I’d like to share with you an idea that occurred to me today regarding the climate crisis:

Humanity conquered the Earth before we knew what to do with it. We’re the chief executive of a world we don’t really understand, taking on a responsibility we didn’t earn, and we refuse to see a need for change before it’s too late.

Humanity is George W. Bush.

The question now becomes: are we on the verge of global collapse—the point at which rising temperatures would create a self-feeding, self-perpetuating loop that would cause catastrophic upheavals regardless of any actions we take?

[1] Jorgen Randers, co-author of the groundbreaking environmental wake-up call [2] Limits to Growth, recently published an article in the magazine [3] ScienceDirect which looks at the data and attempts to answer that question scientifically.

Abstract

This paper seeks to answer the following question: Is it possible that the slow societal response to the emerging climate crisis may result in ‘‘global collapse’’—that is, a situation were global society first exceeds the sustainable rate of greenhouse gas emissions, and then experiences a sudden, unwanted, and unstoppable decline in the average welfare of hundreds of millions of its citizens?

Certainly, global collapse can be avoided if society decides to act in time, and even at a reasonable cost. Still, global collapse is a possibility in the 21st century, because of the numerous good reasons to postpone societal response, because of the inertia in the climate system, and because there exist self-reinforcing mechanisms that may lead to runaway temperature increase once certain thresholds are surpassed.

The paper argues, finally, that climate-induced global collapse, even if it did indeed occur, would not necessarily be described by future historians as such. The collapse could well be reported as a case of bad global management.

Global collapse could remain fiction, even if it proved to be fact.

© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The paper in its entirety can be found in the December 2008 issue of the journal Futures. [4] Go to ScienceDirect to purchase the full text of the paper.