This article discusses a new climate debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World. Researchers are now thinking about the potential for a complete collapse of the earth’s climate, to the point where only a few will survive. They are thinking about how to prepare for it.
The fact that we are actually beginning to discuss this issue means that if we do nothing about climate change, this mass scale extinction we are heading towards, could occur, and include humans.
At the end of 2016, before Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed, wildfires reached the Arctic, and a large swath of North Carolina was submerged under floodwaters, Jonathan Gosling published an academic paper asking what might have seemed like a shrill question: How should we prepare for the consequences of planetary climate catastrophe?
Propelling the movement are signs that the problem is worsening at an accelerating rate. In an article this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 climate scientists from around the world argued that the planet may be much closer than previously realized to locking in what they call a “hothouse” trajectory—warming of 4C or 5C (7F or 9F), “with serious challenges for the viability of human societies.”