BREAKING: world's scientists show that without immediate, total system change the activities of the global growth economy will lead us to mass death and extinctions by around 2045
🧵 1. It's not too late to totally change the global system hurtling us into mass extinction (as >20,000 scientists warn) by rapidly expanding the growing movement for a postgrowth economy to avoid a dead world of ruined habitats, but media remain silent.ecowatch.com/warning-to-hum…
2. 10%-20% of plants, insects, fish, birds, and mammals face extinction at 1.6-2°C due to abrupt climate change, but more species are also threatened by the habitat destruction & pollution of the global growth-inequality economy.
'2C somewhere between the early 2040s and early 2050s' (realistic projections); 2032-2039 possible.carbonbrief.org/analysis-what-…
4. Mass death of species has already begun at 1C-1.4C of warming, and will become far worse. It's painful to acknowledge this, but more painful and damaging to deny it or remain silent.
Not mentioning climate change until paragraph 17: typical downplaying.cbc.ca/radio/thecurre…
5. Billions of children, women, and men, especially in the Global South, oppressed & exploited by poverty, face atrocious dangers in the 2020s/30s and beyond. We must and can have total change to protect everyone.
6. IUCN: 20% of species in danger of extinction in 2020s-40s; scientifically undeniable we're on path of 6th major extinction frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
'western, white and elitist framing of reality' 'centuries of European colonization and fossil capitalism'frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
7. Mass mortality events have been becoming more frequent and increasing in magnitude for decades.
We must acknowledge mass deaths of the very recent past, present, and the near future at 1.6-2C to limit damage.
8. State-corporate media unsurprisingly ignore the fact that the whole global economy must be totally changed as this would threaten profits and extreme wealth. Abrupt climate change is a staggering threat, but the entire system must change for survival:
9. The US, Canada, and Russia are major food producers, as well as being the countries with most of the Northern Hemispheres permafrost which is beginning to thaw.
10. A rapid, postgrowth, political-economic-system-change transition to tackle utterly unsustainable overconsumption by the ultra-wealthy/affluent is possible. We must be informed why this is necessary, though. It means breaking media silence.
11. A 1998 American Museum of Natural History poll found 70% of 400 biology experts agreed Earth is in one of its fastest mass extinctions threating humans and 20%-50% of species by 2027:
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..'
* hard/impossible to survive
* hard/impossible to prevent
* likely by 2069-2092
* plausible by 2045
* just one of many existential threats that mean a total rethink of economic growth is mandatory to protect species and everyone
Journalists:
Capitalism has set up the early deaths of billions of people.
Has capitalism left it too late to avoid unsurvivable 2/2.5°C of global warming and rising?
Yes.
Has the scientific community issued major consensus reports indicating only political-economic systems changes may end biodiversity destruction and limit abrupt climate chaos?