The End of Civilization

People still think of the true catastrophe of global warming as being decades away.  I fear they may be cataclysmically wrong.

These people see the threats of global warming in desertification of agricultural areas like the Southern great plains, loss of coastland due to ocean levels rising, or more and more destructive weather events.  They may well be overlooking a far more serious, and far more immediate threat, which goes by the name of "wet-bulb temperature."  Wet-bulb temperature is a measure of the combined effects of temperature and humidity.  A wet-bulb temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit is on the threshold of being lethal to huge swathes of humanity.  And that is what we are approaching now in many areas.

I have compiled the following map.  I am not a meteorologist, so it is prepared from the works of others, but it shows countries around the globe where very little more warming will be needed to render large parts of their territory uninhabitable.

I repeat again that I am not an expert, but when I first wrote about this problem in 2015, I estimated that there were about 450 million people in the affected area in North Africa, the Middle East and Eastward into Pakistan and India.  That has now grown to probably around 600 million or more.  In addition, there may be 200 million in a similar at risk area in the Western Hemisphere, reaching from Southern Mexico well into South America.

Consider the fact that about 20 million people were displaced by the Syrian Civil war, and that was enough to cause a frightening resurgence in race hatred and right wing politics in many parts of Europe, an area that should know better than to give in to that sort of thing.  Imagine that number of refugees being increased by ten times, as a result of lethal climate changes.  And imagine it happening in the next decade.  This would likely produce a total breakdown of democratic government in large parts of Europe, giving way to the kind of violent, vicious dictatorship that we associate with the Nazis.

Now imagine that, instead of a few million people trying to cross the southern border of the United States, that number swelled to 100 or 150 million, people fleeing certain death back home, and who will therefore never be persuaded to return to where they came from.  We already see Southern States like Texas and Florida sinking into open fascism, with nativist hatred of Hispanics being a strong driving force.  The result of this climate migration will almost certainly be the destruction of the United States, with the expected Southern areas breaking off to form violent dictatorships which the rest of us will have to deal with, in what could be a virtually endless state of war.

Well, that is the price that the world is  likely to pay for continuing to coddle the greed of the hyper-rich, which is causing this to happen, and for allowing them to go on plundering our planet without check.  I honestly see little hope of averting this catastrophe, which has been hiding in plain sight, while people who try to speak the truth are endlessly shouted down by synthetically generated hatred.