If I had to say one thing to one person, I would say by the end of the century
if we do not take action on climate change the damage from climate change
will surpass twice as much as all the wealth that exists in the world today.
My book, "The Uninhabitable Earth", is a sort of big picture look at climate change
and where we are and where we're headed. Not just what the science is
telling us but what it will mean for the way we live on this planet.
Because scientists have often talked about 2 degrees celsius of warming
as the threshold of catastrophe.
It's meant that most of the public didn't appreciate
that that threshold two degrees was really a floor of warming rather than a ceiling.
We're now on track to up for about 4 to 4.3 degrees celsius warming
by the end of the century.
And yet we had very done very little storytelling about what that would mean
to be anywhere between 2 and 4.3 degrees, so my book is focused on that question.
It's just to give you a sense of what that would mean conventional wisdom would suggest that
at 4 degrees we will have hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
We will have a global GDP that's about 30% lower than it would be without climate change.
We would have places in the world that would be hit
simultaneously by 6 climate change disasters at once.
We would have lost all of the world's ice that would happen over centuries.
But it would've been baked in by the end of the century which would mean eventually
seas could be 260ft higher, and this is a truly, truly catastrophic portrait of what life
on the planet would be like–and that is where we're headed now.
I mean, I'm scared, honestly, of what the present holds.
I mean when you see, you know,
what happened in 2018–the global heatwave, unprecedented heat wave,
all of the hurricanes, all of the wildfires,
more than a million acres in California burning.
If we get to 4.3 degrees at the end of the century, we're likely to see 64 times more
acres being burned in California than were burned last year
in the record-setting season.
But even now that damage is devastating, horrifying.
Right now, in Australia, we're seeing simultaneously they're dealing with
epic flooding and an epic heatwave where people are dying and the crops are failing.
We're already in this future. We just haven't adjusted our sense of
the world and what it contains yet because people feel like, if I'm eating less meat,
or if I'm taking a few flights–fewer a year–that I've done
my part, but in fact that impact is so trivial compared to the impact that
transformed politics can have and that's really what we need to be focusing on.
Keep in mind that when you think about the scale of these impacts which are
truly dramatic, truly enormous,
really those are reflections of how much power we, as humanity,
have over the climate.
So these are not outcomes that are already inevitable, and the fact that
they are possible is a sign of just how much control we actually have
over the future of the planet.
If we wanted to avert all these outcomes right now
and we collectively mobilized and decided
that we're gonna devote ourselves to that action as, you know, as a planet,
we could do that easily. The UN says that just by 2050, we're likely to have
200 million climate refugees and that we could have as many as
1 billion climate refugees which is as many people as live in North and South America combined today.
I think those numbers are a bit inflated but even if you take
the very low end, you see from what happened in Europe and the aftermath of the Syrian civil war
and the Syrian refugee crisis, that the influx of just 1 million refugees
completely transformed an entire continent's politics,
and through that, the global geopolitics. It seems hard to believe from this vantage that
if we get to 4 or 5 degrees Celsius of warming, that there'll still be
people who are happily married, and having kids, and excited about the future.
But, inevitably, it will be the case.
It may also just be the case that parts of
the many big parts of the planet will be uninhabitable and we'll be dealing with
huge refugee crises. But we've passed through harsh shows before and I
think that humanity will endure. The question is in what form and how
civilization will be reshaped by these forces