The world’s largest sources of freshwater will be severely depleted by 2029, with catastrophic consequences for all of humanity.
[THREAD]
Timebomb:
Regions most sensitive to changes in climate include humid and wet areas, such as the Amazon, Indonesia and parts of central Africa. In some of these areas, it could take *less* than 10 years for climate change to fully impact groundwater flows. carbonbrief.org/climate-change…
Groundwater response times:
The map below:
Yellow shows areas where groundwater is likely to fully respond to stresses in under 10 years. ⚠️
Light green shows where the response time is 10-100 years.
Areas with the shortest groundwater response times include wet, humid regions: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Indonesia, and low-lying regions, such as the Asian mega-deltas and the Florida Everglades.
2 billion living with absolute water scarcity by 2025👇
Most over-stressed is the Arabian Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people in Saudi Arabia & Yemen; the Indus Basin aquifer in northwest India & Pakistan is the second-most threatened; the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa the third. nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/07/w…
Today:
🔺1.9 billion people live in countries facing extremely high water stress
e.g India, Pakistan, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE
🔺Another 2.5 billion people face high levels of water stress
The likelihood of conflict:
'most regions of the world face significant hydropolitical vulnerabilities that, in a number of hot-spot basins, may turn into serious water conflict in the decades to come'
COLLAPSING: scientists indicate civilisation-wrecking conditions are already developing as rapid mass extinction accelerates with billions set to be killed from 2029- 2048🧵
Current generic extinction rates likely to greatly accelerate in coming decades due to economic growth & overconsumption by the rich.
Economic activities during capitalism are destroying the conditions that make human life possible. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… salon.com/2023/09/19/exp…
Plastic contamination will soon be "catastrophic" for human health and is slowly "killing the human race"
more cancer, more allergic diseases, more infertility
DOOM: majority of scientists think difficult-or-impossible-to-survive warming of 1.9-2.1°C and rising is now unavoidable and set to begin wiping out species within years 🧵
1. 'New assessment warns area the size of the USA will become too hot during extreme heat events for even healthy young humans to maintain a safe body temperature if we hit 2°C' kcl.ac.uk/news/half-a-de…
2. Even before new research confirming warming is accelerating, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists fully expected ~2°C (in most cases much more).
COLLAPSE: scientists indicate all aspects of human societies will be wrecked by 2029-2092 as habitat destruction and pollution intensify with unsurvivable accelerating warming of 1.95-2.15°C and rising now unavoidable even with capitalism's best-case emissions reductions 🧵
"The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise”.. global heating is likely to reach 2C by 2045 dumptheguardian.com/environment/20…
The economy is a heat engine.
How will it cool the planet?
Collapse is already here.
Time to rethink. 🧵
1.
Economic growth: the engine of collapse
The hope is that, with astute academic guidance and sufficiently powerful doses of political will, we can safely navigate our way through the Anthropocene.
But there are physical limits to what is possible.
2.
To get a sense of any physical limits, it helps to look at how physical systems function. A useful concept here is a thermodynamic “heat engine”... available energy powers cyclical motions thereby enabling “work’’ to be done to move something else while giving off waste heat.
COLLAPSE: there is a very high likelihood that capitalism has condemned 2 to 7 billion people to an early death by 2038-2058. 🧵
1.
'a very high likelihood of 2.0 °C of regional warming by 2040 for the majority of regions, along with a likelihood of 3 °C by mid-century' iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…
2.
Report fr risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries:
'At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states..'