Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire. Brain takes a serious as well as entertaining look at a world of possibilities for Earth and the human race. He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.” This is the first of a two-story examination of the global threat of climate change – what could happen and solutions.
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RALEIGH – The full-scale Climate Catastrophe is now arriving. We can see the early effects popping up in the news more and more frequently.
The terrifying thing about Climate Change is that these early effects are tiny in comparison to what is coming. If humanity sits on its hands and continues dismissing the Climate Change threat, our future looks grim.
How bad will things get? How terrifying can Climate Change be? What sorts of catastrophes are possible as our climate reaches its tipping points and the planet starts visibly degrading all around us? Let’s look at the Top 10 most terrifying things that we will be seeing soon in the world around us…
#10 Severe Heating Events
Watch the headlines about the heatwave underway in India right now. It’s a record-breaking catastrophe of heat, with temperatures going as high as 120 degrees F. Or think back to last summer, June of 2021, when a gigantic heat dome was sitting over western North America. In Canada temperatures got as high as 120 degrees F and the Western U.S. baked. 1,000+ people died. Crops failed. And then there were the wildfires, as we will see in a moment.
Why are these heatwaves happening and increasing? It’s easy to understand. Humanity pumps something like 35 gigatons of new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year by burning fossil fuels. What does this mean? On a personal level, when someone in the U.S. drives their gasoline-powered car, it adds about three or four tons of carbon dioxide per year. A coal-fueled or natural-gas-fueled power plant for a city adds megatons per year. More and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means more and more global heating, until we start seeing heatwaves that are killing tens of thousands of people in a single event.
#9 Increasing Wildfires
If you take a forest and you bake it in a heatwave, it dries out. A dry forest, especially if there is wind, is a bonfire waiting to happen. And so we see bigger and bigger wildfires happening more and more often. In 2021 for example, the Dixie fire in California burned nearly a million acres. In 2020, 46 million acres burned in Australia and an estimated 3 billion animals died. In 2021, Russia saw 45 million acres of forests burn.
#8 Rainforest Collapse
What would be the worst possible wildfire? The Amazon Rainforest is more than a billion acres. If it burns to the ground, the effects will be horrific for the planet. But how can a rainforest burn? Doesn’t all the rain put out the fires?
There are three problems. First, the rainforest naturally has a wetter season (November to June) and a drier season (July to October). The drier season is lengthening. Second, during the drier season, farmers intent on converting the rainforest to farm fields light the forest on fire. There were more than 100,000 fires in 2019 alone. Third, the trees pump moisture into the air to make it rain, in a symbiotic cycle. The more trees that farmers burn down, the less rain will fall, until the rain stops. When that happens, the entire rainforest will burn or rot, adding hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and killing billions more animals. This is called rainforest collapse.
The only good thing about the 2019 rainforest fires is that, for a couple of weeks, they made headlines that average people actually noticed. This might have been the first time that a Climate Change event captured international attention amongst the general population. People were horrified. Unfortunately, the attention only lasted a couple of weeks, and the fires continue. See this article for a description of the chain reaction that could unfold due to rainforest collapse.
#7 Sea Level Rise
Would humanity want to lose trillions of dollars in infrastructure when sea levels rise by 10 feet, destroying many of Earth’s major coastal cities and beaches? Of course not. But through inaction, humanity may get to witness this event sooner than expected.
We don’t know the exact timing, but we could see this catastrophe unfold within 10 years. In 2022, humanity watched the collapse of the first major ice shelf in Antarctica. One cause was a heatwave in Antarctica (see #10). This collapse released about 300,000 acres of ice. The problem is that the Thwaites glacier in Western Antarctica is held in place by an ice shelf. If its ice shelf collapses, it may start a chain reaction that causes sea levels to ultimately rise by 10 feet. See this article for a description of how this colossal catastrophe could unfold.
#6 Mass extinctions
Animals periodically go extinct in the natural course of events. This is something scientists can track, and it is known as the background extinction rate (in the absence of human activities). But humans do all kinds of things that are making animals go extinct much faster than normal, like 100X faster. Things like the previously mentioned heating (#10), increased wildfires (#9), habitat destruction (#8), pollution, fencing and roads that fragment habitats, artificial lighting, plastics in the oceans, overfishing, and on and on. Soon humans will have caused the extinction of 1% of the species, then 2% and so on.
A mass extinction event occurs when 75% or more of the species on Earth go extinct because of an event. The asteroid strike 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs was the fifth mass extinction event on Earth. It is widely believed that humanity will cause the sixth mass extinction event unless we change course quickly.
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