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New research from the National Academy of the Sciences shows that the human cost of global climate change will likely hit sooner, and harder, than previously anticipated. According to this research, in as little as fifty years, over a billion people could be living in unbearable heat. A nightmare scenario of the future could involve humans struggling for survival, subsisting on MRE survival food kit meals.
Even under ideal circumstances, the research predicts that, by 2070, as many as 1.2 billion people could be living outside of the “comfortable climate” that most people currently inhabit. Under runaway, worst-case scenario circumstances, over one billion people could inhabit an area as hot as the Sahara Desert.
The study’s finding came as a major shock to its own authors. Most climate scientists have been warning of the dire consequences of unchecked climate change for decades. However, most have never predicted changes this dramatic, this soon, and this severe.
“The numbers are flabbergasting. I literally did a double take when I first saw them,” stated Tim Lenton, one of the study’s authors. “I’ve previously studied climate tipping points, which are usually considered apocalyptic. But this hit home harder. This puts the threat in very human terms.”
This paper specifically focused on the human impacts of the climate crisis. Prior research in the field has tended to focus on the economic or meteorological realities of climate change. The study, by putting things in very human terms, could make more people come face-to-face with the near future humanity could be moving towards.
Despite being the dominant lifeform on the Earth, Humans are surprisingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This is because we need to live on land masses, and land heats up much more quickly than water. Likewise, much of our food is derived from farming, which requires exact climate conditions that are predictable.
What’s more, the majority of population growth in the next fifty years will likely occur in Africa and Asia. These regions are already quite warm, and further warming of the planet could make these areas unbearably hot for humans.
In these projections, areas like India, Sudan and Indonesia face massive challenges. Migration from these extremely hot areas and the issue of so much former farming land becoming unusable could be catastrophic. Making moves now to ease these tensions when they may arise could save millions, if not billions, of live in the not-so-distant future.
