Uninhabitable Earth

Human behavior is putting our survival at risk. Even with our current climate goals, we are on track to hit major tipping points that will render large swathes of Earth uninhabitable and puts the survival of many plants and animals, including humanity, at risk of substantial or complete extinction.

Read a round up of the headlines below:

“In advance of next month’s COP27 climate change summit in Egypt, the United Nations and the Red Cross released a report arguing that heatwaves will become so extreme in several regions of the world that human life there will become unsustainable. For instance, in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and south and southwest Asia, heatwaves are predicted to “exceed human physiological and social limits,” with extreme events triggering “large-scale suffering and loss of life,” as the experts put it.

“There are clear limits beyond which people exposed to extreme heat and humidity cannot survive,” the report authors wrote. “There are also likely to be levels of extreme heat beyond which societies may find it practically impossible to deliver effective adaptation for all. On current trajectories, heatwaves could meet and exceed these physiological and social limits in the coming decades, including in regions such as the Sahel and south and southwest Asia.’”

Earth.com, Heatwaves will make some regions uninhabitable

“In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary António Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster”. Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to “the collapse of our civilizations”. In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable”.

PNAS, Climate change and the threat to civilization

“Beyond a certain threshold – and no one knows exactly where that is – the planet itself will significantly boost warming and release large stores of carbon that will overwhelm our already belaboured efforts to slow and eventually stop human emissions. In the meantime, we are rapidly destroying Earth’s life-support systems. Oceans, forests and soils are straining to maintain the steady-state conditions that have made this such a hospitable place for our species over the last 11,000 years, and could abruptly change course and race toward a new “hothouse” equilibrium as has happened in the past, warn the big-picture scientists.

That’s not a world we can live in.”

AFP Correspondent, Watching the world burn