Many scientists have since referred to Attenborough’s speech, mostly to instill a sense of urgency.
Many also used the speech to mock scientists, calling them doomsayers.
But maybe, one thing is happening at the same time: No one knows what the collapse of human civilization and the natural world will look like.
Several movies, TV shows, and books have imagined this scenario, but like scientists before them, have been unable to come to a conclusion.
Maybe because there are no real examples to compare to?
There are two ways to look at some of the comments made by Attenborough and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The first is the environmental aspect.
According to the 2020 paper “The Future of the Human Climate Niche,” human societies have locally adapted to a specific climate with an average annual temperature of 13 degrees Celsius. As the current warming of the planet continues, this adaptive capacity will also decrease.
In short: Human civilization could have thrived under stable conditions in the Holocene, but this stability was disturbed due to anthropogenic changes. The effects of this disruption are visible every day.
Humanity is experiencing dramatic changes in its surrounding environment, with droughts in Africa, fires across much of North America and Canada, floods in Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, and heat waves elsewhere also wreaking havoc around the world, regardless of the stage of development in the region. exist.
In nature, the impact is just as dramatic. While coral reefs around the world are experiencing extinction-level bleaching events, changes in temperature and land use are causing diseases to spread from one species to another, including humans, a process known as zoonosis. This not only affects infected species, but also threatens more frequent and potentially more deadly epidemics.
The World Health Organization on Thursday warned of the increasing spread of H5N1 bird flu to new species, including humans, who face “extremely high” mortality rates.
This brings us to the second aspect of this statement.
Events over the past few years have proven that the Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and as alarmist as it may sound: collapse may be imminent. But the silver lining is that the collapse likely won’t be as dramatic as the extinction of the dinosaurs, nor will it be a sudden event.
With this in mind, some scientists, in their paper “Climate Change and Threats to Civilization,” define civilizational collapse as “the loss of a society’s ability to maintain basic governance functions, in particular the ability to maintain security, the rule of law, and the supply of basic necessities.” They further linked this collapse to civil unrest, violence, and general deprivation.
Climate breakdown, then, may not be a sudden event but a long-term process that starts small and lasts a century or more, say scientists at the School of Population and Public Health and the University of Washington, led by Daniel Steele.
They identified three possible civilization collapse scenarios:
- Local collapse at specific vulnerable locations
- Some cities and regions of the country collapse, while the rest suffer negative climate-related impacts such as food and water shortages
- The world collapsed, cities around the world were abandoned, countries disappeared, and the world’s population declined rapidly.
First, the scientists cited the example of the Syrian civil war, in which model simulations showed that war-related droughts were more than twice as likely to occur given anthropogenic climate change. Climate breakdown therefore depends not only on environmental factors, but politics, international aggressors and internal conflicts also play a leading role.
Elaborating on the other two scenarios, the scientists wrote that in the second scenario, while collapse at the city and national levels was widespread, some large urban centers and national governments remained with shortages. The third scenario is that all major urban areas around the world are effectively abandoned, functioning nation-states cease to exist, and the world’s population plummets.
This image, they say, may be what the phrase “collapse of civilization” evokes.
This hypothesis is closely related to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which defines a five-level model of human needs, described as a hierarchy within a pyramid. Among other things, the basic needs of food, water, warmth, and rest must be met before the individual can meet the needs higher up the pyramid. While this is a theory of motivation in psychology that identifies what motivates an individual to achieve goals, it identifies food, water, warmth, and rest as the most basic elements of survival.
From a climate perspective, these basic needs are also the first to be at risk of destruction.
The water crisis in Bangalore, rising prices for staples like olive oil following drought in parts of Europe, winter fuel shortages caused by the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and ongoing conflicts in West Asia: these can serve as examples.
Scientists have also identified crash mechanisms and divided them into three categories:
Direct impact mechanism: Severe and complex climate impacts such as rising sea levels, droughts, floods, and extreme heat will affect agriculture, water resources, and other basic necessities of civilization.
Social climate feedback mechanism: The adverse effects of climate change, particularly on food production, may trigger political conflicts that undermine adaptive capacity, while leading to actions such as bans on food exports or war, thereby amplifying instability and accelerating collapse.
Vulnerability mechanism to external shocks: Climate change will weaken adaptive capacity through the processes described in the first two regime types, leaving global society vulnerable to collapse caused by other types of shocks, such as wars or pandemics.
So, will climate change lead to human extinction or destroy civilization?
Adam Schlosser, deputy director of the Joint Program on Global Change Science and Policy at MIT, said: “If I had to rate the likelihood, I would say it is, if not, likely that climate change will push us toward human extinction. Zero is also very low.
This is going to have some very, very bad regional and local consequences. Climate scientist Schlosser believes that for the world’s island nations, the warming climate we are heading toward, with projected rising sea levels that could force them to retreat or potentially abandon their homes in many places, is an existential threat to them. Studying future climate change and its impact on human society, said.
So while human extinction is not really a major concern, it might be better for humans to prepare for regional, localized collapse scenarios.
Tannu Jain, deputy chief content producer at HT, picks a climate news story from around the world and analyzes its impact with relevant reports, research and expert talks
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