A Tale of Two Paths: Toward Climate Destruction or Rehabilitation

What follows are two short tales of what Earth might be like in the year 2050 with the only difference being whether humans decided to take aggressive action to address the climate crisis in the previous years.

In the first tale, we didn’t take the threat as seriously as we should have and procrastinated making substantial changes until it was already too late. In the second tale, we decided, on a global scale, to do everything in our power to bring down emissions as fast as possible to ensure a sustainable future for all.

As you read, keep in mind that although everything stated is fiction, it is primarily based on current scientific evidence and predictions (with a conservative approach taken) meaning that these scenarios are entirely possible — and even probable depending on the actions we take now. Imagine yourself living in each of these different worlds and which you would choose if given the choice.

Toward Climate Destruction

It’s now the year 2050, but there’s not much to celebrate these days…I wish we had heeded the scientists’ warnings decades ago. We were given all the facts and potential solutions, yet most of the developed world decided that economic growth was more important than the livability of our planet for future generations. Little did they know (or perhaps cynically they did) that all the gains in human prosperity and technological innovations would be for naught. Economics and politics became a thing of the past as chaos now governs everything.

While most of the world was distracted by these tech innovations and what they watched on the media, we kept ticking toward the 2°C threshold the climate scientists had been warning us about, and eventually surpassed it. We were all assured that politicians and corporations were taking the threat seriously, yet when pressed to act, they failed us and left us to fend for ourselves.

I felt the true impact of what we had done to our planet myself when a Category 6 hurricane (yes, they had to create a new category for the increased severity of these storms) barreled through our small town. What didn’t get destroyed just by the 200+ mph winds was later destroyed by the flooding that resulted from over 6 feet of rain being dumped on us, which was further exacerbated by the 2 feet of sea level rise we had already experienced. We lost so many good people and our community was virtually destroyed in the span of 24 hours…and we are just one community among many that no longer exists.

As people fled coastal communities like our own and moved more inland, they still could not escape the wrath of our changing climate, whether it was wildfires that burned millions of acres, multi-year droughts, or extreme cold patterns that made you feel like you were living in the Arctic. All these catastrophic weather scenarios hit crop production yields significantly meaning the cost for produce skyrocketed as supplies of staple crops diminished by over 10% worldwide, and in some regions, the losses were much greater. This, of course, led to food rationing in places and theft became widespread as people struggled to provide for their families by any means necessary.

In some cases, like in the Middle East and Africa, entire nations of people, millions upon millions, began to flee their homelands in search of more resources as their lands had become nonarable and they could no longer sustain themselves. No border, no matter how strong, was going to keep all of them out. The climate refugees inundated virtually every developed nation that still had enough resources to feed its people, but this mass influx further strained what little food was left to feed everyone. Due to the droughts, decreased snowmelt in the mountains, and overuse of water for things like agriculture, drinking water was also more difficult to come by in much of the world. Without access to these basic necessities, people turned on one another and civilization as we once knew it, began to break down.

The beauty of our planet is now a shadow of what it once was. The forests of the ocean, i.e. the coral reefs, are now ghosts of their formal selves. In fact, a majority of sea life is either now endangered or extinct as they were the first to take the brunt of a warming planet with the oceans acting as giant carbon sinks. Life on land has only fared marginally better with the rate of species loss quickly outpacing our ability to save them. In fact, we exacerbated their extinction not just through emissions, but through habitat destruction, as we cleared the way for animal agriculture, timber, and palm oil. Essentially, we destroyed our best natural solutions for mitigating emissions forcing us to rely solely on technological solutions that came too little too late.

I fear there is no future to look forward to for mankind. There is no such thing as “civil society” anymore nor is anyone proposing a path forward. Everyone is focused on their own survival and we have devolved back into a primal state. The climate feedbacks are much stronger than the scientists’ modeling ever predicted and we are now in a vicious positive feedback loop that is inescapable, so everyone feels pretty hopeless. I’m not sure how much longer we have nor do I have time to worry about that; I’m just trying to survive like everyone else.

Toward Climate Rehabilitation

It’s now the year 2050, and we have much to celebrate, but also much work still to do. Our most important achievement has been successfully keeping below the 2°C threshold the climate scientists said would be the point of no return. When I look outside, the sun is shining on the solar panels that lay across the roofs and on the ground while a cool breeze keeps the wind turbines spinning down in the fields.

Virtually all the developed nations have been able to achieve 100% clean energy usage for their electricity and heating with many of the developing nations not far behind as we lent a hand to help them develop their infrastructure much quicker and avoid a fossil fuel path of their own. Combustion engines have become obsolete as we transitioned to electric vehicles that can be driven anywhere now that the charging stations are as ubiquitous as gas stations once were.

By transforming our energy infrastructure, we created millions of good-paying jobs that served as a massive boost to the global economy. Some people in developing nations experienced what it was like to have electricity and energy security for the first time in their lives, and the jobs that were created helped lift many out of poverty.

We also scaled back factory farming that was polluting our atmosphere and water sources. We moved more toward co-op farming that only produced what was needed and utilized sustainable agriculture practices that helped renew the soil and provided a natural carbon sink. Speaking of carbon sinks, a global mass movement toward reforestation and habitat restoration occurred once we realized the importance of these natural carbon sinks to reduce emissions. However, we still had to develop technological solutions to help bring down emissions faster, but we wouldn’t be where we are now if we didn’t heavily rely on nature to save us. And, as a result, we never again took it for granted.

All of this was, by no means, easy to achieve. It took worldwide collaboration on a scale not ever seen before in human history with developed nations serving as the role models for developing nations to achieve their own climate goals. We were also incredibly lucky to have major breakthroughs in carbon capture technology and further innovations in the renewable field that made it much easier to scale them up to meet world energy demand. We also had to take on the power of the fossil fuel industry, the agricultural industry, and many other interests who wanted nothing more than to continue business as usual and keep their revenues growing. It took all of us from across the political spectrums and geographic locations to demand that we transition to a more sustainable world.

Even so, our planet is still not the same as it once was when I was growing up. We still experience severe weather events, the sea levels have still risen, many species are now extinct due to an inability to adapt quickly enough, and many people have been lost due to climate catastrophes over the years. However, we are still here and we haven’t given up.

I once thought that my children would have to suffer on an increasingly uninhabitable planet, but now we are making our planet habitable again. We have also learned the important lessons of what excessive growth and consumption inevitably leads to when we don’t balance that with the finite resources of our planet. Even more importantly, each of us understands the power we hold that can be used for good or for bad, and we recognize that we must hold each other accountable to ensure we never go back to the way things once were.

Where We Go From Here

Although there are a million different scenarios for what might happen between now and 2050, the two most important ones are those described above. We can continue business as usual and head towards the first path of climate destruction — the track we happen to be on currently for much of the world — or we can take bold, transformative action to address the climate crisis and redirect towards the second path of climate rehabilitation.

It is crucial that we lay out a vision of what we want the future to look like, so that we can begin taking the steps necessary to achieve that vision. That vision of the future must also be a collective vision, and each of us can start now by developing our own Climate Resolutions and a vision for what we would like the world to look like in 2050. Sometimes, it feels like we can never agree on anything, but certainly, we can all agree that our planet is worth protecting — and with a strong collective vision — there is nothing we cannot achieve.

References and Further Reading:

Annelise Jolley. The Co-Op Farming Model Might Help Save America’s Small Farms. 3 Oct. 2018, https://civileats.com/2018/10/03/co-op-farming-models-might-help-save-americas-small-farms/.

Bill McKibben. Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

David Fleshler. The World Has Never Seen a Category 6 Hurricane. But the Day May Be Coming. 7 July 2018, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hurricane-strenth-20180707-story.html.

David Roberts. This Graphic Explains Why 2 Degrees of Global Warming Will Be Way Worse than 1.5. 7 Oct. 2018, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/19/16908402/global-warming-2-degrees-climate-change.

David Wallace-Wells. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Tim Duggan Books, 2019.

Gerardo Ceballos, et al. “Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2017.

EarthTalk. Is Harvesting Palm Oil Destroying the Rainforests? 21 Apr. 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/harvesting-palm-oil-and-rainforests/.

Emily Moon. Climate Change Could Devastate Crop Yields. But New Research Shows Farmers Can Adapt. 15 Nov. 2018, https://psmag.com/news/climate-change-could-devastate-crop-yields-but-new-research-shows-farmers-can-adapt.

George Dvorsky. Extreme Heat Will Make Parts of the Middle East and Africa Uninhabitable by 2050. 2 May 2016, https://gizmodo.com/extreme-heat-will-make-parts-of-the-middle-east-and-afr-1774311994.

Giovanni Strona, and Corey J. A. Bradshaw. “Co-Extinctions Annihilate Planetary Life during Extreme Environmental Change.” Scientific Reports, Nov. 2018.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments. 8 Oct. 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/.

James Fergusson. The World Will Soon Be at War Over Water. 24 Apr. 2015, https://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/01/world-will-soon-be-war-over-water-324328.html.

James Hansen, et al. “Climate Sensitivity, Sea Level and Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 371, no. 2001, Oct. 2013.

Resplandy, L., et al. “Quantification of Ocean Heat Uptake from Changes in Atmospheric O2 and CO2 Composition.” Nature, vol. 563, no. 7729, Nov. 2018, pp. 105–08.

Roz Pidcock. Scientists Compare Climate Change Impacts at 1.5C and 2C. 21 Apr. 2016, https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-compare-climate-change-impacts-at-1-5c-and-2c.

Sarah Gibbens. Why a Warming Arctic May Be Causing Colder U.S. Winters. 13 Mar. 2018, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/global-warming-arctic-colder-winters-climate-change-spd/.

Steffen, Will, et al. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 33, Aug. 2018, p. 8252.

Susan Solomon, et al. “Irreversible Climate Change Due to Carbon Dioxide Emissions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 6, Feb. 2009.

The Solutions Project. Our 100% Clean Energy Vision. https://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/#/map/countries/.

Union of Concerned Scientists. Infographic: Western Wildfires and Climate Change. https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/infographic-wildfires-climate-change.html.

U.S. Global Change Research Program. Projected Sea Level Rise and Flooding by 2050. https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/multimedia/projected-sea-level-rise-and-flooding-2050.