Health In Check
Doctors have just taken the Earth’s “vital signs.” And the prognosis is not good.
In an annual climate report published in the journal BioScience, an international team of scientists warn that humanity is “on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” as we fail to stop the worst of the environmental impacts.
Right now, of the 35 planetary vital signs that scientists track annually, 25 are at the worst levels ever recorded, the report found.
If left unaddressed, the result of these changes will be massively destabilizing to human and nonhuman life, with societal collapse now emerging as a serious possibility.
The report emphasizes that the primary drivers of our unfolding climate crisis are human-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses like methane. 90 percent of those emissions stem from the combustion of fossil fuels, with the remainder accounted for by devastating forms of human-imposed land destruction, mainly deforestation.
“This is a global emergency beyond any doubt,” the authors wrote in the report. “We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
Numbers Go Up
Many of these vital signs are beginning to sound decidedly morbid. Per the report, the surface temperatures of the Earth’s oceans have reached record-breaking levels, and so has their acidity. The average global sea level, too, is at a record high. Three of the hottest days ever recorded took place this July. And fossil fuel emissions are higher than they’ve ever been, rising by 1.5 percent in 2023 from the year before. In the coming years, there will be more extreme weather events, they warn.
Meanwhile, the human population is increasing at a rate of around 200,000 people per day, the report said. Similarly, the number of cattle, sheep, and goats, which produce significant greenhouse gas emissions on top of the large amounts of deforestation required to farm some of them, is increasing by approximately 170,000 per day.
With our current commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is still on track for around 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit of peak warming by 2100.
“We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardizes life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University who led the report, told The Guardian. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives.”
Bye Society
One of the most grim auguries is that scientists are now increasingly grappling with the possibility of societal collapse, as more scientific articles than ever are being published about the topic in relation to climate change, the report found.
Even if we were to avoid a global collapse, the authors wrote, climate change could displace hundreds of millions — if not billions — of more people than it already has.
“By the end of the century, roughly one-third of people worldwide could be outside the human climate niche, facing increased risk of illness and early death, famine, and a host of other adverse outcomes,” they wrote.
They leave us with a final warning: that we simply aren’t doing enough.
“We are currently going in the wrong direction, and our increasing fossil fuel consumption and rising greenhouse gas emissions are driving us toward a climate catastrophe.”
More on climate: Climate Change Is Drying Up All the World’s Rivers at an Alarming Rate
