive and expressed as a percentage
of the 1920–1949 historical ensemble mean. Both variables are smoothed with a 2-yr running mean
before computing trends. Each scenario shows the ensemble mean (white stars), median (green lines),
25–75% range (boxes), full ensemble range (whiskers) and individual trends (black dots).”

The Collapse of Ocean Currents

The gulf stream feeds into the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC,
which brings warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic and cold water south
(and is part of what is referred to as a global conveyor belt). The wind is a factor in
surface currents (up to 100 meters), but there are much slower currents that occur due
to thermohaline circulation, which occurs due to changes in the saltiness and
temperature of the ocean, which results in changes to the water’s density.

In the Earth's polar regions ocean water gets very cold, forming sea ice. As a
consequence the surrounding seawater gets saltier, because when sea ice
forms, the salt is left behind. As the seawater gets saltier, its density
increases, and it starts to sink. Surface water is pulled in to replace the

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 sinking water, which in turn eventually becomes cold and salty enough to
sink. This initiates the deep-ocean currents driving the global conveyer belt.85

A new paper predicts that there is a high probability that the AMOC will cross a tipping
point and collapse this century, perhaps as soon as 2050 (Ditlevsen & Ditlevsen, 2023).
In a response to the paper, Rahmstorf (2023) answers some of the criticisms and clearly
lays out the consequences:

An AMOC collapse would be a massive, planetary-scale disaster. Some of

the consequences: Cooling and increased storminess in northwestern
Europe, major additional sea level rise especially along the American
Atlantic coast, a southward shift of tropical rainfall belts (causing drought
in some regions and flooding in others), reduced ocean carbon dioxide
uptake, greatly reduced oxygen supply to the deep ocean, likely
ecosystem collapse in the northern Atlantic, and others.

Scientific predictions get better over time as we collect more evidence and refine
models. Rahmstorf continues his commentary, pointing out that we need to keep risks of
serious collapses like this at a minimum:

In other words: we are talking about risk analysis and disaster prevention.
This is not about being 100% sure that the AMOC will pass its tipping
point this century; it is that we’d like to be 100% sure that it won’t. Even if
there were just (say) a 40% chance that the Ditlevsen study is correct in
the tipping point being reached between 2025 and 2095, that’s a major
change to the previous IPCC assessment that the risk is less than 10%.
Even a <10% chance as of IPCC (for which there is only “medium
confidence” that it’s so small) is in my view a massive concern. That
concern has increased greatly with the Ditlevsen study – that is the point,
and not whether it’s 100% correct and certain.

The Spread of Infectious Diseases

Many factors contribute to the distribution and frequency of vectorborne diseases, but
climate change is certainly important, primarily by increasing temperatures at moderate
latitudes and higher elevations. The IPCC has already concluded that vectorborne
diseases have increased, and that malaria, dengue, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus
will continue to increase in the future. As Thomson et al. (2022) conclude in an article in
the New England Journal of Medicine,

85
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_currents/05conveyor1.html

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 Climate change has substantial effects on pathogens, vectors, and
reservoir hosts, with implications for the health sector worldwide. Many
vectors are already expanding their latitude and altitude ranges, and the
length of season during which they are active is increasing; these trends
are expected to continue as the climate continues to warm. (Thomson et
al., 2022)

Mass Migration
As described in the main body of this report, it is inevitable that mass migration will
increase, and most countries will not welcome these migrants. For example, consider
what happened recently in Saudi Arabia. Human Rights Watch interviewed 42 Ethiopian
migrants and asylum seekers and their friends, analyzed over 350 videos and
photographs posted to social media, and analyzed several hundreds square kilometers
of satellite imagery. Here is a summary from their report86:

Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants

and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between
March 2022 and June 2023. Human Rights Watch research indicates that,
at time of writing, the killings are continuing. Saudi border guards have
used explosive weapons and shot people at close range, including women
and children, in a pattern that is widespread and systematic. If committed
as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings
would be a crime against humanity. In some instances, Saudi border
guards first asked survivors in which limb of their body they preferred to be
shot, before shooting them at close range. Saudi border guards also fired
explosive weapons at migrants who had just been released from
temporary Saudi detention and were attempting to flee back to Yemen.

86
The Human Rights Watch report on Saudi Arabia’s murder of refugees is available at
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-y
emen-saudi

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 Appendix 2: Relevant Figures from the Fifth National Climate
Assessment (Crimmins et al., 2023)

The US has warmed rapidly since the 1970s.

FIGURE 1.5. The graph shows the change in US annual average surface temperature during 1895–2022
compared to the 1951–1980 average. The temperature trend changes color as data become available for
more regions of the US, with Alaska data added to the average temperature for the contiguous US
(CONUS) beginning in 1926 (medium blue line) and Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, and US-Affiliated Pacific
Islands data added beginning in 1951 (dark blue line). Global average surface temperature is shown by
the black line. Figure credit: NOAA NCEI and CISESS NC.

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The US now experiences, on average, a billion-dollar weather or climate disaster every
three weeks.
FIGURE 1.7. Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are events where damages/costs reach or
exceed $1 billion, including adjustments for inflation. Between 2018 and 2022, 89 such events affected
the US, including 4 droughts, 6 floods, 52 severe storms, 18 tropical cyclones, 5 wildfires, and 4 winter
storm events (see Figure A4.5 for the number of billion-dollar disasters per year). During this period,
Texas had the highest total damages ($375 billion); Florida experienced the highest damages from a
single event—Hurricane Ian ($113 billion). While similar data are not available for the US-Affiliated Pacific
Islands, Super Typhoon Yutu caused $500 million in property damage alone in Saipan and the northern
Marianas in 2018 (NCEI 2019). Increasing costs over time are driven by changes in the assets at risk and
the increase in frequency or intensity of extreme events caused by climate change. Adapted from NCEI
2023

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 Appendix 3: Relevant Figures from IPCC, 2023

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Figure 2.1 from IPCC (2023): “The causal chain from emissions to resulting warming of the climate
system. Emissions of GHG have increased rapidly over recent decades (panel (a)). Global net
anthropogenic GHG emissions include CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes
(CO2-FFI) (dark green); net CO2 from land use, land-use change and forestry (CO2- LULUCF) (green);
CH4; N2O; and fluorinated gases (HFCs, PFCs, SF6, NF3) (light blue). These emissions have led to
increases in the atmospheric concentrations of several GHGs including the three major well-mixed GHGs
CO2, CH4 and N2O (panel (b), annual values). To indicate their relative importance each subpanel’s
vertical extent for CO2, CH4 and N2O is scaled to match the assessed individual direct effect (and, in the
case of CH4 indirect effect via atmospheric chemistry impacts on tropospheric ozone) of historical
emissions on temperature change from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019. This estimate arises from an
assessment of effective radiative forcing and climate sensitivity. The global surface temperature (shown
as annual anomalies from a 1850–1900 baseline) has increased by around 1.1°C since 1850–1900
(panel (c)). The vertical bar on the right shows the estimated temperature (very likely range) during the
warmest multicentury period in at least the last 100,000 years, which occurred around 6500 years ago
during the current interglacial period (Holocene). Prior to that, the next most recent warm period was
about 125,000 years ago, when the assessed multicentury temperature range [0.5°C–1.5℃] overlaps the
observations of the most recent decade. These past warm periods were caused by slow (multi-millennial)
orbital variations. Formal detection and attribution studies synthesise information from climate models and
observations and show that the best estimate is that all the warming observed between 1850– 1900 and
2010–2019 is caused by humans (panel (d)). The panel shows temperature change attributed to: total
human influence; its decomposition into changes in GHG concentrations and other human drivers
(aerosols, ozone and land-use change (land-use reflectance)); solar and volcanic drivers; and internal
climate variability. Whiskers show likely ranges. {WGI SPM A.2.2, WGI Figure SPM.1, WGI Figure SPM.2,
WGI TS2.2, WGI 2.1; WGIII Figure SPM.1, WGIII A.III.II.2.5.1}”

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 Appendix 4: A Warning from 1983, and IPCC Conferences and
Uncertainty Language

A Warning from 1983

Here is the abstract to Seidel’s 1983 EPA report titled, “Can we delay a greenhouse
warming?” Seidel, it turns out, was more accurate in his predictions of temperature rise
than the IPCC reports 30 years later.

Evidence continues to accumulate that increases in atmospheric carbon

dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases will substantially raise global
temperature. While considerable uncertainty exists concerning the rate
and ultimate magnitude of such a temperature rise, current estimates
suggest that a 2°C (3.6°F) increase could occur by the middle of the next
century, and a 5°C (9°F) increase by 2100. Such increases in the span of
only a few decades represent an unprecedented rate of atmospheric
warming.

Temperature increases are likely to be accompanied by dramatic changes

in precipitation and storm patterns and a rise in global average sea level.
As a result, agricultural conditions will be significantly altered,
environmental and economic systems potentially disrupted, and political
institutions stressed.

Responses to the threat of a greenhouse warming are polarized. This

study aims to shed light on the debate by evaluating the usefulness of
various strategies for slowing or limiting a global warming. This study
takes a first look at whether specific policies aimed at limiting the use of
fossil fuels would prove effective in delaying temperature increases over
the next 120 years. These policies are also evaluated for their economic
and political feasibility. To put our findings in perspective, alternative,
nonenergy approaches to limiting a greenhouse warming are also
reviewed. [I corrected minor typos.]

Climate Conferences: Progress and Failures

The title of this section is from Pope Francis (2023), who writes in paragraph 44 of his
recent Apostolic Exhortation:

For several decades now, representatives of more than 190 countries

have met periodically to address the issue of climate change. The 1992
Rio de Janeiro Conference led to the adoption of the United Nations

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 Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a treaty that took
effect when the necessary ratification on the part of the signatories
concluded in 1994. These States meet annually in the Conference of the
Parties (COP), the highest decision-making body. Some of these
Conferences were failures, like that of Copenhagen (2009), while others
made it possible to take important steps forward, like COP3 in Kyoto
(1997). Its significant Protocol set the goal of reducing overall greenhouse
gas emissions by 5% with respect to 1990. The deadline was the year
2012, but this, clearly, was not achieved.

Pope Francis goes on to write about how COP21 in Paris in 2015 was a “significant
moment” but that there were “scarce results” at the following conferences, and ends this
section by noting that the accords have not had much impact.

Today we can continue to state that, “the accords have been poorly
implemented, due to lack of suitable mechanisms for oversight, periodic
review and penalties in cases of noncompliance. The principles which they
proclaimed still await an efficient and flexible means of practical
implementation”. Also, that “international negotiations cannot make
significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their
national interests above the global common good. Those who will have to
suffer the consequences of what we are trying to hide will not forget this
failure of conscience and responsibility”.

COP28, which is about to start in Dubai, will undoubtedly be no different from previous
COPs, and Pope Francis describes what must happen for it to make a difference.

If there is sincere interest in making COP28 a historic event that honours

and ennobles us as human beings, then one can only hope for binding
forms of energy transition that meet three conditions: that they be efficient,
obligatory and readily monitored. This, in order to achieve the beginning of
a new process marked by three requirements: that it be drastic, intense
and count on the commitment of all. That is not what has happened so far,
and only a process of this sort can enable international politics to recover
its credibility, since only in this concrete manner will it be possible to
reduce significantly carbon dioxide levels and to prevent even greater evils
over time.

Unfortunately, COP28 was not an historic event, as I describe in the section in the
beginning of this paper on The Current Situation.

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 IPCC “Calibrated Uncertainty Language”
From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2023):

The IPCC calibrated language uses five qualifiers to express a level of

confidence: very low, low, medium, high and very high…. The following
terms are used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or a
result: virtually certain 99–100% probability, very likely 90–100%, likely
66–100%, more likely than not >50–100%, about as likely as not 33–66%,
unlikely 0–33%, very unlikely 0–10%, exceptionally unlikely 0–1%.
Additional terms (extremely likely 95–100%; and extremely unlikely 0–5%)
are also used when appropriate.” (p. 3, footnote 4).

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 Appendix 5: Military Reports on the Climate and Conflict

The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commissioned the Rand Corporation to

analyze the literature and produce a series of reports on the causal pathways from
climate change to conflict, plus related areas. The reports were completed in May of
2023 but were not publicly released until late in the year given the time required for
prepublication and security reviews.

OAI: operations, activities, and investments

AOR: area of responsibility

Five Reports
The titles of the five reports, with brief descriptions (verbatim from the report
introductions), are below. The citations for each are not yet in the Reference list, but are
included at the end of this appendix.
1. Hotter and Drier Future Ahead: An Assessment of Climate Change in U.S.
Central Command presents an analysis of projected climate impacts in the
CENTCOM AOR in 2035, 2050, and 2070.
2. Pathways from Climate Change to Conflict in U.S. Central Command details
causal pathways from climate change to conflict, including cases in which those
pathways have played out in the CENTCOM AOR.
3. Conflict Projections in U.S. Central Command: Incorporating Climate Change
generates ranged forecasts of future conflict in the region with climate change
incorporated as one driver of that conflict.
4. Mischief, Malevolence, or Indifference? How Competitors and Adversaries Could
Exploit Climate-Related Conflict in the U.S. Central Command Area of
Responsibility presents an analysis of how U.S. competitors—China, Russia, and
Iran—may attempt to exploit climate-induced conflict in the CENTCOM AOR.
5. Defense Planning Implications of Climate Change for U.S. Central Command
analyzes “off-ramps” to climate-influenced conflict and the operations, activities,
and investments CENTCOM needs to be prepared to execute, given climate
impacts on the security environment.

Causal Pathways from Climate Change to Conflict

The second report is the most relevant to this paper. Here are the key findings
(verbatim):
● Although climate hazards may have direct impacts on violence, the
pathways from climate events to war involve multistep processes in which
the initial hazard typically triggers several intervening steps before
manifesting as high-intensity conflict.

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 ● The causal pathways from climate hazard to conflict vary but often begin
with a hazard that results from a form of insecurity (such as food,
livelihood, physical, or health insecurity) that then combines with climate
impacts on state capacity, population flows, and other factors. When
filtered through individuals' and armed groups' incentives to mobilize
around greed or grievance, the impacts of these hazards culminate in
conflict.
● The causal pathways from climate hazards to conflict below the threshold
of interstate and intrastate war are the same; what varies is the intensity of
the ensuing conflict, not the path to get there.
● In total, the research identified seven broad families of causal pathways —
and many more individual hypotheses — from which climate impacts
could evolve into conflict.
● Climate-related conflict has already occurred in the CENTCOM AOR,
contributing to conflict below the threshold of interstate and intrastate war.
● The research did not find a compelling case of past climate-related
interstate war in the region; however, there are plausible future
contingencies for this outcome, based on analysis of the defense
acquisitions of potential disputants.

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Backpage: A cartoon by Ilex Opaca.

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