WRAL Techwire Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” –  is a contributor to WRAL TechWire.  He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.” Brain has written several posts recently about the threat of climate change. His exclusive columns written for TechWire are published on Fridays. 

Note to readers: WRAL TechWire would like to hear from you about views expressed by our contributors. Please send email to: info@wraltechwire.com.

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RALEIGH – Last week I wrote an article on the coming collapse of our ecosystem and our civilization:

We have destroyed our ecosystem – now we await the collapse of civilization

The article received a lot of traffic, and reactions were all over the map. Today’s article is for those people who think things aren’t that bad. They say things like:

• “Everything is going to be OK”
• “Civilization is not going to collapse”
• “We are on the road to solving climate change”

To those on this “positive” or “hopium” end of the spectrum, here is something to consider: Things are way, way worse than you think. The reason people can believe that everything is going to be OK is because they have not taken the time to comprehend all the different things that are going wrong simultaneously, nor how seriously these things are going wrong.

Therefore, let’s take a dive into the unfolding catastrophe that climate change is creating for humanity and the planet’s ecosystems.

#1 LOOKING BACK AT THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENTS OF 2016

The first thing to grasp is that humanity is doing nothing of any significance to stop climate change. Humanity continues to burn fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. How do we know this? Think back to the famous “Paris Climate Accords” from 2016. Nearly 200 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed the agreement (only 3 have not). Here is a quick summary of the agreement:

Paris Agreements – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement

“The Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal is to keep the rise in mean global temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and preferably limit the increase to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), recognizing that this would substantially reduce the effects of climate change. Emissions should be reduced as soon as possible and reach net zero by the middle of the 21st century. To stay below 1.5 °C of global warming, emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% by 2030.”

That last sentence is important for two reasons. First, think about what has happened since 2016 in terms of emissions. Given that the agreement started in 2016 and we are now halfway to 2030, we would expect the world’s emissions to have been cut by 25% here in 2023. But this has not happened at all. Instead, emissions hit a record high in 2022 and will likely do the same in 2023:

Carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high in 2022 – https://apnews.com/article/climate-emissions-global-warming-carbon-dioxide-coal-494ef490f16abe381ea2a4107f779670

Second, temperatures have exploded. In 2016, the expectation/hope was that 1.5 degrees C of warming would be the peak, and we might hit it in 2050 or 2100. Instead, we are on track to see 1.5 degrees C of warming this year, in 2023. Back in 2016, such a thing would have been completely unexpected, but now it is our reality:

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE:

Just how bad is climate change? It’s worse than you think, says Doomsday author