Doom and gloom

The end days are upon us. OK, that was just for effect, but it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say the end decades are upon us. And in the context of the 100,000 to 200,000 years that homo sapiens has walked the earth, what are eight or nine decades? A mere tick of the geologic clock.

My forecast is not a religious prophecy, as such forecasts usually are. The Second Coming and Judgment Day have nothing to do with it. Nor am I predicting the end of the planet or all life on it. What I foresee is the decimation of human life, the end of prosperity everywhere, and a dire focus on survival that will beget civil unrest and wars around the globe. Just that. It’s a conclusion based on an eyes-wide-open look into the future using what I know about the social history of our species.

Four grim realities are entwining to shape our future. They are weaving an inescapable net around us. The first of these is climate change. The fraction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is growing relentlessly. CO₂ recently passed the 400 parts per million mark. We’re on track to reach 1,000 ppm by the end of the century. That will make the world 3.2 to 5.4 degrees Celsius warmer than it was when the Industrial Revolution began. It’s enough to bring on extreme heat waves, cause food stocks to plummet, kill off ecosystems, reduce biodiversity, put coastal regions under water, and cause massive dislocations in population.

The second reality is what we’ve referred to for years as the “population bomb.” I suppose Paul Ehrlich coined the term to call attention to another kind of bomb that is every bit as worrisome as the thermonuclear kind. There are 7 billion of us now, and we’re on track to hit 16 billion by the end of the century. Obviously, the extra 9 billion will want to eat on a regular basis. How can that happen in a world beset by floods, drought, and all manner of freaky weather? Well, even though grains will be hard to come by, at least we’ll have plenty of meat, right? Probably not. It’s hard to imagine the mass butchery of cattle, hogs, and poultry at more than twice the current rate, and besides, don’t those animals also eat grains? Maybe we could all become big fish eaters. No, that’s improbable, too. U.N. experts predict that our oceans will be fished out in less than 40 years.

The third reality is what I call the Wreck-It Ralph Principle. It holds that the power to destroy is just as important to nations as the power to create. The latter begets national pride and the respect of our neighbors. The former begets intimidation and caution among our neighbors. Any nation with pretensions to greatness must flaunt both to be taken seriously. This principle explains a great deal: why the proliferation of WMDs is unstoppable, why terrorist groups want nuclear weapons above all, why networks are hacked and computer viruses are spread, why space weapons will propagate and computer-controlled infrastructure will be targeted. It’s alarmingly reminiscent of the beginning of World War I, when Europe was armed to the teeth and ready for any threat to light the fuse. What about a planet teeming with people, many of them starving and beset by a continual string of natural disasters while economic chaos grows around them? How’s that for a fuse?

The fourth reality is the clincher. It’s the inability of humankind to cooperate globally for the common good. If this weren’t true, the U.N. wouldn’t be a charade. We’d have an international treaty to mitigate CO₂ production and fund research on CO₂ sequestration. We’d have another treaty to establish thousands of family planning clinics that operate under uniform guidelines. We’d have a U.N. Charter that pledged military intervention against any nation that planned to acquire WMDs. In short, we’d have genuine international controls to protect against the biggest threats to our survival. But we’re so far short of these goals that we can only shake our heads and wince at our naivete.

In fact, we are actually slogging through an era of less cooperation. Take the United States for openers. The so-called “leader of the free world” is riven. A second civil war, albeit a cold one, is underway. It’s a war in which imbecility has become respectable. On the subject of climate change, James Imhofe, chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, brings a snowball on to the Senate floor to demonstrate that global warming is a hoax. On family planning, most Republicans urge cuts in Planned Parenthood because of the advice they offer for avoiding and terminating pregnancies. They likewise support businesses who cite religious scruples and exclude the cost of contraception from their health insurance plans. On foreign policy, a grotesque military budget continues to grow, and a contingent of Republicans promotes American intervention nearly everywhere in the Middle East.

In Europe, cooperation is eroding:

• NATO has all but announced it is not a counter-terrorist force. Western Europe, enjoying the cover of America’s military bases and nuclear umbrella, projects no military strength. The trade sanctions imposed against Russia have some teeth, but it’s hard to imagine that Germany isn’t cheating. Economically, they have too much at stake.

• The European Union (EU) looks earnest in its efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions, but it relies too heavily on biofuels to meet its goals. Meanwhile, member nations are uncoordinated in their plans to generate electricity. France alone relies on nuclear energy as a primary source of electrical power, as the rest of Europe pays a high price for an immoderate reaction to the Fukushima nuclear fiasco in 2011. Instead of learning how to make a clean technology safer—by building thorium reactors, for instance—second- and third-best solutions are in favor. Meanwhile, the Euro Zone is faltering under the unrealistic demands of German creditors, and a consensus is building in Great Britain to leave the EU.

Elsewhere, the ugliness of nationalism and sectarianism lives on. Russia has revived the swaggering and suppression that marked the Soviet era. They see cooperation with the West as a kind of cringing subservience. China belligerently pursues its goal of Asian domination by building military bases on disputed territory in the South China Sea. A party tabloid declares that if the U.S. interferes on behalf its allies—Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines—war is inevitable. Iran is saying clearly that inspections of its military facilities can never be part of an agreement to curtail uranium enrichment. In effect, their negotiating position was never serious. And the de facto nation of ISIS is showing its weakling enemies that it will be making mischief for a very long time.

Can the civilized world survive this witches’ brew? Many say yes. They point out that humankind has after all survived plagues, famines, and horrific wars, only to grow and prosper. Their model of the future is in theaters right now, in the Disney film Tomorrowland. I say no. There are no precedents for the challenges that will build to a crescendo later in this century. Our non-Disney future was foretold 120 years ago, when H. G. Welles wrote The Time Machine. It tells of a world so devastated that the human species fractures into two races, the Morlocks and the Eloi.

Worth a thousand words

Last Tuesday on the New York Times website, I saw the picture shown above. I’ll call it simply Survivors. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a comparable picture. One that comes to mind is the famous picture known as Napalm Girl, which shows a naked Vietnamese girl and other hysterical children running away from a napalm bombing [see]. Both pictures are about horror and flight, but Survivors, while less jolting, is deeper in its grimness.

A few things jump out in Survivors. First, there’s the devastation all around the fleeing pair (a woman and her daughter, I assume): standing water, wreckage, bent and torn trees. Typhoon Haiyan was indeed a monster. Then I see the bandana covering the woman’s nose and mouth, and the girl covering her nose with her hand. The stench of death must be horrible. What is the woman carrying? A statuette of Jesus, apparently her most treasured possession. It’s stunningly ironic: devastation and death surround her; her husband is elsewhere and perhaps among the dead; her home and other possessions are gone, save for her earrings, a Calvin Klein pullover, and a sporty windbreaker; hunger and possibly disease lie ahead. Yet idolatry remains at the center of her life. The entire image is a testament to unshakeable faith.

Not directly in evidence is the villain behind this scene. It would be easy to say that it’s Typhoon Haiyan if it weren’t for the fact that the second most powerful storm to strike the Philippines, Typhoon Bopha, occurred less than a year ago. So perhaps the real villain isn’t the storms themselves but the dynamic in the world’s climate that has jacked up the temperature of our oceans—what we call “global warming” or, more recently, “climate change.” That phenomenon also gave us Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. It’s also generating severe thunderstorms with increasing CAPE (convective available potential energy) and wind shear, the makers of tornadoes. A recent study predicts that by the end of the century, climate change will increase severe thunderstorms in the eastern U.S. by 40%. [source] How many EF5 tornadoes will that bring us?

The problem with this analysis is that it’s completely impersonal. Climate change didn’t create itself; people created it. More specifically, the users of carbon-based fuels in the industrialized nations created it. So when I look at Survivors, I see a poor people whose country is being ravaged by the wealthy people of the world. More than that, though, I see insanity. Everyone’s a loser, because the ravagers are also ravaging themselves.