Outgoing director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) believes mankind, through its activities, is headed for a “mass extinction” and an anthropogenic calamity comparable to a geological scale asteroid hit.

Outgoing Potsdam Institute director Hans-Joachim “John” Schellnhuber tells German national daily that mankind has run out of time and faces “mass extinction” and calamity of geological proportions. Photo: PNAS.

In an online article titled Climate Change Like An Asteroid Strike appearing in Germany’s online national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), journalist Alex Rühle reports on the outgoing director of Germany’s alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Prof. Hans-Joachim “John” Schellnhuber.

Prof. Schellnhuber, widely known in Germany as the Climate Pope, is considered in Europe as the leading climate science authority and the architect of the Master Planfor transforming global society – dubbed The Great Transformation – which aims to make global society climate compatible through draconian, almost surrealistic measures. Moreover the plan calls for all of it to happen in just a matter of a couple of decades.

A number of critics have called the whole idea detached from economic reality and dystopian.

Risks mounting “by the hour”

Schellnhuber is also the father of the “2°C climate target”, a warming that the world must never exceed, he claims, lest it’ll tip hopelessly into a state rapid, irreversible climatic collapse.

The SZ article reports how the outgoing Schellnhuber believes the planet is in fact approaching the climatic catastrophe at “a crazy speed” and that the risks “are mounting quasi by the hour”.

The alarmist Potsdam Institute professor has been known for a number of shrill comments made in the past, but in this most recent SZ article, Schellnhuber shrillness arguably reaches a whole new level that goes beyond the realms of reason.

Rapid epic disaster of geologic dimensions

Now that Schellnhuber is stepping down as director of the Potsdam Institute after 25 years as its director, he reflects back, telling the SZ how he feels about the overall “disinterest with regards to the consequences of climate change” that has swept across the public.

In Schellnhuber’s view, world leaders are moving far too sluggishly to avert what he sees as a climatic disaster of epic geological proposrtions, and compares them earlier geological calamities that the earth witnessed tens of millions of years ago.

100 times faster than Permian–Triassic extinction event

Schellnhuber tells the SZ that the globe’s temperature today is rising at a rate of 5°C per century! – or “100 times faster than during the time of the Permian–Triassic extinction event” which occurred some 250 million years ago and is believed to have wiped out 90% of all land life on the planet at the time.

According to Rühle, Schellnhuber compares today’s climate change to the “largest mass extinctions in the history of the earth.”

Comparable to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event!

If one mass extinction event were not enough to illustrate what in Schellnhuber’s mind is climatically in store for humanity, the former PIK director piles on yet another geological catastrophe to describe the course on which man has put the planet on. He tells the SZ:

What man is doing today, is similar to to the asteroid strike known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.”

According to the SZ, Schellnhuber says, “We’ve shirked our responsibility much too long”. He then compares the situation to a sinking ship that urgently demands top priority.

If we don’t get climate change under control, and if we can no longer keep the ship afloat, then we won’t need to think about distribution of income, racism and good taste any longer.”

Luckilly Schellnhuber’s dire claims are very much in dispute and considered outliers. If anything is certain, Schellnhuber is definitely not leaving his post a minute too early.