A modern doomsday leader has risen to prominence via a climate change article that has been shared extensively across the globe.

British Professor, Jem Bendell (below), unwittingly took on this role when she shared her paper, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, online. The piece is now one of the key resources used by ‘climate doomers’ to back up theories about “the inevitability of societal collapse” due to climate change.

The unconventional paper was denied publication by a peer-reviewed academic journal, who deemed the piece “inappropriate” as an academic resource.

And yet, people were quick to come on board and take it to heart.

BBC notes that one of these ‘climate doomers’, Rachel Ingrams, is a firm believer in Bendell’s predictions and is attempting to prepare her children for a dystopian, nightmarish future:

“I don’t think what they’re learning in school is the right stuff any more, given what we’re facing. They need to be learning permaculture [self-sufficient agriculture] and other stuff, ancient stuff that we’ve forgotten how to do. We just go to Tesco”.

Rachel explains how, a year ago, she came across a video of Bendell on social media and it changed her life:

“As soon as I saw it, everything seemed to make sense in a terrifying way. It felt like a bolt from the blue: ‘We’re all going to die.’ I felt it in my bones that we are at the beginning of the end”.

The 45-year-old has also been planning for the future by way of a well-stocked vegetable garden and a greenhouse. Rachel says that she doesn’t think humans have more than 10 years before society falls apart.

Rachel is not the only one. Since Bendell shared the piece, it has been download over 500 000 times and co-opted as an important text for what’s being called the ‘Deep Adaptation movement’.

Respected climate scientists, however, are not thrilled with Bendell’s terrifying predictions. Bendell describes that, in her vision of the earth’s future, “You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death”.

Professor Michael Mann has dismissed Bendell’s work as “pseudo-scientific nonsense”.

“To me, the Bendell paper is a perfect storm of misguidedness and wrongheadedness. It is wrong on the science and its impacts. There is no credible evidence that we face ‘inevitable near-term collapse'”.

The renowned climate scientist also warns that the stance taken by Bendell and the Deep Adaptation crew is potentially as “disabling” as climate change denial as both could lead citizens down a road of inaction.

Oxford University Professor of Geosystem Science, Myles Allen, agrees with Mann’s analysis:

“Predictions of societal collapse in the next few years as a result of climate change seem very far-fetched. So far, the system’s responded to greenhouse gas emissions almost exactly as predicted. So to say it’s about to change and become much worse is speculation.

Honestly this kind of material is at the level of science of the anti-vax campaign,” says the Prof.

While many are claiming that it really is too late, it seems that scientists beg to differ.

If you’re reading this in your permaculture bunker: it looks like you can emerge for the time being.

Don’t give up just yet.

[source:bbc]