A new paper on global climate policy, prefaced by a former Australian Defence Force chief, urges government, industry, and national security leaders to consider drastic climate change projections before we all just fucking die.
And the authors claim the window to stop all of us dying could close sooner than many researchers would like to admit.
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Breakthrough, an Melbourne-based think-tank dedicated to sparking action on climate change, states researchers may be reluctant to share harsh truths and avoid publicising the more terrifying consequences of rising global temperatures.
Authors David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, the latter of whom was once chair of the Australian Coal Association, are pretty clear that they want to scare society into action.
“Analysis of climate-related security threats in an era of existential risk must have a clear focus on the extremely serious outcomes that fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years,” they write, saying those outcomes “have probabilities that are far higher than is generally understood.”
The authors illustrate a scenario they state is harrowing but not impossible, where society’s hand-wringing on curtailing carbon emissions results in global temperatures spiking 3°C by 2050.
The paper posits that things would spiral out of control from there, resulting in huge swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable due to rising sea levels, torturous heat, or desolated farmland. In that timeline, human society ceases to exist as we know it by the end of the century.
After mapping out that timeline, the authors state they’re not in the business of mapping out clear probabilities, like those stated in countless research papers.
“In high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end.”
In his foreword, Admiral Chris Barrie states “without immediate drastic action our prospects are poor,” before emphasising the potential turmoil posed by billions of climate migrants.
“The implications far outweigh conventional geopolitical threats,” Barrie says.
You can read the paper here.
