Consequences of Climate Change
Understand Physical Realities
Accept and Adapt
Live within Gaia
The consequences of climate change are very hard to predict, for the following reasons.
Decline is an on-going process, not a single event. It gets worse over time.
The impact of the changes will depend on a person’s location. Drought will be the major concern of a farmer at the center of a continent; sea level rise will be the primary worry of a person who lives in a beach-front condominium.
The impact is not spread evenly around the planet. For example, the Arctic is warming more rapidly than temperate zones.
Given these cautionary statements, three publications give us some idea as to what the consequences of climate change may be. They are: The Uninhabitable Earth, Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, and Deep Adaptation.
The Uninhabitable Earth
In the year 2017, David Wallace-Wells published an article entitled The Uninhabitable Earth in the New York Magazine. The article, which went viral, started with the following words,
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Based on the success of the article, Wallace-Wells published a book on the same theme in the year 2019.
Wallace-Wells is not a climate scientist. Nonetheless he has researched the climate change literature in order to summarize our present condition. He says,
Climate science is of course unsettled—that’s what makes it science. Almost all projections are clouded in uncertainty, and we should do our best to view the future through that lens. But the sheer mass of scary science, and the fact that new research almost always revises projections in a scarier direction, is quite bad news.
The organization of the book presents problems. It consists of many pages of bad news to do with sea level rise, freshwater availability, economic decline, physical conflict and many other topics. The information is presented almost randomly; we jump from year to year without much sense of direction. The information would have been more valuable had it been matched with a time line. The message is also diluted by discussions about off-topic issues such as the possibility of alien life, or the Silicon Valley mentality.
Six Degrees
At one degree – the world we are already living in – vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away, and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.
In the year 2007 Mark Lynas wrote the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. He organized the book into six chapters — one for each degree (Celsius) increase in the earth’s temperature over the pre-industrial baseline. Based on his research and reading, he provided a summary of what conditions may be like for each step increase in temperature. His book pulled no punches. He described just how terrible conditions will be as the Earth’s temperature rises. Lynas even compares each degree upwards with a further descent into Dante’s levels of Hell.
The book’s conclusions are based on scientific papers and research, not on internet chatter. He also reviews previous geological epochs to draw parallels with what is going on now.
In 2020 he released a second edition of the book with the expanded title Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.
There is an important difference between the two editions. In the first edition, Chapter 1 predicts what the world will look like with one degree of warming. In the second edition that one degree of warming degree has already happened — it is in the history books. The predictions in the first edition turned out to be quite accurate. For example, Lynas talked about slow-moving hurricanes dumping immense amounts of rain, and the likelihood of massive wildfires in the American west. These events happened.
Lynas goes back three million years to the Pliocene epoch to see if we can learn lessons as to what a 3°C world may look like. At that time CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were in the 360-400 ppm range, slightly below where we are now.
Since it seems plausible that we may be at the 3°C level of temperature increase by the year 2050, some of the following statements that Lynas makes about the world at that temperature are worth consideration.
· The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase to around 500 ppm. At this point it is possible that permafrost will melt, releasing large amounts of methane. (This is the ‘clathrate gun’, described earlier.)
· The Asian summer monsoons that provide water for the crops that feed millions of people are likely to become much more variable, with conditions varying from flood to drought. Many of the rivers that supply the same area, such as the Indus and the Ganges, will have much less water due to the loss of the glaciers in the Himalayas. Throughout the world, food supplies will become precarious.
There will be flooding in the tropical areas of Africa, but severe drought in the sub-tropical areas.
Coastal cities around the world will experience many more hurricanes, and the intensities of those storms will be much greater than now.
The rivers in the Murray-Darling basin in Australia will lose between a quarter and a half of their flow.
The Sahara Desert will creep northwards into Spain, Italy and southern France, the Sahara itself will see more rain and become greener.
The Amazonian rain forest will become a savannah.
Deep Adaptation
In 2018 Professor Jem Bendell published the paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. It is what he describes as an ‘Occasional Paper’, i.e., it has the form of a professional article, but it has not been peer reviewed or published in a professional journal. The article quickly went viral. The following quotation is from the paper’s Abstract.
The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change.
The approach of the paper is to analyse recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies . . .
That synthesis leads to the conclusion that there will be near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of readers . . .
Bendell recognizes that talking about issues such as collapse may lead to a sense of despair and hopelessness. Nevertheless, he believes that we should speak out. He claims that his students, for example, react quite positively to his message. They may not like it, but they do not despair. He says,
In my work with mature students, I have found that inviting them to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression.
Bendell’s agenda has three main components:
Resilience
What do we most value that we want to keep?Relinquishment
What do we need to let go of to not make matters worse?Restoration
What can we bring back to help us recover and thrive?
He emphasizes the need to confront grief, fear, and anxiety about collapse so that we can respond with compassion and creativity rather than denial or panic.
One of the theological themes of this book is ‘Accept and Adapt’. This theme aligns well with Bendell’s advocacy of Resilience and Relinquishment. His proposal for Restoration fits with the theological theme of ‘Live within Gaia’.
Update
At a conference that I attended in September 2025, one of the speakers described how our world is changing.
Sea levels are predicted to rise four feet (about 1.2 meters) before someone born today is likely to die.
There is more carbon dioxide in the air now than at any point in the last 800,000 years.
Global warming contribute to more frequent and violent storms, more drought, more fires, more violence, and 200 million refugees.
More than three distinct species go extinct every day ― about 200 times greater than the natural background rate ― the most rapid rate since the end of the age of dinosaurs.
Animal species populations have diminished by over 2/3 in the last 50 years. Much of the remaining megafauna is composed of domesticated animals raised for food.
The world will produce about 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage this year ― most of which is compostable or recyclable.
Air pollution contributes to approximately 1 of every 10 deaths of worldwide.
Human beings use resources at about 1½ times the rate at which the Earth produces them. (The rate is four times in the United States.)
Information such as this reinforces the messages of the books just described.
