It looks like the Extinction Rebellion might be on to something.

A former Australian defence chief and senior royal navy commander have endorsed a terrifying scenario analysis of how human civilisation might fall apart in the next 30 years.

Yeah, the wheels are going to come off at the start of 2050. This is going to put a serious damper on my retirement plans.

The analysis was published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, reports VICE.

It describes “a near- to a mid-term existential threat to human civilisation”, and sets out a plausible scenario that predicts what will happen if we don’t change our attitude towards climate change in the next couple of decades.

The paper argues that the potentially “extremely serious outcomes” of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.”

On our current trajectory, the report warns, “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.”

In other words, the end is nigh.

The only way to avoid all of this is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization”. Only this time, we focus on rapidly building a zero-emissions industrial system to set in motion the restoration of a safe climate.

The scenario warns that our current trajectory will likely lock in at least 3 degrees Celsius (C) of global heating, which in turn could trigger further amplifying feedbacks unleashing further warming. This would drive the accelerating collapse of key ecosystems “including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic.”

The results would be devastating. Some one billion people would be forced to attempt to relocate from unlivable conditions, and two billion would face scarcity of water supplies. Agriculture would collapse in the sub-tropics, and food production would suffer dramatically worldwide. The internal cohesion of nation-states like the US and China would unravel.

It’s not all apocalyptic, though. A small window of opportunity exists for us to turn things around.

Sadly, that will take global mobilisation, and many of the world’s biggest powers don’t seem too bothered about lending a hand.

[source:vice]