If asteroids span 60 miles (100 kilometers) of tomorrow hit the Earth, it will make the Earth on Earth capable of causing almost all forms of life, except for the most difficult extreme particles. This massive extinction event will cause humanity to disappear from the face of the earth – no survivors.
For some experts, this is the true definition of “there is a threat.” Traditionalists would say that the term describes a risk that harms the existence of something-in this case human. In recent years, the definition has been largely relaxed to cover global warming. Scientists, politicians and world leaders have all described the climate crisis as an existing threat to humanity. This man-driven phenomenon is already changing lives, as we know on planetary scale, but will it really lead to our extinction?
Some experts say that in the most extreme cases, it can. Others think this is not a question we should ask. Regarding this GIZ requirement, we contact various experts to see if climate change really poses an existential threat to our species.
Seth Baum
Executive Director of the Global Institute for Disaster Risks.
It depends on how you define the threat. I tend to use “global catastrophic risk” rather than “survival risk” because the latter actually means there is a risk. I think that in terms of extreme disasters, we need not only care about survival.
This is also important if we continue to exist in the form of species or civilization, but in a continuous state. In fact, some definitions used for the presence of risks include loss of existence (such as human extinction), and hovering in very reduced forms. To me, it feels like a misusing the existence risk of existence, because our existence is not actually lost.
But, in general, I am worried about the collapse of human civilization. You can have other conversations about what that means, but basically, I’m talking about the world because we know it doesn’t work anymore. If there are any survivors, they will be in a significant reduction.
Human civilization has emerged within the past 10,000 to 12,000 years, but it is said that humans have a history of 200,000 years. Why did civilization appear until recently? One explanation is that the Earth’s climate has been very favorable for the past 10,000 years. This is the Holocene of the climate, with temperatures quite warm and stable.
There is a theory that those stable, warm conditions allow us to truly realize this civilization’s ability (a potential capability) actually eliminates civilization. In fact, agriculture was invented in at least five or six different places around the world, all of which were invented in the same 10,000 years. This shows that without the Holocene we will not be able to achieve this. With that in mind, if we now start pushing the planets beyond these good, warm, stable, favorable Holocene conditions, perhaps we are destroying the premise of civilization.
Then you can start looking at the details. How does the climate change? How will this affect the population? There is a lot of concern about how this will affect agriculture, water resources and extreme weather. All of this stuff starts to paint a picture of a scene, in which case our civilized ability is problematic.
Another important detail is that climate change does not happen on its own. In this way, it is different from many other disaster scenarios, such as being hit by a large asteroid. Climate change is a gradual process, so we need to consider not only our own climate change, but also how it affects everything else that happens, including other catastrophic risks. Will climate change make nuclear war more likely? Can climate change push society to take dangerous risks through artificial intelligence? Actually, we see a few points now. It may help to consider less whether climate change is a catastrophic risk, and to consider more whether it increases the risk of global disasters. I think this is an easy question to answer.
Michael Mann
Climatologist, geophysicist, director of the Center for Sustainability and Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
I don’t think there is any problem. In our forthcoming book Siege of SciencePeter Hotez and I identified three existential threats that currently collectively threaten human civilization. They are climate crisis, deadly pandemics, and critical upward trends against knowledge and disinformation that can undermine our ability to resolve these crises.
Apart from the worst cases of climate negligence, it seems unlikely that the table will become extinct. However, it is easy to imagine the collapse of human civilization. We have seen it get stuck on the edge, especially in the form of geopolitical conflict, driven to a large extent by the growing global population of food, water and space. All of this is aggravated by climate change.
The critical points, such as the collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet or the closure of the hot salt ocean cycle (which will have important regional consequences), may be vaguely visible in a not-too-out-of-reach future if we continue to heat the planet with fossil fuel carbon emissions. Although we don’t know how much warming will trigger them, whether it’s 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) or more.
There is no even a need to attract uncertain climate tipping point science, the known effects of climate change (especially extreme, harmful and deadly weather events that will continue to worsen as warming increases), which will be enough to stabilize our social infrastructure. We have seen ways in which these events disrupt supply chains, put pressure on food and water resources and threaten human health. This is already taxing our resources and rigorously testing adaptability.
Kennedy Mbeva
Research Assistant at the Cambridge College Student Risk Research Center.
If we use the term “risk” in a strict sense, then one can see it as a threat to humanity, which is very extreme. However, we used another term called “catastrophic risk”. Not only is this a posed crisis of climate system collapse (which can be catastrophic in the most extreme cases), but also in terms of the extreme impacts of climate change that we can witness now and in the near future.
There are many ways people can consider these impacts. Scientists consider this on planetary boundaries or pouring points. If you focus on people, you will find that in many parts of the world, there are areas that are completely affected by the extremes of climate change. If you look at the island state, some of them will disappear due to rising sea levels. It can be said that this is an existential threat to them, as islands or territory may disappear. This threatens the way people live, and we can already see some Pacific islands involved in dialogue and negotiations about immigration to other countries, such as Australia. Where did people go when this unfolds and becomes a reality?
Climate impacts also damage major parts of the economy. For example, in many African countries, people rely mainly on agriculture to make a living. Droughts are becoming increasingly intense and more frequent. We also host extreme weather events such as flooding. Some estimates suggest that GDP in these countries spends up to 20% of the impacts and damages of climate change. Industrialized countries are also facing climate impacts. We see wildfires becoming more intense, more common, and summer getting hotter.
So while those who consider climate change on planetary scale focus on borders and tipping points, you can also see many different ways in which climate change affects around the world. I think these different views have the same concern. As scholars, we may debate which framework is more useful, but I don’t think we should ignore the reality that these issues are developing.
Renée Lertzman
A psychologist focused on climate and environmental psychology.
It’s hard for me to imagine that climate change is not considered a threat to exist. It took me decades to unravel the psychology of climate change, and I feel there are many factors that blend in to cause the way we experience and understand it. This includes that it is produced by humans, it is systematic, and its effects are distributed across time and space. This combination creates a very unique set of existential threats, especially from a psychological point of view, which looks at how people deal with and make climate change meaningful.
There is also a meaningful crisis of existence. If we really want to consider what is going on here, it does have some level of inquiry about who we are as human beings and what it means to live a good life. Climate change forces us to deal with the consequences of our recent industrialization practices.
We are working on it and meeting what is happening. As humans, we have a kind of programming of where we are going, what is going to happen, and I have been feeling for a long time that awareness of climate change and environmental issues directly affects our ability to envision a viable future.
The way I use the word “existence” is simply to acknowledge that climate change touches and affects our existence. To me, this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of all life we know. This means: What does it mean to be human? I feel we need to acknowledge that threats to climate and the environment exist because they cut the core of who we are.
Olúfẹ́miO.Táíwò
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
Climate change is an existential threat to humans and human society. However, the reason why this exists in a survival threat to human society is not necessarily directly (or even mainly) related to the atmospheric and ecological effects of climate change. On the contrary, it is the intersection between these effects that are devastating, and our political system constitutes an existential crisis.
From the levels of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to the severity of various atmospheric hazards such as wildfires, there is a lot of focus on how we talk about climate crisis and its response to carbon. All of these things deserve attention, but the actual damage they cause to human society is caused by the interaction between ecological problems and how our political system succeeds or fails to protect people from their influence. Historically, what we have seen is that colonial, unjust systems respond differently to natural and ecological disasters than more systems of equality.
People in many parts of the world, including the United States, live in open political diseases of some of the worst climate scenarios. Thinking of the climate crisis as a political crisis rather than just a part of an ecological crisis, is thinking about how institutions that protect the common good can re-establish themselves in defending their personal belongings. This is done in a very intrinsic and useful way by Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein. One of the biggest gains from this way of thinking about crisis is not only the failure of governments to fulfill their core responsibilities to protect the public interest, but the way they fail has prevented civil society, communities and families from working for solutions.
We live in a very complex ecology and we are trying to solve a problem at the scale of the planet. Not only do we need governments to do what they have to do, but there are also many people who are thinking, working, planning and deciding what they can do for trees in rivers or cities. We need people to do climate adaptation and mitigation. The end result of perseverance and grafting politics (a politics that plunders common interests) is also a politics without public mobilization of these things.
