Today, it's hard to avoid indications that all three of those thresholds are being crossed.
To begin with, on a planetary basis, the environmental impacts of climate change are now unavoidable and worsening by the year. To take just one among innumerable global examples, the drought afflicting the American West has now persisted for more than two decades, leading scientists to label it a "megadrought" exceeding all recorded regional dry spells in breadth and severity. As of August 2021, 99% of the United States west of the Rockies was in drought, something for which there is no modern precedent. The recent record heat waves in the region have only emphasized this grim reality.
The American West's megadrought has been accompanied by another indicator of abiding environmental change: the steady decline in the volume of the Colorado River, the region's most important source of water. The Colorado River Basin supplies drinking water to more than 40 million people in the United States and, according to economists at the University of Arizona, it's crucial to $1.4 trillion of the U.S. economy. All of that is now at severe risk due to increased temperatures and diminished precipitation. The volume of the Colorado is almost 20% below what it was when this century began and, as global temperatures continue to rise, that decline is likely to worsen.
The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offers many examples of such negative climate alterations globally (as do the latest headlines). It's obvious, in fact, that climate change is permanently altering our environment in an ever more disastrous fashion.
It's also evident that Diamond's second precursor to collapse, the refusal to alter agricultural and industrial methods of production which only aggravate or in the case of fossil-fuel consumption simply cause the crisis, is growing ever more obvious. At the top of any list would be a continuing reliance on oil, coal, and natural gas, the leading sources of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) now overheating our atmosphere and oceans. Despite all the scientific evidence linking fossil-fuel combustion to global warming and the promises of governing elites to reduce the consumption of those fuels for example, under the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 their use continues to grow.
According to a 2022 report produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA), global oil consumption, given current government policies, will rise from 94 million barrels per day in 2021 to an estimated 102 million barrels by 2030 and then remain at or near that level until 2050. Coal consumption, though expected to decline after 2030, is still rising in some areas of the world. The demand for natural gas (only recently found to be dirtier than previously imagined) is projected to exceed 2020 levels in 2050.
The same 2022 IEA report indicates that energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide the leading component of greenhouse gases will climb from 19.5 billion metric tons in 2020 to an estimated 21.6 billion tons in 2030 and remain at about that level until 2050. Emissions of methane, another leading GHG component, will continue to rise, thanks to the increased production of natural gas.
Not surprisingly, climate experts now predict that average world temperatures will soon surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial level the maximum amount they believe the planet can absorb without experiencing irreversible, catastrophic consequences, including the dying out of the Amazon and the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (with an accompanying rise in sea levels of one meter or more).
There are many other ways in which societies are now perpetuating behavior that will endanger the survival of civilization, including the devotion of ever more resources to industrial-scale beef production. That practice consumes vast amounts of land, water, and grains that could be better devoted to less profligate vegetable production. Similarly, many governments continue to facilitate the large-scale production of water-intensive crops through extensive irrigation schemes, despite the evident decline in global water supplies that is already producing widespread shortages of drinking water in places like Iran.
Finally, today's powerful elites are choosing to perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global devastation. Among the most egregious, the decision of top executives of the ExxonMobil Corporation the world's largest and wealthiest privately-owned oil company to continue pumping oil and gas for endless decades after their scientists warned them about the risks of global warming and affirmed that Exxon's operations would only amplify them. As early as the 1970s, Exxon's scientists predicted that the firm's fossil-fuel products could lead to global warming with "dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050." Yet, as has been well documented, Exxon officials responded by investing company funds in casting doubt on climate change research, even financing think tanks focused on climate denialism. Had they instead broadcast their scientists' findings and worked to speed the transition to alternative fuels, the world would be in a far less precarious position today.
Or consider China's decision, even as it was working to develop alternative energy sources, to increase its combustion of coal the most carbon-intense of all fossil fuels in order to keep factories and air conditioners humming during periods of increasingly extreme heat.
All such decisions have ensured that future floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, you name it, will be more intense and prolonged. In other words, the precursors to civilizational collapse and the disintegration of modern industrial society as we know it not to speak of the possible deaths of millions of us are already evident. Worse yet, numerous events this very summer suggest that we are witnessing the first stages of just such a collapse.
The Apocalyptic Summer of '23
July 2023 has already been declared the hottest month ever recorded and the entire year is also likely to go down as the hottest ever. Unusually high temperatures globally are responsible for a host of heat-related deaths across the planet. For many of us, the relentless baking will be remembered as the most distinctive feature of the summer of '23. But other climate impacts offer their own intimations of an approaching Jared Diamond-style collapse. To me, two ongoing events fit that category in a striking fashion.
The fires in Canada: As of August 2nd, months after they first erupted into flame, there were still 225 major uncontrolled wildfires and another 430 under some degree of control but still burning across the country. At one point, the figure was more than 1,000 fires! To date, they have burned some 32.4 million acres of Canadian woodland, or 50,625 square miles an area the size of the state of Alabama. Such staggering fires, largely attributed to the effects of climate change, have destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures, while sending particle-laden smoke across Canadian and American cities at one point turning New York's skies orange. In the process, record amounts of carbon dioxide were dispatched into the atmosphere, only increasing the pace of global warming and its destructive impacts.
Aside from its unprecedented scale, there are aspects of this year's fire season that suggest a more profound threat to society. To begin with, in fire terms or more accurately, in climate-change terms Canada has clearly lost control of its hinterland. As political scientists have long suggested, the very essence of the modern nation-state, its core raison d'??tre, is maintaining control over its sovereign territory and protecting its citizens. A country unable to do so, like Sudan or Somalia, has long been considered a "failed state."
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