A report by an Australian think-tank says that climate change and our inability to do something about it could lead to an increasingly chaotic world with devastating results. The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration of Melbourne claims that even if global emissions peak by 2030, (a very hopeful view), several studies indicate that the whole deck of cards could still fall apart by 2050.
‘High likelihood of human civilisation coming to end’ by 2050, report finds
This is but the latest in a long line of alarms that go back at least to the Club of Rome, another prestigious think-tank. They issued a highly controversial report, The Limits to Growth, in 1972. Their computer projections found that if there is no change in human growth and consumption patterns, resources would be exhausted and civilization would inevitably collapse sometime in the mid-21st century. They foresaw no technological fix, either: any means of prolonging resources or lessening pollution just made the collapse a little later, but much worse.
Meanwhile, another paper states that six out of nine critical planetary thresholds have already been violated and the remaining three are under serious stress.
Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries
Yet all is not lost. Even an unprecedented world crisis such as this might provide opportunity for utopian advancement. Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, a theorist at yet another think tank, the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems in Britain, says that we could be on our way to “networked superabundance” for the whole planet if new clean-energy technologies can be mobilized through decentralized distribution. This would require a revolutionary new mindset to replace “old centralised industrial hierarchies”.
The danger, he says, lies in reactionary authoritarians like Donald Trump and industrial plutocrats, who may seek to preserve the obsolete ways of profit and power. This “could prevent us successfully moving through the planetary phase shift to the next stage of human evolution.”
