End Times
Could Climate Change Really End the World?
Species are going extinct and the climate is warming rapidly — yet at least materially, humans are doing better than ever. Welcome to the environmentalist’s paradox.
Asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, engineered viruses, artificial intelligence, and even aliens — the end may be closer than you think. For the next two weeks, OneZero will be featuring essays drawn from editor Bryan Walsh’s forthcoming book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, which hits shelves on August 27 and is available for pre-order now, as well as pieces by other experts in the burgeoning field of existential risk. But we’re not helpless. It’s up to us to postpone the apocalypse.
That the natural world is degraded from what it once was is indisputable. If Christopher Columbus were to arrive in the Americas today aboard his Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, he would find 30% less biodiversity than in 1492. The global population of vertebrates has declined by 52% between 1970 and 2010. The current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times higher than it has been during normal — meaning non-mass extinction — periods in biological history, with amphibians going extinct 45,000 times faster than the norm. One point eight trillion pieces of plastic trash, weighing 79,000 tons, now occupies an area three times the size of France in the Pacific Ocean — and this Great Pacific Garbage Patch is expected to grow 22% by 2025. And of course, there is the climate change that has happened — about 1.6 F in warming since 1901 — and the climate change that is to come.
Yet amid all this natural loss, human beings, on the aggregate, have largely thrived. That’s definitely true compared to the days of Columbus — the economist Angus Maddison estimates that between 1500 and 2008, global average per capita gross domestic product (GDP) multiplied by more than thirteenfold. Much of that gain has occurred in recent years, as globalization helped lift more than a billion people out of extreme poverty in the developing world since 1990 alone — the same years when environmental damage, including the first signs of climate change, began compounding.
