Climate change and civilizational collapse
Climate change and civilizational collapse refers to a hypothetical risk of the impacts of climate change reducing global socioeconomic complexity to the point complex human civilization effectively ends around the world, with humanity reduced to a less developed state. This hypothetical risk is typically associated with the idea of a massive reduction of human population caused by the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, and often, it is also associated with a permanent reduction of the Earth's carrying capacity. Finally, it is sometimes suggested that a civilizational collapse caused by climate change would soon be followed by human extinction.
Some researchers connect historical examples of societal collapse with adverse changes in local and/or global weather patterns. In particular, the 4.2-kiloyear event, a millennial-scale megadrought which took place in Africa and Asia between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, has been linked with the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Liangzhu culture in the lower Yangtze River area and the Indus Valley Civilization.[2][3] In Europe, the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which was defined by events such as crop failure and the Thirty Years' War, took place during the Little Ice Age. In 2011, a general connection was proposed between adverse climate variations and long-term societal crises during the preindustrial times.[4] However, all of these events were limited to individual human societies: a collapse of the entire human civilization would be historically unprecedented.
Some of the more extreme warnings of civilizational collapse caused by climate change, such as a claim that civilization is highly likely to end by 2050, have attracted strong rebutals from scientists. [5][6] The 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report projects that human population would be in a range between 8.5 billion and 11 billion people by 2050. By the year 2100, the median population projection is at 11 billion people, while the maximum population projection is close to 16 billion people. The lowest projection for 2100 is around 7 billion, and this decline from present levels is primarily attributed to "rapid development and investment in education", with those projections associated with some of the highest levels of economic growth.[7] However, a minority of climate scientists have argued that higher levels of warming—between about 3 °C (5.4 °F) to 5 °C (9.0 °F) over preindustrial temperatures—may be incompatible with civilization, or that the lives of several billion people could no longer be sustained in such a world.[8][9][10][11] In 2022, they have called for a so-called "climate endgame" research agenda into the probability of these risks, which had attracted significant media attention and some scientific controversy.[12][13][14]
Some of the most high-profile writing on climate change and civilizational collapse has been written by non-scientists. Notable examples include "The Uninhabitable Earth"[15] by David Wallace-Wells and "What if we stopped pretending?" by Jonathan Franzen,[16] which were both criticized for scientific inaccuracy.[17][18] Climate change in popular culture is commonly represented in a highly exaggerated manner as well. Opinion polling has provided evidence that people across the world believe that the outcomes of civilizational collapse or human extinction are much more likely than the scientists believe them to be.[19][20]
Modern discussion[edit]
2000s[edit]
As early as in 2004, a book titled Ecocriticism explored the connection between apocalypticism as expressed in religious contexts, and the secular apocalyptic interpretations of climate and environmental issues.[35] It argued that the tragic (preordained, with clearly delineated morality) or comic (focused on human flaws as opposed to inherent inevitability) apocalyptic framing was seen in the past works on environment, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1972), and Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992).[36][37]
In the mid-2000s, James Lovelock gave predictions to the British newspapers The Independent and The Guardian, where he suggested that much of Europe will have turned to desert and "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century.[38][39] In 2008, he was quoted in The Guardian as saying that 80% of humans will perish by 2100, and that the climate change responsible for that will last 100,000 years.[40] By 2012, he admitted that climate change had proceeded slower than he expected.[41]
2010s-present[edit]
In late 2010s, several articles have attracted attention for their predictions of apocalyptic impacts caused by climate change. Firstly, there was "The Uninhabitable Earth",[15] a July 2017 New York magazine article by David Wallace-Wells, which had become the most-read story in the history of the magazine,[42] and was later adapted into a book. Another was "What if we stopped pretending?", an article written for The New Yorker by Jonathan Franzen in September 2019.[16] Both articles were heavily criticized by the fact-checking organization Climate Feedback for the numerous inaccuracies about tipping points in the climate system and other aspects of climate change research.[17][18]
Other examples of this genre include "What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?", a year 2022 article for TIME magazine by Parag Khanna, which had asserted that hundreds of millions of people dying in the upcoming years and the global population standing at 6 billion by the year 2050 was a plausible worst-case scenario.[43] Further, some reports, such as "the 2050 scenario" from the Australian Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration[44] and the self-published Deep Adaptation paper by Jem Bendell[45] had attracted substantial media coverage by making allegations that the outcomes of climate change are underestimated by the conventional scientific process.[46][47][48][49][50][51] Those reports did not go through the peer review process, and the scientific assessment of these works finds them of very low credibility.[5][52]
Notably, subsequent writing by David Wallace-Wells had stepped back from the claims he made in either version of The Uninhabitable Earth. In 2022, he authored a feature article for The New York Times, which was titled "Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View".[53] The following year, Kyle Paoletta argued in Harper's Magazine that the shift in tone made by David Wallace-Wells was indicative of a larger trend in media coverage of climate change taking place.[54]