Humanity Has No Future

Three weeks ago, Adam McKay wrote in Current Affairs, “there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.”

The gargantuan lie is “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”

We don’t have more time. We’re out of time.

Last month, Mark Hertsgaard revealed that the Labour party in the UK buried an explosive report by UK military and intelligence leaders. The report warned “that the global collapse of ecosystems poses grave threats to the UK’s security and food supply within as little as five years.”

Human-caused global warming is destroying our planet’s ecosystems. This affects global food supplies and leads to grave food shortages.

The Natural World Fund reported, “Extreme heat is increasingly threatening global food production, with the UN warning that rising temperatures are putting the livelihoods of more than one billion people at risk.”

It doesn’t even seem real. Yet, UK military and intelligence leaders concluded that the world will suffer “severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis.”

The most striking line of the report was the admission that “the UK ‘has no future’.”

To extrapolate, the human species has no future. We continue to burn fossil fuels and pump record amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere at breakneck speed. The more CO2 we pump into the air, the more heat we trap on Earth.

The Wall Street Journal reported “This June was the hottest June on record.” In addition, “[This] July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous U.S.” This is a pattern of record-breaking global warming that will continue for decades (possibly even centuries) into the future.

Phys.org wrote, “Each extra degree of warming will mean a billion more people will experience roughly another month of heat and humidity beyond what their bodies can tolerate.”

Heatwaves are already extremely deadly, without the inevitability of rising temperatures. Bloomberg reported, “Extreme heat has killed more than 25,000 people across Europe this year.”

If extreme heat doesn’t kill you, wildfire smoke will. The Guardian said, “Estimates are for well over 100,000 excess deaths globally due to smoke exposure from wildfires.”

This will only get worse. Human-caused global warming increases the intensity of heatwaves, wildfires, extreme rainfall, flooding, severe droughts, and sea-ice melting.

Climate scientist Anders Levermann admitted “The planet is heading for climate free fall.”

In our climate free fall, irreversible ice loss is quickly becoming the new normal. Earth Climate wrote, “Ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland have already passed their critical tipping temperatures.”

Space Daily wrote “the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could begin an irreversible collapse… that would continue until the ice sheet had contributed roughly four metres [13 ft] to global sea levels.”

Cataclysmic climate catastrophe is here!

Yet, taxpayers subsidize the corporations that prioritize short-term profit over billions of lives.

-Anton Porcari