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…
