The Paris climate agreement sounds promising but it came toward the end of Earth's warmest year on record and now in 2016 warming has only gotten stronger. The increase in global temperatures over pre-industrial levels surpassed one degree Celsius in 2015 and is now inching its way to 1.5 degrees Celsius and that horrifies any person who is paying attention. Voluntary pledges made in Paris to limit greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient to the task of averting drastic climate change. They are, at best, incremental moves and not the steps that are necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change including the sixth mass extinction event which we find ourselves in at this very moment. What we needed was the types of programs that ex President Jimmy Carter had rolled out, almost 40 years ago, before he lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. President Reagan immediately dismantled all federal clean energy efforts. And here we are today.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists note:
There have been some positive developments, however, notably the agreement in Paris among 196 countries on a global climate accord. Boldly setting a goal of keeping global mean warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, the agreement recognizes the need to bring net greenhouse gas emissions to zero before the end of the century. Still, it is unclear how the world will actually meet that goal. The backbone of the accord—pledges submitted by each of the signatory countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—is far from sufficient. Even while acclaiming the Paris agreement as a landmark achievement, the UN Climate Change Secretariat acknowledged that if all countries fulfill their voluntary commitments but do no more than that, then by 2025, the world will have used half of the remaining carbon dioxide budget consistent with a 2 degrees C goal. Three-quarters of that budget of carbon emissions will have been exhausted by 2030. And this assessment assumes that countries will fully comply with their pledges—even though the Paris agreement includes no effective enforcement mechanisms to assure that countries do so.
A new report from the U.K.-based Global Challenges Foundation debuted a startling statistic: Across the span of their lives, the average American is more than five times likelier to die during a human-extinction event than in a car crash.
[N]early all of the most threatening global catastrophic risks were unforeseeable a few decades before they became apparent. Forty years before the discovery of the nuclear bomb, few could have predicted that nuclear weapons would come to be one of the leading global catastrophic risks. Immediately after the Second World War, few could have known that catastrophic climate change, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence would come to pose such a significant threat.
The Atlantic reports:
The Stern Review, the U.K. government’s premier report on the economics of climate change, estimated a 0.1 percent risk of human extinction every year. That may sound low, but it also adds up when extrapolated to century-scale. The Global Challenges Foundation estimates a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.
And that number probably underestimates the risk of dying in any global cataclysm. The Stern Review, whose math suggests the 9.5-percent number, only calculated the danger of species-wide extinction. The Global Challenges Foundation’s report is concerned with all events that would wipe out more than 10 percent of Earth’s human population.
Stronger and stronger storms, flooding, drought, heatwaves, food crops will take a heavy toll as will as our water, vector borne disease, like the Zika virus, will only increase as our greenhouse gases continue to bombard our atmosphere and oceans.
The Atlantic continues:
Climate change also poses its own risks. As I’ve written about before, serious veterans of climate science now suggest that global warming will spawn continent-sized superstorms by the end of the century. Farquhar said that even more conservative estimates can be alarming: UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace. “On a more plausible emissions scenario, we’re looking at a 10-percent risk,” Farquhar said. Few climate adaption scenarios account for swings in global temperature this enormous.
Pandemics will kill a lot of us as we head into unchartered territory.
Yet natural pandemics may pose the most serious risks of all. In fact, in the past two millennia, the only two events that experts can certify as global catastrophes of this scale were plagues. The Black Death of the 1340s felled more than 10 percent of the world population. Eight centuries prior, another epidemic of the Yersinia pestis bacterium—the “Great Plague of Justinian” in 541 and 542—killed between 25 and 33 million people, or between 13 and 17 percent of the global population at that time. No event approached these totals in the 20th century.
The twin wars did not come close: About 1 percent of the global population perished in the Great War, about 3 percent in World War II. Only the Spanish flu epidemic of the late 1910s, which killed between 2.5 and 5 percent of the world’s people, approached the medieval plagues. Farquhar said there’s some evidence that the First World War and Spanish influenza were the same catastrophic global event—but even then, the death toll only came to about 6 percent of humanity.