There's a potential risk in the extinction of humanity in the coming three decades if urgent actions to combat climate crisis aren't taken, a new report has warned.
Admiral Chris Barrie, a former Australian Defense Chief and the Deputy Chief of Royal Navy, has endorsed the harrowing analysis on how human civilization might collapse by the year 2050.
The report published by an Australian think-tank in Melbourne, the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, has outlined an apocalyptic scenario that describes climate change as "a near- to the mid-term existential threat to human civilization."
Barrie, who's now working for the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, Canberra, explains:
"This policy paper looks at the existential climate-related security risk through a scenario set thirty years into the future."
"[The researchers] have laid bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way."
This report calculates the existential climate-related security risk to Earth through a scenario set 30 years into the future.
Though the report refuses to disclose what could exactly happen, it's warning there will be:
"An existential risk to civilization [..] posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity that may never be undone, either annihilating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential."
Researchers in the report argue that we're now in an unusual situation with no precise historical equivalent, and temperatures will rise, unlike anything we've ever experienced.
The reports also states:
"This scenario provides a glimpse into a world of 'outright chaos' on a path to the end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm."
It continues to say that these climatic-related security threats are almost impossible to quantify as they "fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years."
According to the current trajectory, the report warns that:
"Planetary and human systems [are] reaching a 'point of no return' by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order."
It also suggests that to avoid the risks, we need to focus on developing a zero-emission industrial system to restore a safe climate.
Researchers have warned that the current trajectory is likely to lock in at least 3 Degrees Celsius of global heating. And this temperature rise could trigger adverse amplifying feedback, which could unleash further warming.
This heightening in temperatures would lead to the collapsing of the vital ecosystems, including "coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic," according to the report.
And once this tipping point is reached and the harrowing scenario becomes a reality, researchers believe that there will be an increase in panic and religious fervor.
A permanent shift in the relationship between humankind and nature will also occur.
The report is an addition to other scientific warnings presented to governments to convince them of the potential dangers of climate change and the importance of curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
