Scientists have warned that Earth in the year 2500 will be completely alien to modern-day humans as the result of the climate catastrophe.
Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have released a report stating that the next 500 years could be shaped in a dramatic fashion by the actions we take in the here and now. While most climate scientists are looking at the next 100 years, up to 2100, the report shows that the long-term damage could be even more severe.
Scientists mostly agree that an increase in global temperatures, as result of greenhouse gases, of 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels will result in widespread famine, floods and natural disasters, which themselves will result in political instability, warfare and huge swathes of refugees.
What this report from the IPCC does is explain what happens after 2100.
Scientists from the IPCC ran climate models based on the idea that we do not get climate change under control. They looked at three models, one in which temperature does not increase much after 2100, one where it increases by a moderate amount, and one in which temperature increases by a large amount.
Even under low levels of heat increase, it could be expected that the Amazon basin could run dry, that huge amounts of the world near the equator could become uninhabitable, and that famine will be widespread.
Christopher Lyon, a climate scientist writing in The Conversation, says:
"Between 1500 and today, we have witnessed colonization and the Industrial Revolution, the birth of modern states, identities and institutions, the mass combustion of fossil fuels and the associated rise in global temperatures. If we fail to halt climate warming, the next 500 years and beyond will change the Earth in ways that challenge our ability to maintain many essentials for survival – particularly in the historically and geographically rooted cultures that give us meaning and identity."
"The Earth of our high-end projections is alien to humans. The choice we face is to urgently reduce emissions, while continuing to adapt to the warming we cannot escape as a result of emissions up to now, or begin to consider life on an Earth very different to this one."
[h/t: science alert]
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