Climate Change Is More Dangerous Than You Think

It’s common for people to weigh climate change as one of many equally-important factors for our government to prioritize — a mere subset of the global economy.

But in the coming years, climate change will not just be a mere pawn in the grand chessboard of politics — it will be the bishop, the knight, the rook, and the queen.

Climate change is a much bigger issue than you may realize. Here are nine reasons why:

1) Death Toll.

Hardly ever will you hear the mainstream media mention this devastating fact: already — as we speak — climate change is killing around 400,000 people every single year. That’s a death rate of over a thousand people a day.

The 2015 heat waves in India were so deadly that the pavement literally melted.

2) Economic Effects.

A 2017 study found that climate change and air pollution from fossil fuel consumption are directly responsible for a loss of $240 billion every year to the United States economy alone. Some researchers even project that global GDP per capita in 2100 will be tens of trillions of dollars lower than it otherwise would be if there weren’t climate change.

Addressing climate change isn’t just a humanitarian pursuit — it’s an economic necessity.

3) Climate Refugee Crises.

Compounding the economic harm of climate change is the accelerating number of refugee crises that higher temperatures will spark.

In Bangladesh, rising seas are set to permanently displace over 18 million Bangladeshis from their homelands by 2050, an exodus that analysts are referring to as “a migration the size of which the world has never before seen.”

These millions of climate refugees will flock primarily into Dhaka, which is already one of the world’s most impoverished and overcrowded megacities — a deadly prescription for mass poverty and urban chaos.

Deadly floods in Bangladesh last August, which killed 1,200 people.

Just as dire is the situation that will be faced by those living in the Middle East and North Africa. The region — which is home to over 300 million people — is set to become literally uninhabitable in the coming decades, with temperatures so hot that “the very existence of its inhabitants is in jeopardy.”

The West has already demonstrated that it is unprepared to deal with refugee crises of a few million people. Imagine what will happen when the number of those seeking asylum skyrockets to the tens or even hundreds of millions.

4) Water Shortage.

We already live in a world where one billion people lack access to potable water. The epicenter of this crisis is in Yemen, where a devastating drought has led to over one million cases of cholera and over 2,000 deaths, something the U.N. said is likely “the world’s worst humanitarian disaster for 50 years.”

South Africa is also dealing with a potentially deadly epidemic of water shortage. Cape Town, a city of over three million people, is preparing to literally run out of water on July 9 of this year — an apocalyptic event that is already being referred to as “Day Zero.” If water becomes inaccessible for less affluent residents of the city, dehydration and death could ensue.

A queue for water in Cape Town in January.

But if you thought that was bad, it might get even worse in the coming years. By 2050, water demand worldwide is projected to rise by 55%. Meanwhile, reserves of freshwater are quickly drying up.

While not every corner of the world would be affected by this disparity between water supply and water demand, it’s not hard to foresee the misery and chaos that this would spark in certain areas.

5) Food Shortage.

By 2050, it is expected that food demand will increase by over 50%. At the same time, due to the desertification and aridification of the world’s land, experts project that our global food supply will decrease by 2% every ten years.

This means that, for food supply to keep up with food demand, we’d need to increase our agricultural yield-per-acre by over 50% by 2050. While it’s true that genetic modification and improved agricultural efficiency have promising outlooks, increasing yield by 50% in such a short period of time seems to be a quite difficult task, especially since failure to succeed could mean widespread hunger and even a spike in death rates in developing nations.

Images of arid farmland from the film, “California: Paradise Burning”

Many people don’t seem to understand how serious this actually might be. I’m not talking about a yearlong famine in a small geographic region. I’m talking about potentially not having enough food for billions of people for an extended period of time.

You’d think that the potential for billions of additional people to be unable to put food on the table — and the death, starvation, collapsed economies, and failed states such a phenomenon would produce — would be covered nonstop by the media. But worryingly, what may be the most devastating humanitarian crisis of the 21st century is last thing from any of our minds.

6) Threats to National Security.

The aforementioned risk of food shortages won’t only result in death and economic chaos — it may also lead to violence. Some analysts are even projecting that the next world war will be fought over food.

Water may also spark threats to national security. As the global water supply dwindles and water demand accelerates, wars over water are set to break out across the Middle East as the region becomes hotter and drier.

This isn’t based on speculation — almost every time that severe water shortages occur, violent conflicts break out. Remember the Yemeni water crisis I mentioned earlier? According to a 2016 study, the water crisis in Yemen causes 4,000 people to die every year due to “violent disputes over water rights.”

Boy pushing a wheelbarrow of water jugs in Yemen.

Cape Town is facing a similar predicament. The water shortage there has led to the rise of criminal gangs that are stockpiling tanks of water to sell at high prices once Day Zero hits.

7) Extinction.

Largely as a result of climate change, we are already experiencing the early stages of our planet’s sixth mass extinction, devastating the fine-tuned symbiosis of our planet’s biodiversity.

In addition to disrupting natural ecosystems, mass extinction will also threaten humans. If several major keystone species like bees, turtles, and coral go extinct, it could trigger a runaway ecological collapse, in which the extinction of these species could lead to the extinction of many other species, a chain reaction that could trickle up to mankind in the long term.

Partially as a result of this phenomenon, a recent study ominously found there to be a 5% chance that climate change will be “catastrophic” or “existential” to human survival by the end of the century.

8) Ocean Acidification.

One of the most underreported and catastrophic effects of our fossil fuel emissions is ocean acidification. While about half of the carbon dioxide we emit is captured in the atmosphere, another 26% of it goes directly into the seas.

This makes our oceans anoxic, depletes the oxygen of our planet, destroys coral reefs, and dissolves the shells and skeletons that are integral to the survival of fish, stifling the global fishing economy and destroying oceanic ecosystems.

Large sections of the Great Barrier Reef are dead, and 93% of it is bleached.

9) Positive Feedback Loops.

If you thought those first eight points were bad, here’s most terrifying part of them all: climate change positive feedback loops will make all of these problems significantly worse.

One of the most significant climate change positive feedback loops is something called a “decreased albedo effect.” As more ice melts, there will be less reflection of the sun’s heat energy back into the atmosphere. This allows our oceans to absorb more heat, igniting rises in global temperature.

Melting ice may also release large amounts of methane when the clathrates in permafrost and “fire ice” thaw. If too much methane from these clathrates is released, it could rapidly enhance the greenhouse effect, a phenomenon that some scientists project could even lead us to a “point of no return.”

Other climate change positive feedback loops include increased fires, increased desertification, warmer soils, reductions in ocean circulation, and increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Each of these have the potential to greatly amplify the greenhouse effect.

In the end, it’s quite possible that positive feedback loops will make climate change a lot worse than most people are currently realizing.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Climate change is not just one of many priorities. It may very well be the defining issue of our time.