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AI Summary:
Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization, requiring urgent action and a paradigm shift in risk management. Key points:
Source: The Climate Web: Explore What We Collectively Know About the Causes of, the Risks From, and the Solutions to Global Heating (Climate Change)
Source: “Human-induced environmental change is occurring at an unprecedented scale and pace and the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes in societies around the world is rapidly closing. These outcomes include economic instability, large-scale involuntary migration, conflict, famine and the potential collapse of social and economic systems. The historical disregard of environmental considerations in most areas of policy has been a catastrophic mistake. In response, this paper argues that three shifts in understanding across political and policy communities are required: of the scale and pace of environmental breakdown, the implications for societies, and the subsequent need for transformative change.”
Source: From the Summary page: “Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome that will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential, unless carbon emissions are rapidly reduced. Special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if the increased likelihood of very large climate impacts — known as ‘fat tails’ — are to be adequately dealt with. The potential consequences of these lower-probability, but higher-impact, events would be devastating for human societies. The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence, although increasing numbers of scientists have spoken out in recent years on the dangers of such an approach. Climate policymaking and the public narrative are significantly informed by the important work of the IPCC. However, IPCC reports also tend toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of ‘least drama,’ and downplaying the more extreme and more damaging outcomes. Whilst this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower-probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely. This is a particular concern with potential climatic tipping points — passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system — such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), and permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are non-linear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge. However the extreme risks to humanity, which these tipping points represent, justify strong precautionary management. Under-reporting on these issues is irresponsible, contributing to the failure of imagination that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change. If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required. This must be taken up not just in the work of the IPCC, but also in the UNFCCC negotiations if we are to address the real climate challenge. Current processes will not deliver either the speed or the scale of change required.”
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Source: “Dr Luke Kemp spoke to the Oxford Climate Society on a panel with David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth; Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy at the Breakthrough Institute and the US analyst for Carbon Brief; and Kate Guy, Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Climate and Security. We know that climate change poses significant threats to our way of life - but what if the risks associated with our changing planet are more than we can fully comprehend? As scientists learn more about tipping points, interconnected earth systems, and the fragility that comes along with a warming climate, we might be facing untold consequences as a human species. How can we understand those risks, and how likely is it that existential-level impacts will come to pass?”
Source: “Climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization. But this is not inevitable. A new approach to climate-related security risk-management is thus required, giving particular attention to the high-end and difficult-to-quantify ‘fat-tail’ possibilities, in order to avoid such an outcome. This may be most effectively explored by scenario analysis. A 2050 scenario of the high-end risks is outlined in which accelerating climate- change impacts pose large negative consequences to humanity, which might not be undone for centuries.”
Image source: “Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence-together with other global dangers-be usefully synthesized into an ‘integrated catastrophe assessment’? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.”
Image source: “This infographic summarizes some of CSER’s research and advocacy work around the existential and globally catastrophic potential of climate change, as a risk driver, risk multiplier, and risk mitigation opportunity.”
Source: “A transdisciplinary research project investigated the idea of framing climate and environmental change (CEC) as a new type of threat: a hyperthreat. Traditional military analytical methods were used to assess the hyperthreat and its context and develop ideas about how an adequate response could be conceived. This approach contrasts to prior literature and longstanding geopolitical discourse that identify the risks of taking a securitization approach. Instead, the author argues that it is now riskier not to consider CEC within a mainstream geopolitical and nation-state security strategy. When the hyperthreat of CEC is centered as the main threat to be contained, and its relationship to other threats is analyzed, startling new pathways to stability emerge. The research developed a new theoretical approach called ‘entangled security’ to develop an initial new ‘grand narrative’ and ‘grand strategy’ (PLAN E). This article offers a vision of how military theory can be reimagined to support new policy directions and security priorities.”
Source: An EXCELLENT infographic illustrating that climate change is perceived to be the #1 global issue, much more salient than economic stability or security in the Third World where life lines are already jeopardized.
“No moral issue during my lifetime is of greater gravity, demanding a stronger global response, than anthropogenic climate disruption.” —Bron Taylor (facebook status)
Source: Executive summary and a full PDF of the Pew Report
“Global warming is like a very slow nuclear explosion that nobody even notices is happening… That’s the horrifying thing about it: it’s like my childhood nightmares came true, even before I was born.” —Timothy Morton
Source: "The symbolic doomsday clock moved to three minutes before midnight on Thursday because of the gathering dangers of climate change and nuclear proliferation, signalling the gravest threat to humanity since the throes of the cold war. It was the closest the clock has come to midnight since 1984, when arms-control negotiations stalled and virtually all channels of communication between the US and the former Soviet Union closed down... As the scientists noted last Thursday, 2014 was the hottest year in 130 years of systematic record keeping. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. But the scientists suggested that the greater danger lay in the failure of leaders to recognise and act on climate change.”
Source: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide: Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival. Spot on analysis.
Source: Alarmist Guy McPherson— the anti-conservative climate scientist (video)
Source: “Many have claimed that climate change is an imminent threat to humanity, but there is no way to verify such claims. This is concerning, especially given the prominence of some of these claims and the fact that they are confused with other well verified and settled aspects of climate science. This paper seeks to build an analytical framework to help explore climate change’s contribution to Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR), including the role of its indirect and systemic impacts. In doing so it evaluates the current state of knowledge about catastrophic climate change and integrates this with a suite of conceptual and evaluative tools that have recently been developed by scholars of GCR and Existential Risk. These tools connect GCR to planetary boundaries, classify its key features, and place it in a global policy context. While the goal of this paper is limited to producing a framework for assessment; we argue that applying this framework can yield new insights into how climate change could cause global catastrophes and how to manage this risk. We illustrate this by using our framework to describe the novel concept of possible’ global systems death spirals,’ involving reinforcing feedback between collapsing sociotechnological and ecological systems.”
Source: “The risk assessment considers sixty-one UK-wide climate risks and opportunities cutting across multiple sectors of the economy and prioritises the following eight risk areas for action in the next two years:
—risks to the viability and diversity of terrestrial and freshwater habitats and species from multiple hazards
—risks to soil health from increased flooding and drought
—risks to natural carbon stores and sequestration from multiple hazards
—risks to crops, livestock and commercial trees from multiple climate hazards