Nations must make plans to help tens of millions of "sea level refugees" if climate change continues to ravage the world's oceans, German researchers said on Thursday.
Waters are rising and warming, increasing the destructive power of storms, they said, and seas are becoming more acidic, threatening to throw entire food chains into chaos.
"In the long run, sea level rises are going to be the most severe impact of global warming on human society," said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, presenting a report by German scientists at a major United Nations climate change meeting.
Here's briefly what I think's going to happen over the next 75 years:
We're going to run out of food, for one. The oceans are heating up, and they're spotted with what scientists aptly call "dead zones." It's only a matter of time until some crucial link in the food-chain is severed, leading to large-scale ecological collapse. Famines -- and attendant wars -- will occupy the resources of poorer nations. Factor in a deluge of climate refugees and territorial conflicts promise to antagonize an already tenuous geopolitical milieu.
One of the many dangers of population displacement is the proliferation of viruses. Climate change promises to provide new and unpredictable vectors. The abandoned and hurricane-battered coasts will serve up novel contagions -- even the least of which, given the disheveled state of emergency relief, will take a massive toll.
And it will be hot -- very hot. Crops will fail, infrastructures will collapse and political regimes will dissolve, unremembered. Entire continents will fall victim to what ecologist James Lovelock has termed a "morbid fever."
But ultimately the fever will have run its course, leaving the Earth irrevocably changed. Humans will be fewer, their resources diminished. For all intents and purposes, the planet will be alien, its landscapes scarred by maverick climate, unruly pathogens and bitter conflict.
But the worst part? We'll look back and realize we had it coming.
4 comments:
Mac,
You forgot about the part where the Islamic fundies interpret everything as Allah's judgment on mankind -- and take over the world.
Dessicated cities will be inhabited by starving survivors awakening every morning to the shrill call in Arabic from a marinet, "God is great! God is great! Come to prayer! Come to prayer! Prayer is better than sleep!"
w.m.bear--
I see a Whole Earth Caliphate in our future too, but maybe much sooner. IMO it could happen within the next 75 years. I tend to think that after all the horrors Mac envisions, the world will be plunged into a new dark age. Will civilization ever recover to the point where we actually get to building those fantastic starships? I don't know...
In the list of all the awful things that will come to pass, they forgot to mention that survivors will eat all the Extropians and Transhumanists. :)
Yeah! Eat the extropians and the transhumanists!
Pfft.
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