Last Updated 1.16.23

Force Our Politicians to Get Governments to ACT on Honest global Fossil Fuel Reduction Targets

Individuals who choose this option see this as our last, honest, and effective way to save humanity. 

As more individuals, groups, and notably the wealthiest 1% of individuals worldwide realize they are fighting for their survival, maybe our politicians and governments will listen to them before it is too late. Perhaps our politicians and governments will eventually mobilize (these critical and practical actions) and enforce the drastic global fossil fuel reductions needed. 

Many individuals who have made this choice realize that anyone who understands what is coming would NOT want to survive through the coming climate mega-catastrophes. The suffering, financial loss, and death as runaway global heating accelerates will be unbearable! 

Because they understand the global heating future, they see no other choice other than to go all-in and ensure our politicians and governments bring this emergency under control.

Our organization honors the courage and sacrifice of all individuals who choose this first Option 1. 

If you are one of these individuals, click here for a new way we have found to get our politicians and governments to save the future from climate change. 

In this article, you can discover the sequenced consequences and the suffering, loss, and trauma that awaits us unless we get our governments to enforce the 2025 global fossil fuel targets.

Click here to see how we can convince the 1% to save us by saving themselves. (People who chose option one often also see the many potential global warming survival benefits of this last-ditch effort.)

Please click here to volunteer at Job One for Humanity and help us fix the climate change extinction nightmare.

Check out the other climate change action choice options below:

Action 2: Start the preparations and adaptations needed 

Action 3: Accept runaway global heating extinction and climate collapse

Action 4: Combine elements from the three strategies

Action 5: Here is what Job One for Humanity has decided 

Most people that hear our governments talking about fossil fuel reduction targets for 2040-2060 have no idea if we fail to make key reductions over the next 3-9 years, humanity is totally screwed! But Why?

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Climate change has passed a critical juncture. Our global warming future is now far easier to understand and can be put in one sentence!

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The nine facts in this article are the facts that most other environmental groups are afraid to tell you. Once you understand them, you will be better prepared for what is happening now and what is coming.

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I recently reported that January 2020 was a record high global temperature increase for the month since fossil fuel industrialization started, that it hit 1.5°C, and that the rate of surface heating has accelerated faster over the past ten years.

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Last Updated 5.8.2023.

The following was produced by the independent and 100% publically funded Job One for Humanity climate change think tank. 

Prologue

A critical part of recovering from our worsening climate change emergency is finally having our governments finally do what is necessary and required to end the crisis. Our governments can still slow and fix runaway global heating if they work together to get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel targets. Please also remember that many, but not all, of the climate consequences are still avoidable and unnecessary.

Not only can our governments still fix our climate nightmare, achieve many surprising benefits, and save a good portion of humanity, we also may be able to bring about a Great Global Rebirth (once we have learned and applied the lessons of our climate tragedy.)

If you have not done so already, click here to see the most read page on our website with over two million views. This page will also help you see the many benefits and a possible Great Global Rebirth that can come into being once our governments and us have made the necessary sacrifices to fix runaway global heating and we have endured the coming climate consequences that we can no longer avoid.

Now that you understand the many payoffs for fixing the runaway global heating extinction emergency, it is time to look at how challenging it will be.

 

Introduction to Part 3 of the Job One for Humanity Plan: Critical  Governmental Actions on the Climate Change Emergency

"As hard as it is to digest, we have wasted six decades in no or ineffective government actions to reduce global fossil fuel use. At this 11th hour, no amount of tree planting, bogus carbon capture schemes, carbon-sequestering, carbon trading, geo-engineering, or other actions other than the direct and immediate radical reduction of global fossil fuel use can save us within the very small amount of time we have left to still control our climate change futures." Lawrence Wollersheim

The following critical action steps can only be effectively enacted by politicians and governments through binding, verifiable, and enforceable national and international agreements. They must also be done and completed with a Manhattan Project-like urgency. (The Manhattan Project was a super-rushed highest priority research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons in about four years. No expense or resource was denied to this highest priority project.)

Without the following actions being done in this style and urgency of a Manhattan-like project or mass mobilization by all the major to mid-range population-sized governments of the world, there is little to no hope we can avoid the extinction of about half of humanity and economic, political, and social chaos by or before mid-century.

 

 

Unfortunately, individual actions to reduce fossil fuel dependency, even if done by hundreds of millions of us, will be far too little and far too late to save the future from endless and increasing runaway global heating catastrophes!

It is now time for the rest of the bad news. Despite the fossil fuel reduction progress you hear touted in the media, the current global heating reductions are not occurring at any level even close to the critical levels that would keep us safe from the extinction of about half of humanity occurring by mid-century.

Hopefully, government-driven actions to slow runaway global heating like those described below will occur in time, in part, because of the courageous extinction warning work of individuals in organizations like:

1. Job One for Humanity 

2. Extinction Rebellion and Green Peace

3. Greta Thunberg,

4. The millions of global school children in the Fridays for the Future monthly walkouts,

5. The Sunrise Movement, and,

5. courageous climate researchers who will not be silenced about the climate extinction emergency even when financially or academically punished or physically intimidated, as well as 

7. the few brave individuals in the world's intelligence agencies who are shouting at bosses to shout at their politicians this is our last chance to avoid a runaway global heating-driven global collapse and near-total extinction event. (Please note that runaway global heating caused near-total human extinction is not total extinction. Nor is near-total extinction the same as our unfortunate and unavoidable current path to the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. This critical difference between the two is that total extinction is highly improbable because of the many natural and human counteractions that will ramp up as runaway global heating consequences worsen. So, if you want to see the good news (which we strongly recommend) about why total human extinction caused by the consequences of runaway global heating is not our future and should not be worried about, please click here.)

These organizations and individuals are demonstrating the courage and persistence to try to convince their national politicians that the accelerating runaway global heating extinction emergency is a no-win game leading to the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. Hopefully, in addition to the organizations and individuals mentioned above, our governments and politicians will eventually act because the 1% ultra-wealthy individuals, corporations, and others whose vast self-interests and assets will incentivize them to use their powerful influence to get our politicians and governments to realize that now (and up until 2025,) is our last effective chance to respond successfully.

If our governments don't act immediately, we will pass through atmospheric carbon tipping points levels that will bring about extinction starting at carbon 425-450 ppm (parts per million.) We will also pass the carbon 500 ppm extinction-accelerating tipping point and carbon 600 ppm beginning of the neat-total extinction tipping point. (These 3 carbon ppm atmospheric tipping point levels caused by the burning of fossil fuels will be explained in detail further below.)

All of the action steps of Part 3 of the Job One plan below are designed to both meet and reflect the most critical and deadline-prioritized legitimate targets we must achieve to resolve our current runaway global heating extinction emergency before it is too late. 

Think about all of the actions below as the necessary hitting of an emergency brake on a train that is just about to go out of control and over a cliff in a real emergency. If we do not hit the emergency brake right now by executing the following action steps that will help ensure we will achieve or come very close to our last chance 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, our current and unavoidable mass extinction event could easily become a near-total extinction event.

To maintain your motivation to complete these new and challenging tasks below, we strongly recommend that you regularly read and re-read this page with the many individual and collective benefits we will receive when we successfully get the runaway global heating under control. It is the most read page on our website with well over 2 million views.

(If by chance, you do not have any realistic or significant influence on your national politicians, there is still plenty you can do at local, regional, and state political levels. (Click here and see Step 1 to learn about those important actions.)

 

If you think current government programs like the Green New Deal or net-zero by 2035, 2040, 2050, etc., can save us, you are in for a massive shock as you learn about what is actually needed to save us.

Executive Summary of the Key Government Action and Recovery Steps That are the Most Urgent to Execute

The following is a brief overview of the critical deadline-prioritized actions that governments must do immediately. These and other key actions are explained in greater detail further below. An extraordinary and unprecedented emergency will always require extraordinary, costly, and unprecedented actions.

The first two actions below are the most urgent and radical deadline prioritized government-enforced action steps we need to complete by 2025 to save at least half of humanity. After the first two actions listed below, the other actions will also need to be done, but we will have more time to complete them as long as we are successful with the first two actions by 2025.

If we fail to get the first two actions done, the later actions after the first two will not save us from near-total extinction. Only by completing the first two steps below does humanity maintain control of its runaway global heating future.

1. Declare a formal national and international climate change and runaway global heating extinction emergency to let the public know that a mass mobilization of humanity's needed resources and great sacrifices by individual citizens are now required to prevent humanity's near-total extinction.

The climate change emergency consists of the many direct, indirect, primary, and secondary consequences of climate change and runaway global heating. But most importantly, to save as much of humanity as possible at this very late stage of the climate battle, we must first set a firm "last stand" atmospheric carbon (C02) limit in parts per million (ppm) limit of carbon 425-450 ppm.

If we go above carbon 450 ppm, we will push the average global temperature above 2 degrees Celsius. After 2 degrees Celsius, there will be no way to stop runaway global warming from crossing many more climate tipping points and feedbacks, which will cause increased global temperature levels of 3, 4, 5, and 6 degrees Celsius. Only a tiny portion of humanity (about 5%-10%) will be able to survive a 3-4-degree Celsius increase, and their lives will be a living hell. 

As of June 2022, we are at about carbon 421 ppm. Average global atmospheric carbon levels are the best way to measure global fossil fuel reduction progress. They are also the best indicator that average global temperatures will go either up or down based on our global carbon levels going up or down.

As you can see below, our worldwide government's last 60 years of efforts to lower carbon in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning have been a total failure!

 

 

2. Enact enforced global rationing for ALL fossil fuel use (oil, gasoline, kerosine, methane, coal, etc.) so that the developed world gets very close to reducing its total fossil fuel use by 75% by 2025.

If we are very fortunate, we may have as long as until 2031 to reach the 75% global reduction target of all fossil fuels for ALL developed countries, including India and China. Only by reducing global fossil fuel use by 75% and not crossing the atmospheric carbon level of 450 parts per million (ppm) can we prevent the later phases of runaway global heating and cascading crossed climate tipping points and feedbacks. If we cross the carbon 450 ppm level, there is no way humanity can stop the near-total extinction of humanity.

Getting this step two done will also require the world's political leaders and nations to create new, verifiable, and enforceable climate laws and treaties to get close to these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets in time to save us from near-total extinction. Without these government-enforced laws to meet the 2025 targets, it will not happen.

After 60 years of international governmental failure in managing the global heating emergency, with the time we have left, only the enforced rationing of all fossil fuels in all nations will work to save some of humanity.

If you have any doubts about either the urgency of the (2025-2031) deadline or the critical importance of why we need to enact enforced fossil fuel rationing (and then work on the rest of the essential governmental actions of Part 3 of the Job One Plan listed below,), please click here and review the ten most important facts about runaway global heating and our destabilizing climate. Also, see the four extinction-accelerating tipping points of our current phase of near-irreversible runaway global heating.

Unfortunately, politicians and nations will also face the horrible Garrett's Climate Dilemma when they do make the needed global fossil fuel cuts. Garrett's Climate Dilemma is the dilemma that demonstrates that to save at least half of humanity through critical global fossil fuel cuts executed now, no matter what we do, the other half of humanity will perish from starvation and the other primary and secondary climate consequences by mid-century. 

That is a horrible climate reality to have to face. Still, the only worse climate change reality is that if we do not do what is necessary to radically reduce global fossil fuel use NOW, 90% to 95% of humanity (or more) will eventually perish. This extinction will happen because of the interaction of the many interconnected climate, ecological, economic, and political processes and consequences (discussed in horrifying detail on this page.) Even worse, post-near-total extinction survivors will live in a hell on earth and forever curse everyone who let this happen.

The world waited too long to fix global warming. The painful climate bill has come due, and our politicians now need to inspire their citizens to endure the great sacrifices now needed to save about half of humanity post-mid-century.

It bears repeating that without the 75% global fossil fuel reductions by 2025 to maybe 2031, enacted through government-enforced fossil fuel rationing, there is little realistic hope that humanity will be able to prevent its near-total extinction. 

 

The following are additional critical actions also to be done by our politicians and governments immediately after steps one and two are done

3. Create a revenue-neutral, Fee and Dividend-based climate change reduction program. This program will help fund the many fossil fuel transition needs, job retraining needs, the huge costs of managed climate change retreat, etc. It will also help to incentivize the new desired non-fossil fuel-dependent behaviors immediately. 

The Fee and Dividend program will not fund all fossil fuel transition needs. Other needed sources of funding for this massive global transition are discussed below. (Using The Fee and Dividend, not the Carbon Capture program, is critical!)

4. Using part of the Fee and Dividend and other transition taxes collected, create a central global broadcast center that would further educate and warn the public beyond our politicians' and governments' initial call to sacrifice. It would inform the public about the current runaway global heating extinction emergency and provide continuous accurate runaway global heating education.

It would utilize our politicians and other respected opinion leaders to help educate the public about the many huge sacrifices and suffering we must endure to save the future for ourselves, our children, and future generations. The broadcast center would explain that we had wasted almost 60 years since we were first warned about the extinction threat of runaway global heating from rising fossil fuel use. Because of this, the required global fossil fuel reductions would be radical, sudden, and painful.

Moreover, the public needs to know that these required immediate, radical 2025 global fossil fuel reductions would cause a steep global economic recession or depression. (Click here to see professor Garrett's research on why a steep global economic recession or depression will be inevitable to save the future of humanity from accelerating runaway global heating.) 

Suppose the world's citizens did not understand what has happened and why. They will not be inspired to make the necessary sacrifices or endure the inescapable suffering due to the required, sudden, and radical fossil fuel reductions. If they do not understand the required sacrifices and suffering, it is doubtful the world's citizens will cooperate or ever make the required changes.

They may even revolt against the required fossil fuel reductions. This is why a simultaneous broadcast function and its public education processes are essential right at the beginning of the radical transition off fossil fuels.

5. Allocate adequate funding for national and international non-fossil fuel industry job transition training, support, and recovery. The radical fossil fuel reductions needed cannot be made without this funding already in place and ready. It must be there to help and support everyone hurt by the sudden and radical reductions in global fossil fuel use. (These radical reductions are needed to save the other half of humanity.)

These massive financial subsidies and funds can come from any and all sources, including the Fee and Dividend program and additional tax assessments wherever needed. It even may be necessary for ALL governments to print lots and lots of new money that will temporarily cause extensive harm to their economies to save the lives of most of their citizens. 

Without this funding ready to assist all workers and companies who will lose their jobs in this rapid forced energy transition, there will be massive resistance to the needed changes and even riots and violence. Furthermore, without this financial support and public cooperation, we will never be able to make all of the critical global fossil fuel reductions in time to save us. (This expensive funding requirement could also be funded by using the other new fees and taxes mentioned below in this document.)

6. As an essential part of the climate emergency declaration and to raise finances to cover expenses to fund a rapid green energy transition, ALL governments must terminate ALL fossil fuel industry tax breaks and subsidies.

7. Scale-up green energy generation to replace fossil fuel energy generation as fast as quickly as possible. This action will help lessen some economic and other hardships as we leave the use of fossil fuels to meet the 2025 targets. But, it cannot serve as a substitute for immediately cutting global fossil fuel use to come close to the 2025 targets. As this MIT study shows, green energy generation is a "too little too late solution" for the runaway global heating extinction emergency. It is something we must do in the long run, but it will not save us over the shorter period or replace hitting the critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.  

8. Scale up sustainable agriculture as fast as possible to replace most of our atmosphere-polluting current fossil fuel-based agriculture. This action will minimize mass starvation as fossil fuel availability is reduced for agricultural uses.

There will be unavoidable mass starvation because of these radical fossil fuel cuts, which is inevitable. Please click here to read about this horrible Garrett's Climate Dilemma that our politicians and humanity must face. Garrett's Climate Dilemma explains in part why they must push sustainable, non-fossil fuel-dependent agriculture as hard as possible so we can save as much of humanity as possible.

Part of encouraging agricultural sustainability will be to lace hefty new taxes on all global cattle, pork, and some poultry mass production to discourage their consumption globally. (This is because they produce so much methane and use fossil fuels to feed and transport them.)

9. Radically increase global natural carbon sequestration to help achieve global net-zero carbon. To save ourselves from the worst consequences of escalating runaway global heating, we must also rapidly expand our natural carbon sequestration actions. These actions are also partially effective in reducing existing carbon ppm levels in the atmosphere while radically reducing the global use of fossil fuels. 

10. at the right time, inform each nation's citizens that the climate consequence-driven extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century is now unavoidable. They must honestly let their citizens know that humanity must now make great and difficult sacrifices to save the other half of humanity because of their own six decades of government inaction or ineffective climate action. Unless the public adequately understands what has happened and why they may be unwilling to make the necessary hard sacrifices to save the younger generations and the other half of humanity. 

To inform their citizens thoroughly and adequately, our politicians and governments must inform their citizens about these critical facts about our climate and runaway global heating conditions. Giving the public this horrible news will also allow them more time to prepare physically, emotionally, and spiritually as best as possible. If done correctly and soon, it should help prevent widespread public panic and inspire a new level of global cooperation to save the younger X, Y, Z, and A generations as described in Plan B below.

11. Create, adequately fund, and execute a climate change-managed retreat plan in which our governments buy the homes and buildings of businesses in all runaway global heating high-risk areas at market value. A managed retreat can also mean our governments purchase the properties now and could even lease the properties back to the original owners until these owners are physically forced to relocate because of escalating climate consequences. 

If governments do not start managed retreat from high-risk climate areas now, there will eventually be a massive real estate crash in affected areas. Moreover, those property owners who do not get bought out soon are likely to get far less than the market value later during the height of the climate crisis. If that is the case, they will be stuck paying for most of the losses themselves. 

Climate change-managed retreat from all our global climate high-risk areas before climate calamity strikes will eventually cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. The Fee and Dividend program alone will not fund this and all of the other fossil fuel transition needs. Other needed funding sources for our massive and critical global fossil fuel transition are discussed further below.

12. Activate an emergency backup Plan B for each nation in case we fail totally. (That national emergency backup Plan B is listed further below.)

13. Ensure national intelligence agencies take over and provide accurate annual climate consequence timeline predictions, required fossil fuel reduction amounts, and verified progress reports on how each nation is doing in coming close to its 2025 targets. With so little time left to save ourselves from near-total extinction, progress verification and progress feedback must be swift and precise. Additionally, the UN's IPCC has failed horribly at this task.

14. If eventually necessary, use United Nations military forces to take over Brazil, Indonesia, or any other country, that continues to burn and destroy vast tropical forests for the production of palm oil, livestock production, or other agriculture, causing more carbon and methane into the atmosphere, which continues to put the whole world at risk.

These areas are the earth's lungs and produce 20% of all oxygen needed for humanity to survive the other coming climate catastrophes. These forests must be preserved if humanity is to survive. All previous efforts to get these nations to stop their slash-and-burn tactics on these critical remaining tropical forests have failed.

Key background reading to understand better the urgency and importance of the above 14 actions: 

This page will help build your understanding and motivation to keep pushing Part 3 below forward.

To understand the final 2025-2031 crucial action deadline for preventing near-total extinction and why we are in runaway global warming, click here. 

To see how that near-total extinction event will unfold in dozens of primary and secondary climate-related consequences, click here.)

Click here to discover why total human extinction is not realistic or probable, and the worst humanity will experience is near-total extinction (50 to 90+% of humanity going extinct.

Important information about how the government action needs to be done

"There can be no margin for error whatsoever whenever there is a real and imminent threat of total human extinction." Lawrence Wollersheim

Part 3 of the Job One for Humanity Plan below contains ALL of the most critical and deadline-prioritized government-driven climate and runaway global heating (aka global warming) reduction actions needed to prevent near-total human extinction within the second part of the 21st century. It is a comprehensive and complex plan in which only stable governments have the resources necessary to execute its many parts near-simultaneously.

Part 3 of the Job One Plan was designed to educate politicians and activists on the minimal simultaneous actions our governments must enact and enforce to save those who will survive the unavoidable pre-mid-century global heating-driven mass extinction. The great news is that if the government actions below are done as described and as prioritized, we will be able to save much of humanity and most of the plants, animals, and living systems of our beautiful planet. 

Although Part 3 of Job One Plan focuses on the governmental mass mobilization actions required to resolve the runaway global heating extinction emergency, many of those same government actions below will also improve many of our 11 critical global challenges.

Keep in mind that as you read the action steps listed below, they cannot be rolled out slowly, piecemeal, or sequentially, or they will never be successful or in time to prevent near-total extinction. 

There will be those who read the following required government actions and think they cannot be done because they are economically or politically impossible. Of course, they are absolutely correct for all normal crises. But this is an extraordinary and imminent extinction-level emergency and crisis. In this extinction emergency, extraordinary and impossible actions that are not economically viable will have to be done and become the new norm. Almost all of us will die if the two critical actions listed above do not get done. (The other actions also need to get done eventually.)

Eventually, we at Job One believe that they will get done. This is because when our governments finally do understand we ALL are facing unprecedented suffering, death, and near-total extinction with decades, to save themselves, our governments (our politicians and their families) will do whatever is necessary, impossible, or that creates a severe but temporary hardship to the economy. Without a doubt, our politicians can be fully relied on to save themselves and their families once they finally realize the runaway global heating nightmare that they too are trapped in. 

Part 3 of the Job One plan for mass government mobilization also includes a last chance Plan B also consists of critical "save and salvage" actions for our governments. The Plan B section below consists of additional actions our governments will need to begin once they realize they have already failed to act in time to prevent a now unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century.

Please read the rest of this page carefully because if our governments do not act to slow down the current accelerating runaway global heating, there will be no livable long-term future that any of us would want to endure. We will face a near-total human extinction event as soon as 2070. This extinction process will also cause the death of many plant and animal species and critical planetary living systems. 

No global heating remedial program that claims to have a solution to climate change and global heating can not be called legitimate unless it is designed around knowing:

a. when a global heating-driven near-total extinction event will probably occur, 

b. how it will occur, and

c. what must be done when to prevent that outcome.

The Job One for Humanity four-part program relentlessly follows this critical path and deadlines policy.

And finally, the government-required action list below was created using current climate science, climate tipping point theory, the principles of systems theory, and the multiple perspective analysis tools of dialectical meta-systemic thinking. 

"No individual or group alone, no matter how dedicated, can solve a problem that spans multiple systems. Climate change is such a problem. Only a multi-government-driven, multi-systemic approach will work." Lawrence Wollersheim

How to get the best results on Part 2 of the Job One Climate and Global Heating Resilience Plan

To help get this part of the Job One for Humanity Plan done, we offer the following essential tips:

Step 1: Email us at ([email protected]) if you have any questions or suggestions relating to this part of the Job One Plan or feel stuck. We will get back to you in two business days or less. Ongoing email support is critical if you want the best chance of success. Extensive research has shown that having support for completing a task can be up to 90% of the reason that task was completed successfully. 

Step 2: Join one of our eco-communities or create your own local eco-community dedicated to getting our governments to act on the emergency preparation, adaptation and climate change solution actions discussed above. Click here to learn all about these supportive new eco-communities.

 

Part 1: The Expanded Critical Governmental actions needed to Slow Down a Human, Animal, and Biological Mass Extinction Event by Mid-century to prevent our near-total extinction 

(Please note these are not in the same order as in the overview above.)

Here are all of the deadline-prioritized Job One Plan government-driven action steps needed to radically reduce global fossil fuel usage, slow the consequences that are now unavoidable, and slow our crossing the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point where we begin the near-total extinction stages. There is no longer any time or excuse for the delay! 

Escalating runaway global heating has already passed crisis levels. We are facing the most serious of possible consequences when we allow ourselves to pass through the final extinction level atmospheric carbon tipping point of carbon 600 ppm. The following graph of atmospheric carbon (CO2) in parts per million shows where we are now and that we are racing exponentially towards the three extinction evoking runaway global heating tipping points which are described in detail further below.

 

The reason to begin these critical deadline prioritized actions now (no matter what) is because we will need to at least slow and lessen the coming consequences with these massive fossil fuel reductions described below so that:

a. more of us can live longer and more comfortably, and
b. we have more time to prepare, adapt, and migrate to save and salvage what we can of humanity and civilization.

Action Step A: Demand an immediate emergency meeting of the world’s political leaders to declare an international Climate Change and Runaway Global Heating Extinction Emergency and to enact the critical 2025 runaway global heating emergency global fossil fuel reduction targets, laws, or treaties.

"There is a simple concept that often gets lost in today's proposed runaway global heating remedial strategies. We have wasted 60 years of climate warnings. To reduce climate change and runaway global heating, we have to reduce the carbon that is going up into the atmosphere, causing runaway global heating. In order to do that, we must directly, immediately, and radically reduce the global burning of all fossil fuels which are putting carbon into the atmosphere. There is no other proven method that can scale up in time to save us from extinction." Lawrence Wollersheim 

We cannot afford to waste another year, much less another 5-7 years, waiting for the next ineffective climate change climate conference like the UN Paris Climate Conference of 2015^[1] (COP21). To grasp how ineffective our past 20+ climate conferences have been it is first necessary to see just how poorly our previous fossil fuel reduction agreements and actions have fared since we were first notified about the runaway global heating extinction danger by our scientists over 40 years ago. 

 

What has been hidden from you 

1. We have actually increased fossil fuel use more this century than in the last two decades of the 20th century. To make this point alarmingly clear, more than half of all fossil fuel emissions released in the last 25 years and parked in the atmosphere are more than released in all recorded history before 1990. 

2. Even though we have had over 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and international treaties since at least 1993 pledging we would reduce runaway global heating worldwide, we still are about 67% higher in carbon emissions than in the early 1990s. (Atmospheric carbon emissions are the best way to measure future global heating.)

3. In 2018, carbon emissions increased another dramatic 2.7%, and they are projected to increase once again in 2019.

Yes, intentionally or through ignorance, our governments, the media, and most of the world's environmental groups have not been telling us the REAL facts about how our lack of any REAL progress whatsoever in reducing the rate of fossil fuel use increases, much less the complete absence of any substantive reductions anywhere across the world in reducing atmospheric carbon. (If you don't believe we are telling you the facts about our dismal failure in reducing global warming over the last 60 years, click here to view a short video by climate Professor Kevin Anderson in a recent presentation to the Oxford University Climate Society.)

 

 

(If you do not understand how fossil fuel emissions of carbon into the atmosphere create global warming, please click here for a set of simple illustrations and then continue reading... 

From the preceding it is easy to see that we are already in an unacknowledged and dangerous runaway global heating State of Emergency, we need to demand an immediate emergency meeting of the world’s leaders (in any forum possible) to publically declare this State of Emergency so that we can better acknowledge what this crisis means to the future of humanity and acknowledge the urgency for beginning the correct additional steps needed to resolve it and prepare for its now unavoidable consequences.

With a global public declaration of a worldwide runaway global heating State of Emergency in place, the world and all its nations will be on notice, fully authorized, and legally and morally obligated to:

a. start preparing for its consequences,

b. create necessary new enforceable and verifiable laws or treaties and allocate sufficient resources to resolve this escalating emergency before it is too late.

Supported by this worldwide declaration of a runaway global heating extinction emergency, we, as corporations, organizations, and individuals, will be more aware of the challenge and better able to mass-mobilize the necessary top-down-driven global actions before it's too late. This first "runaway global heating extinction emergency" declaration step is important because, without mass public awareness that we are in fact, in a runaway global heating extinction emergency from our governments, there is little political will or urgency to act appropriately upon what this emergency now demands (i.e. allocate the budget, personnel and other resources needed to resolve it.)

Click here to sign our petition demanding a national and international declaration of a runaway global heating extinction emergency. (After 7 years of our organization demanding a runaway global heating extinction emergency be enacted, the United Nations IPCC has finally started calling escalating climate change a general emergency but unfortunately has not yet had the courage to formally declare it what it is --- a national and international extinction emergency.)

If necessary, click here to read more about why this declaration of a runaway global heating extinction emergency is so important.

If still necessary, click here to read the details of the three runaway global heating extinction-evoking tipping points and deadlines that will bring about mass human, animal, and biological extinction within your lifetime. 

Action Step B: At this same emergency meeting, have the world’s political leaders declare and adopt the 2025 national and international atmospheric carbon parts per million (ppm) reduction targets.

These are the global carbon reduction targets that will honestly resolve the runaway global heating extinction emergency.

"To date, no other proposed climate solutions except radically reducing global fossil fuel use to come close to 2025 target levels have either proven themselves workable or can scale up in time to prevent our near-total extinction." Lawrence Wollersheim

The following is what should have been done decades ago when we were first warned by our best scientists about the dangers of runaway global heating.

These essential new goals for humanity's survival are:

Step 1: To do only what is critical and effective in the properly prioritized sequence to slow climate change enough by getting close to the last chance targets of the 2025 global fossil fuel reductions to keep us from ever crossing the first extinction-triggering tipping point of carbon 425 to 450 ppm and eventually the final near-total extinction human tipping point of carbon 600 ppm.

At this point, the only way that this is still possible is if all worldwide governments enact government-enforced fossil fuel rationing for all their citizen's fossil fuel uses. 

If we cross the carbon for 425 to 450 ppm tipping point, we will inevitably cross the carbon 500 ppm near-extinction tipping point. Crossing the carbon 500 ppm near-extinction tipping point (where all ice on earth will melt) is the most slippery of slopes. It will move us rapidly toward the very high probability of crossing the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point and the last phases of the Climageddon Scenario within most of our lifetimes.

Step 2: Once the 75% reduction target has been achieved and net-zero carbon has been achieved, we then need to begin the necessary secondary actions (described further below) to further reduce atmospheric carbon ppm levels to the long-term temperature and climate-safer maintenance levels of carbon ppm somewhere between 270 and 350 ppm. 

The following graph shows three of the primary greenhouse gases in parts per billion (PPB). All three greenhouse gases have been increasing rapidly since the Industrial Revolution (about 1750.) Furthermore, they have been growing exponentially since 2000.

Below, you see the complete and utter failure of the IPCC and our governments in doing anything effective to reduce fossil fuel-related greenhouse gases causing our accelerating global warming over the last 60 years.

 

 

To resolve the runaway global heating extinction emergency and keep us from ever crossing the unthinkable carbon 600 ppm extinction level tipping point taking us into phases 3-5 of the Climageddon Scenario, there are several additional and essential global mass mobilization targets, deadlines, and sub-targets on how we successfully achieve the goal of not crossing the carbon 600 ppm tipping point, which also must be publically acknowledged and agreed to in the emergency meeting of our world leaders.

The targets and sub-targets that must be successfully accomplished and are critical to resolving the runaway global heating extinction emergency are as follows:

i. Mass mobilization to radically scale down and reduce all global fossil fuel use. The absolute minimum amount we need to reduce fossil fuel use to slow and prevent the processes of likely going extinct in the next few decades is as follows:

a. All industrially developed nations must reduce their total fossil fuel use by 75% by 2025 and then continue reducing fossil fuel use to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035. Net carbon zero emissions in this solution means that no additional fossil fuel emissions are going into the atmosphere that is not also simultaneously being removed from the atmosphere by natural means. (Only about 20 countries produce 70% or more of the world's carbon emissions.)

Think of developed nations like most members of the G 20 group; Argentina, Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and India. (See technical note 1 near the end of this page for why China and India had to be included in the list of developed countries.) 

 

 

b. All developing nations must maintain their total fossil fuel emission levels as they are at the beginning of 2019 and not allow them to go any higher. Then by 2045, all developing nations must also be at net-zero carbon emissions. This allowance for developing nations to stay at the level they are now and gradually reduce down to net-zero carbon emissions by 2045 is part of an essential justice and equity equation. The developed nations created their wealth by producing the far greatest majority of all carbon emissions in the atmosphere today, thus causing almost all of our current runaway global heating extinction emergency. (See technical note 2 near the end of this page for more about justice and equity allowances.)

 

c. The efforts to reduce greenhouse gases also must now include the production, use, and recycling of plastics. New studies show that the production, use, and recycling of plastics now shockingly produce more greenhouse gases globally than the current global use of coal. (Please see this article for more information on this new plastics and climate change research.)

Please note: There is much more information, including what our individual, business, and national annual targets would be, and the technical footnotes that will help explain any qualifications or other technical factors involving these targets and deadlines in detail. We strongly suggest that if you are a researcher or techie, go to this page and read all the qualifying information on these absolutely essential fossil fuel reduction levels and deadlines before continuing on...

ii. Radically increase natural carbon sequestration to help achieve net-zero carbon. To save ourselves from the very worst consequences of runaway global heating, we must also rapidly engage and expand natural carbon sequestration actions that directly and effectively reduce and draw down the existing carbon ppm levels in the atmosphere while we are also radically reducing the global use of fossil fuels. Surprisingly, we can do this while avoiding unproven new technologies with risky outcomes.

Natural sequestration is the only way we should use to achieve net-zero carbon because there are so many unforeseen or even worse consequences trying to use new technologies to remove atmospheric carbon to achieve net-zero carbon. Natural sequestration does not need cap and trade laws as they are ineffective for the radical carbon reductions we now need.

By harmonizing with nature’s many existing mechanisms to reduce and “eat” carbon in the atmosphere and investing globally in reducing deforestation, promoting reforestation, land/soil restoration, restoration or enhancement of carbon sinks and agroecology, we can avoid the use of risky new technologies. We can also wisely use these existing natural technologies to increase the use of biochar and the successful implementation of other non-natural means of carbon sequestration, such as improved and expanded carbon farming. For more information on carbon sequestration, see this article by Umair Irfan.^[7]

The global deployment of the above atmospheric carbon reduction and sequestering measures has the potential to reduce and offset 20% of the current emissions of CO and other greenhouse gases. As a side benefit, the more natural methods mentioned above will also create wealth for the poorest 3 billion. (Many of the above carbon sequestration actions will occur in our poorest nations and help provide work for many in those nations. Also, see ”the global climate’s heat-controlling systems and subsystems” here for more information on the Earth’s natural systems, many of which can be used to remove massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.)

iii. Continue to mass mobilize to scale up to 100% renewable and least toxic global green energy generation as fast as it is technologically possible to replace fossil fuel energy generation. We need to bring new and existing green energy generation technology online and to full capacity at a speed of infrastructure transformation, deployment, and mobilization never before achieved in human history. Scaling up green energy generation to replace fossil fuel energy generation is going to be a tremendous challenge, as described in this latest research from MIT. (Please note that this subgoal is focused only on global green energy generation, not merely building more efficient, less polluting electric appliances or electric cars that will still be getting their electricity mostly from fossil fuel energy generation. As this MIT study shows, green energy generation is a "too little too late solution" for the runaway global heating extinction emergency. It is something we must do in the long run, but it will not save us over the shorter period or replace hitting the critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.  (Please note that this step is not a substitute for first radically reducing your fossil fuel use to help meet the 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets. Unless it is hydroelectric or geothermal, green energy generation also has many toxic by-products.)

iv. And, if some of us survive this runaway global heating mass extinction emergency, continue to eliminate all fossil fuel sources until we reduce our key greenhouse gas back to the safe carbon level of carbon 270-350 ppm, which has existed for hundreds of thousands of years before the fossil fuel-powered Industrial Revolution began. (We are currently at about carbon 413 ppm.)

v. Immediately also begin to also execute an orderly Plan B backup plan to save, salvage, and transfer as much of humanity and civilization as is possible into the safest global warming zones. This critical Plan B must be implemented because, as things stand now, we are likely unable to prevent crossing the final extinction level tipping point of carbon 600 ppm. If we begin this salvage and transfer operation now, while we still have time, at least a smaller part of humanity and civilization can possibly still survive. (More will be said about this critical salvage and transfer emergency backup plan below in Section 2 of the Preventing Extinction Action Plan.) 

(Please note: if we do not hit the 2025 radical global fossil fuel reduction goals listed above, there is now no mathematical way for us to prevent crossing the carbon 425-450 tipping point range, which will lead directly to crossing the carbon 500 ppm tipping point where all ice on earth will melt! Beyond this very scary mathematical atmospheric carbon heat-producing certainty, there are numerous climate scientists who believe that crossing carbon 500 ppm is also inevitable because we will soon cross many of the other climate, biological and human system tipping points covered on the top of this page. The previously mentioned factors will lead to the inevitability of crossing the carbon 500 ppm tipping point does not even include the other runaway global heating positive feedback loops already occurring throughout our climate system. (Positive feedback loops enhance or amplify changes; this tends to move a system away from its equilibrium state and make it more unstable.) 

It is important to be realistic for future planning. The probability that we will cross the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point is very high. Additionally, the final window of opportunity to effectively slow crossing the carbon 600 ppm tipping point will close very soon (in a matter of just a few more years, 2025 and not decades) if we have not made the necessary and immediate radical fossil fuel cuts.) This is because of both the temperature momentum already "baked" into the climate system (the existing carbon 411 ppm level already in the atmosphere) and the additional three or more carbon particles per million we continue to add to the atmosphere each year as we continue failing to adequately reverse our fossil fuel use.)

 

Action Step C: Have the world’s political leaders create new, verifiable, and enforceable national and international climate laws and treaties necessary to achieve the 2025 global warming reductions in time to save us from extinction. These laws will include government-enforced fossil fuel rationing.

Once our politicians have declared a worldwide runaway global heating State of Emergency and have agreed upon national and international global warming reduction goals and subgoals, several categories of new national and international laws or treaties will be needed to ensure effective action. The categories of laws or treaties described below must be enacted simultaneously because they function as an integrated system, which will have the highest probability of success in the little time we have left to slow crossing the carbon 600 ppm threshold.

The many categories of new laws or treaties below are required in part because both the climate and human society are complex adaptive systems, so resolving the runaway global heating extinction emergency will require an integrated systems-level approach involving many categories of laws or treaties covering these areas. These new laws or treaties are also needed to successfully reach the critical subgoals of net-zero carbon and 100% green energy generation as soon as is technically possible in a mass mobilization of humanity’s resources. Please note some temporary but strictly limited critical exceptions in immediate or complete reductions of fossil fuel use may also need to be temporarily allowed within these new laws or treaties for military use, space exploration, limited air travel, as well as other critical, medical, and chemical uses of these fuels.

If any area of the following categories of verifiable and enforceable laws or treaties is not enacted, the probability of achieving the necessary level of success in time to save us from going over the carbon 600 ppm battle line or one or more of the critical global warming tipping points is perilously lessened. If you think of enforceable and verifiable international and national laws or treaties as the most essential and critical fulcrum point that helps to maximize successful top-down-driven leverage to prevent humanity’s extinction, you will have fully grasped their true importance. This single step is by far the most important action step.

Here are the key areas of new, verifiable, and enforceable global warming reduction laws or treaties we must demand to be enacted:

1. Government-enforced fossil fuel rationing for all citizens that will ensure they reach the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.

2. Demand new international and national climate laws or treaties that will rapidly remove government subsidies and tax breaks from all fossil fuel energy generation and industries.

The fantastically wealthy $28 trillion a year global fossil fuel industry is much more dependent on global government handouts than is widely realized. In 2015, governments worldwide subsidized the fossil fuel industry with an estimated $5.3 trillion^[8], giving this dying industry 50 times more than the $120 billion^[9] that went to renewable energy subsidies. Governments are thereby unconsciously paying for their nation’s runaway global heating caused self-destruction!

Amazingly, some fossil fuel subsidies went to boost oil consumption. In effect, taxpayer dollars from around the world are being used to subsidize more toxic fossil fuel pollution, runaway global heating, and its catastrophic and unhealthy consequences.

All fossil fuel tax breaks must also be removed.

3. Demand new national and international climate laws or treaties to create a revenue-neutral, Fee and Dividend-based atmospheric carbon reduction program.

The Fee and Dividend plan will work because it puts a price on carbon fossil fuel use equal to their environmental damage and accomplishes this through market economy mechanisms. The Fee and Dividend plan’s rising fee on carbon pollution incentivizes a rapid shift from toxic fossil fuels to clean green energy. Its direct dividend payments to all those individuals, companies, and nations that reduce their fossil fuel use are the profit motive and self-interest key that will strongly incentivize the rapid transition to green energy generation essential to our survival.

This Fee and Dividend plan is also revenue-neutral and not the investment banker-friendly, grossly flawed Cap and Trade program continually promoted by the fossil fuel industry, its lobbyists, investment bankers, and the fossil fuel-related, owned, or influenced media

Fee and Dividend laws or treaties would quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by placing a fee on carbon dioxide (CO2) or equivalent gases. This fee would be levied against all fossil fuels at their point of entry into the economy.

Almost 100% of the collected revenue would be returned as a monthly, quarterly, or annual direct payment to every citizen, business, or nation that uses less fossil fuel energy or moves to green energy. Hence the concept that this fee is revenue-neutral. This revenue-neutral feature would protect low and middle-class citizens from the rising consumer costs associated with the carbon fee and the critical rapid transition to green energy generation. It will quickly spread the financial benefits of the green energy transition to every area of the world.

In the U.S., current proposals would start the fee at $15 per ton of CO2 equivalent (3/4 of a penny per pound) and raise $10-$20 per ton each year (1/2-1 penny per pound). The fee would continue to rise until total U.S. CO2 equivalent emissions had been reduced to 10% or less of U.S. CO2 equivalent emissions in 1990. (The projected carbon fee is estimated to reach $40-$100 per ton quickly.)

To protect national businesses from actions of other countries that do not have or enforce equivalent carbon Fee and Dividend pricing mechanisms, a compensating border adjustment would be enacted. All goods coming from countries without a Fee and Dividend carbon price equivalent would be subjected to an equivalent compensating fee at the border of the fee-compliant nation. Goods leaving a compliant nation for sale in a fee noncompliant country would be reimbursed that fee at the compliant nation’s border at the time of export.

No other program will be more effective and faster to adopt globally than the Fee and Dividend plan because it:

Financially stimulates low-carbon innovation and the creation of jobs in green energy generation.

It is the fairest current revenue-neutral method of motivating and mobilizing the critical and necessary high-speed transition to green energy generation and away from fossil fuels.

Offsets individual citizen's higher energy costs with direct dividend payments for conservation and going green.

Immediately and radically reduces emissions in all sectors and areas globally, thereby moving toward carbon neutrality (net zero carbon) by strongly incentivizing carbon pollution reductions and efficiencies.

Creates a stable, predictable carbon price benchmark for business planning and puts the carbon fee at the source (well, mine, or port). This way, businesses don't directly absorb costs. Carbon fee border adjustments will also encourage other nations to price carbon similarly to avoid paying the difference at other national borders. This will help create a competitive and level fossil fuel reduction playing field amongst the nations.

It is not easily exploitable by investment bankers and other wealthy special interests who could use current Cap and Trade plans to delay or defer expanding green energy generation while continuing carbon pollution and making vast fortunes buying and selling Cap and Trade credits for owners and Wall Street brokers. Think of Cap and Trade as the “business as usual” scheme of the wealthy few to maintain the status quo for as long as possible. Think of the Fee and Dividend plan as the fairest plan for the well-being of the many as well as the fastest possible transition facilitator to green energy generation for almost all of our energy needs.

It is quickly implementable and is a rational, transparent, and simple policy.

It will quickly generate widespread public support because of its direct and near-immediate financial dividend payments.

It is a great policy tool that has an excellent chance of being implemented politically. This is because both liberals and conservatives can support it. What makes it an attractive policy for conservatives is that the program creates minimal bureaucracy and does not expand the size of the government. Citizens are free to use their dividends as they choose, presumably partly to reduce their use of carbon to offset the increased cost of carbon due to the carbon fee. Its appeal to liberals is that it will help keep the environment safe.

At every level where rapid and effective change away from fossil fuel dependence will be necessary, the Fee and Dividend program has the greatest hope of motivating and immediately mobilizing the necessary green energy generation, use, and effective energy conservation changes that will keep the greatest possible amount of fossil fuels in the ground forever. Please note that these funds will also help compensate or retrain those individuals, companies, or nations who will suffer as the needed fossil fuel reductions are enforced. But, they will not be nearly enough for all the compensation or retraining needed. (See further below for the other necessary revenue-raising actions to be taken to raise enough money to cover all of the compensation and retraining that will be needed.)

No known fee measure (other than Fee and Dividend) will act as quickly or effectively to lessen the escalating global heating extinction emergency and avert crossing more runaway global heating tipping points. (If you are still uncertain about the details of how the Fee and Dividend plan will work to finance the various actions listed above, please read this Wikipedia article here.)

What the new Fee and Dividend program fees will be used for

In addition to paying dividends for reducing fossil fuel use, part of the Fee and Dividend plan proceeds will also help finance the following critical activities. In priority, those critical activities are:

A. Establish a central, honest global broadcast center that would serve primarily to warn and educate. It would warn people about the current runaway global heating extinction emergency and provide accurate runaway global heating education and public relations support in mass mobilization-type campaigns on why we all have to comply with many difficult, painful and costly global warming reduction laws or treaties and other changes that will suddenly be enforced by our governments so that we may survive. 

There will be tremendous sacrifices, changes, and losses involved in implementing the needed global fossil fuel reductions at every level. If there is not an honest educational process on the many negatives that will be widely experienced in the critical emergency transition to green energy generation, people will feel betrayed and become very upset and angry. It will then become much harder to make the needed reductions because people will feel they have been blindsided and not adequately prepared or educated about what must happen to save the future. 

These educational programs would also explain the equal or even better survival, health, and economic benefits our transition to clean, green energy and away from fossil fuel will produce. Right now, the public media is not telling the real story of both the positives and the negatives, and too many of our climate experts and climate organizations are also not telling the real and full story because of political and economic pressure overriding their research.

This honest broadcast center and public educational process are critical because the general public is not ready for the rapid transition required and the resulting radical changes in energy generation and energy distribution. It will take nothing less than a massive accurate global public relations and education program to help the general public understand why these rapid changes are needed, why these changes are beneficial to their futures, why individual self-directed actions alone are not enough, and why the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency is everyone's worst enemy.

We can never forget that change usually evokes fear, and the now-needed radical changes will evoke massive fears. If there is not a massive government-endorsed and funded educational and public relations program about why these difficult changes must be immediately enacted, the general population will become violent and revolt. Any politicians endorsing the needed changes will be thrown out of office if this educational and public relations step is ignored. We will be back to zero, and nothing significant will be done to further reduce global warming.

The financial dividends of the Fee and Dividend program will help lessen that fear and help stimulate adoption, but any sudden, radical, and costly large-scale change will still evoke intense fear, resistance, and counteraction. The successful use of large-scale public education and public relations is not unprecedented. A large-scale education and public relations program is exactly what was used to mobilize the United States in World War II and was foundational to its later victory.

Over time, the citizens of the world will be brought to understand, through these education and public relations programs, the severity and immediacy of the challenge that the runaway global heating extinction emergency presents and the sacrifices that needed to be made. These education and public relations programs must take place concurrently with top-down enforcement of the new global warming reduction laws or treaties. Although many individuals will quickly comply with their national laws or treaties, many others will not commit themselves to any collective effort to remedy this emergency unless they better understand why it is necessary. Over time, this global education and public relations campaign will help the current culture’s transition from the dying fossil fuel age into the life-promoting green energy age. If this global education and public relations campaign is done correctly, the population of the world will begin to feel a powerful sense of common and collective destiny and high moral purpose, knowing their rational actions are saving themselves, their children, and future generations.

The most challenging thing this new runaway global heating broadcast center will have to do is educate about the negative consequences and dilemmas that will need to be endured if we are to get close enough to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets to save humanity. Here are several of the worst of those negative dilemmas that the world will have to go through to reach or get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets:

1. the world will naturally go into a steep global economic depression and probably a worldwide economic depression until we can completely scale-up green energy generation to replace fossil fuel energy generation.

2. Up to 50% of the world's population could die of starvation in the transition to green energy generation because fossil fuels are a primary reason powering the world's agricultural and husbandry successes. The dilemma here is that if we fail to reach or get very close to the 2025 targets most if not all of humanity will eventually die from the later phase consequences of runaway global heating.

There are also many other painful negatives and sacrifices the public will need to be educated about to endure the consequences of our failure to act four decades ago when we still had time left to make the changes in a much more gradual and less painful way. (For a more complete list of all of the educational challenges dealing with the negatives and dilemmas that this broadcast center will need to manage as we move away from fossil fuel energy generation, please see this page.)

B. We must create adequate national and international new job transition training and recovery subsidies and funding that would assist all individuals, businesses, and nations that will suffer significant financial losses or closures because of the rapidly falling use of fossil fuels. For example, carbon Fee and Dividend revenues will help compensate and assist developing nations in stopping using fossil fuels. It will also help developing nations leapfrog over the building or expanding any current fossil fuel energy generation systems directly into building or expanding green energy generation systems like solar or wind power. 

We cannot forget to financially both compensate and subsidize and actively assist all of those individuals, businesses, and nations who will be harmed financially in this rapid transition away from fossil fuels. This support would naturally also include providing new job training in positions for the new green economy or positions in other industries.

This step is critical to the success of all global fossil fuel reduction procedures, especially when the needed 2025 reductions are so severe. It is the unsurfaced fear of change and how it will harm the current status quo, which is a major source of the inertia that has prevented humanity from effectively managing the runaway global heating extinction emergency over the last 40 years.

If we do not handle this fear of change by assuring those whose jobs, livelihoods, or assets are threatened that we will assist them in this energy transition and minimize their losses, it is doubtful we will be successful in coming close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. To cover all of the energy transition costs, simultaneously, all worldwide governments may have to print more money and engage in deficit spending. This monetary action may need to be done for years to ensure social stability during the critical and radical 2025 transition away from fossil fuels.

(Please see the following research article on cultural trauma, social inertia, and climate change for a deeper understanding of the critical early importance of implementing this fear of change management and compensation step.) 

(More will be said further below on what additionally will need to be done beyond the Fee and Dividend revenue to raise adequate funding to cover all of the compensation and retraining that will be required as the radical fossil fuel reductions are enforced.)

C. Fund the rapid scaling-up of the transfer of sustainable agriculture technology (SAT) to current proponents of fossil fuel-based agriculture. This SAT is essential because fossil fuel use will be radically reduced to meet the 2025 targets, and if sustainable agriculture technology is not widely available, there will be massive global starvation. 

(Please keep in mind that points B and C above deal with the critical political and practical issues of getting the radical reductions in global fossil fuel use executed successfully before 2025. Without these two things being done simultaneously with the radical fossil fuel reductions, there is little to no possibility those individuals and industries who will be severely adversely affected will ever politically allow those reductions to happen --- even if they know it means their own later and eventual demise.)

D. Fund appropriate technologies to help us rapidly achieve complete and non-toxic global green energy generation as soon as is technologically possible. (See MIT study on those realistic timeframes.) Appropriate new technologies will have a major role in the long-term retooling and reorientation of our economy to facilitate the final transition to green renewable energy. It can improve smart grid systems, energy storage capabilities, electricity-based mass transportation, retrofitting buildings, sustainable agriculture, zero waste, and more. Appropriate green technology can even help provide access to cleaner and greener cooking for the poorest 3 billion people who spend hours each day collecting solid biomass fuels and burning them for cooking.

Appropriate new technologies are not some new upgraded version of nuclear power or scaling up the older versions of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not the solution. It is another cool new set of problems that avoid the real solution which is radically reducing global fossil fuel usage to the levels mentioned above. Additionally, there is no possible way to physically scale up building enough new nuclear reactor energy generation capacity to replace ALL of global fossil fuel use in the amounts needed (mentioned above) and in the time needed to save us from the worst consequences that will occur over the next 30-50 years.  

E. Fund other possible new technologies as an emergency PLAN B backup plan if we fail to meet the scale-down fossil fuel use targets (mentioned above), but only after we have first well funded the actions detailed above. This is our last-chance-plan for when all other remedial actions of the Job One Plan have failed to slow or lessen escalating global warming, and we are about to go into out-of-control runaway global heating and Phase 2 and 3 of the Climageddon Scenario.

In spite of the grand promises that are being touted about how new geoengineering technologies may help us suck carbon out of the atmosphere, there are critical warnings about any rushed or desperate implementation of these new and unproven technologies. A myriad of unsolved problems attend the proposed “geoengineering” technologies, not the least of which is they are still in the “theoretical drawing board stage,” have no economically proven working models, they cannot be scaled to draw down carbon as computer-modeled, and much more.

Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) are particularly troublesome, and these currently nonexistent technologies are built into current IPCC prediction models. One overwhelming reason they are not feasible any time soon is that some examples of them require growing carbon crops on land the size of India each and every year for decades. The world does not have anything close to this amount of land to lend to a carbon capture scheme because the land is already being used for food crops for human use and consumption. When the choice is starving hundreds of millions of people to grow carbon-capture crops to remediate what humans did in the past, then we must say that this plan is nonsense and look for other technologies. And as Professor Kevin Anderson explains in his lucid video in March 2017,^[2] that nonsense is just what many of the international IPCC models now suggest.

The key warnings about planning for nonexistent or economically unproven new technologies (particularly those that will save us by sucking carbon out of the air,) to resolve the runaway global heating extinction emergency are:

We cannot allow new, nonexistent, or economically unproven technologies to lull us into a false sense of comfort that we can continue to pour more carbon and methane pollution into our atmosphere—or preserve the dying fossil fuel energy generation business model. The emphasis on developing these new technologies must always be to move past the fossil fuel energy generation age. There can be no turning back! We have entered the age of green energy generation, and we need to go forward full speed to get us out of the existing escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency.

Before demonstrations at scale with proven economic viability, we cannot expect that “theoretical drawing board” of geoengineering technologies will save us from what is coming. Relying heavily on miraculous new technologies to save us is a dangerous strategy and should never replace the primary focus of doing the most in-harmony-with-nature actions and the other systemic actions recommended in the Job One Plan. These actions do not carry the potentially disastrous side effects of many new technologies employed as last-chance solutions suggested in the most desperate of times and situations.

We must never forget that almost all new technology is based on mechanical, three-dimensional engineering principles that are far simpler than the principles of complex adaptive systems like the biological and climate systems of our precious planet. Engineering is generally a simple and linear three-dimensional set of cause-and-effect actions. Biology and the climate are complex adaptable systems with nonlinear, self-organizing, and unpredictable spontaneously emergent They should be seen as having many more non-cause-and-effect “dimensions.” They also have far more unknown and complex tipping points, interconnectivities, and interdependencies than are found within the limited mechanical rules and solutions characteristic of the nonliving, mechanical world. Frequently, applying mechanical solutions to complex adaptive systems such as our biological and climate systems results in unpleasant surprises in the form of unintended negative consequences.

We cannot allow our individual or collective hubris about our many great mechanical engineering accomplishments to blind us to the risk of overlooking the possibility that new mechanical technology solutions applied to global warming’s complex adaptable systems may, in fact, produce equal or even greater damage than the problem they're meant to solve. For example, placing massive amounts of sun-reflecting particles into the complex adaptive system of the atmosphere and global climate is being widely discussed as a mechanical new technology solution to the runaway global heating extinction emergency. What if, as an unintended side effect, those particles blocked the normal rainfall in a nuclear-armed country like China and caused immediate mass starvation and death? With its own population dying before its eyes, where do you think the Chinese government would point its nuclear weapons, or from whom would they demand immediate restitution? The unintended risks could easily and quickly get out of hand, leading to unpredictable and potentially worse consequences if any of the nations harmed have nuclear weapons. Additionally, once our ecological and climate systems have been stressed beyond their respective tipping points and points of no return, it will be far too late to develop or deploy any technologically useful geoengineering repair or cooling For additional information on the many problems and dangers of geoengineering solutions to the runaway global heating extinction emergency, see these articles by Andrew Revkin,^[3] Chelsea Harvey,^[4] and John Vidal.^[5]

We also cannot expect to extend the use or lifespan of fossil fuels by increasing fossil fuel consumption efficiency. Collective experience and research have repeatedly shown that using technology to increase fossil fuel consumption efficiency or conservation frequently increases overall fossil fuel use rather than reducing it. This is because of the economic savings that increased fossil fuel energy efficiency or conservation provides, acting to create more cash resources to buy or use more things dependent upon using more fossil fuels. This is known as Jevons’s paradox.^[6] 

In further qualification to what is been said in the section above, it is necessary to state that:

New technology will always play some role, but not the role everyone is hoping for --- the role of the miracle last-minute savior. The essential role that new technology will play will be in providing breakthroughs that will allow increased food production in the poor soils and the sunlight-poor growing seasons of the far north and the far south. New technology will no doubt also provide new solutions to moving our infrastructure to the safe zones as well as creating new types of more sustainable infrastructure and energy generation and use. New technology will also supply many other breakthroughs that will facilitate those who do survive to live longer and more comfortably.

4. Demand new international and national climate laws or treaties that will incentivize full divestment from the dying fossil fuel energy generation industry.

The fossil fuel industry is dying as the green energy revolution grows. While it may be difficult to accept these radical changes, this is as it should be. One important realization related to this change is to understand that the fossil fuel world will, by necessity, die for no other reason than we cannot continue to run our world economies on lower quality, harder to get, dirtier, and more expensive fossil fuels. The reliance on tar sands, super-polluting processes like fracking, and dangerous super-deep drilling systems will only worsen soon. So, it is not a matter of “if” the fossil fuel era will end, but “when.” As the public begins to understand the urgent necessity of leaving fossil fuels behind, and as the runaway global heating extinction emergency is increasingly illuminated and substantiated, fossil fuel-related industries will go the way of dinosaurs. Consequently, many people heavily invested in this dying industry will sooner or later suffer huge financial losses.

To prevent the unscrupulous from trying to profit from this dying industry unfairly, new laws or treaties need to be enacted to:

A. incentivize fossil fuel divestment and

B. punish those “gaming the system” to stop windfall profiteering on the sudden and rapid changes in production, pricing, distribution, carbon fees, or inventories that this dying industry will experience as fossil fuel use radically shrinks and the green energy revolution rapidly expands.

How might the system be gamed? As an example, the fossil fuel industry might hear ahead of its competitors that Fee and Dividend per ton carbon fees are going to go up again on a certain date on any fossil fuels that will be subsequently removed from the ground. Before the new carbon fees take place, a fossil fuel producer could accelerate its extraction process many times beyond normal by creating an out-of-the-ground large non-taxable inventory. This would allow that business to “game the system” and obtain windfall profits on the fossil fuels it just quickly stockpiled. The new laws or treaties must prevent all such activities.

5. Demand new national and international climate laws and treaties to tax all fossil fuel profits at significantly higher rates.

Governments will need to provide a massive retraining of fossil fuel industry-related employees and fund many retooling projects while subsidizing new green energy infrastructure. Considerably higher taxes on remnant fossil fuel profits may also need to be authorized and legislated.

6. Demand new national and international climate laws and treaties mandating that fossil fuel (and other) corporations pay for past and current environmental and health damages caused by their products.

It has been recently discovered that some fossil fuel companies like Exxon appear to have known their products were causing runaway global heating damage and degradation for over 50 years. This suggests that a reasonable interpretation of their actions could be seen as knowingly harming or intentionally harming the health air, water, and land belonging to all of us.

If these allegations are “proven” by legal action, Exxon will be guilty of offloading the pollution damage and health costs of their products onto the citizens and taxpayers of their respective nations while they kept all the profits from their knowingly destructive acts. If this is demonstrated, the intentional harm projected upon the public should be seriously penalized, and appropriate restitution should result.

New laws or treaties requiring fossil fuel-related companies to pay for past and present health and environmental damage should be enacted simultaneously as the other global warming reduction-related laws or treaties mentioned in this document. The world's governments will need restitution payments as part of the funding to repair past fossil fuel damage and facilitate the fast migration to clean green energy generation. Click here to see an article describing how to get financial restitution for damages you have suffered in global warming-aggravated storms.

7. Demand new international and national climate laws or treaties that will rapidly remove government subsidies from the production of cattle, pork, and chicken and also demand massive additional taxes to be placed on all cattle, pork, and chicken production.

The world's cattle, pig, and chicken production produces massive amounts of methane gas. It also requires vast quantities of fossil fuels and cattle feed and destroys land needed for the carbon capture natural sequestration strategies. If we hope to meet the 2025 targets, we must also radically reduce all global cattle, pork, and chicken production. Some estimates indicate that 30-40% of all carbon and methane going into the atmosphere is coming from cattle, pork, and chicken production.

8. Demand new international and national climate laws or treaties that mandate the creation of emergency recovery reserve funds equal to 5% of national GDPs.

This is another way to raise the required revenue in order for each nation to cope with the rapidly rising costs of escalating runaway global heating catastrophes. The modern world has never experienced the rising scope, scale, and frequency of loss and destruction that will continue to accumulate and accelerate as runaway global heating moves toward crossing more tipping points and deeper into the Climageddon Scenario phases. (To see that loss and destruction in detail, click here.)

Some estimates have suggested that if we survive, it will eventually take $200-$600 trillion dollars to repair the damage. To put that amount in perspective, that is roughly 4-6 times the total annual GDP of the entire world’s economic systems.! Unless we create a minimum 5% emergency reserve fund for each nation, it is difficult to conceptualize how we will be able to constructively ameliorate continuing and runaway global heating catastrophe costs.

9. Whenever needed, enact a special extinction prevention tax assessment on the world's wealthiest individuals, corporations, nations, philanthropies, and trusts to ensure adequate financing for all of the government's runaway global heating resolution actions listed above and below. 

This is because all of the funding measures described above will likely not be enough. It likely will take one or many runaway global heating extinction emergency tax assessments on the world's wealthiest individuals, corporations, nations, philanthropies, and trusts to adequately fund all the above emergency and transition needs.

This is particularly true regarding the compensation and retraining of all of the individuals, companies, and governments most harmed by the required global fossil fuel reductions during our extinction emergency.

No matter how many additional tax assessments it takes on the ultra-wealthy, those with the most to gain, lose, or preserve must also give the most. Additionally, it is the patriotic, moral, ethical, justice, and legal responsibility of those with the most resources in this extinction emergency to come forward and help save humanity while protecting themselves!

In part 4 of the Job One Plan, we strongly recommend that you start reading in the section called, Why the world's wealthiest corporations, individuals, and philanthropies are the most responsible for the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency and saving us from extinction. Please also read the two sections below it. In those sections, you will find many compelling reasons why the wealthy entities paying these additional taxes ultimately will not want to fight or resist them. 

Those ultra-wealthy entities being required to pay these assessed additional taxes might also benefit from seeing how these payments have additional relevance to the social, economic, and political ideas, benefits, and principles behind the Indian Potlatch or even the Jewish Jubilee.

In the end, if we do not work together on this unfolding global catastrophe with everyone paying and sacrificing what they must, there will be no winners anywhere!

10. Demand new international and national climate laws or treaties that will provide government subsidies and incentives for expanding green energy generation without toxic by-products.

We have to scale up non-toxic green energy production. Specifically, we will need to mass-mobilize the production and use of non-toxic green technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels, high capacity non-toxic battery storage, hydrogen fuel cell or light-duty electric vehicles, and more efficient end-use devices, especially in appliances, lighting, air conditioning, and industrial processes. 

11. Demand the governments of the world also start preparing to triage the tremendous psychological and emotional trauma that will be experienced by both climagees and survivors.

Because of the unimaginable trauma that will occur as the fossil fuel to green energy generation transition takes place, and as runaway global heating progresses and its worst consequences unfold phase by phase, there will be a special need for many additional pre-trained and ready qualified, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and ministers of all faiths. These individuals will be urgently needed to help everyone recover from the many forced or inhibited survival and migration-related traumas or the deep survivor's guilt in those lucky enough to survive or get to safe zones in time.

If any of the best of humanity is to survive in the safe stones in reasonably healthy psychological or spiritual terms, this need for a massive healing and processing of the emotional and psychological traumas by an adequate number of qualified professionals must be planned in advance and taken into careful consideration.

In the face of the severe levels of trauma that will be experienced by politicians, administrators, and the military who will have to make and enforce the life and death decisions at our borders and the many traumatized individuals and families trying to cross those borders or survive wherever they are, there is no other option but to anticipate this coming emotional and psychological crisis and start preparing for it immediately.

12. Demand the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and other power centers call for an immediate emergency meeting of the world’s leaders, as well as facilitate verification and enforcement of runaway global heating reduction laws or treaties.

Without a global government that has verification and enforcement powers, individual nations or corporations will have incentives to “cheat,” thus gaining competitive advantages. This is because they believe they are immune to outside verification, enforcement, or punishment.

Unless some kind of effective international mechanism is put in place for global verification and enforcement of these new global warming laws or treaties, they will be as ineffective and toothless as the reduction pledges, promises, and intentions of the various IPCC conferences. Without strong verification procedures and globally enforceable penalties evenly applied to all structures and negotiated agreements, there is little hope we will change our ways in time and not go extinct.

Luckily, there are several strategic and innovative ways to ensure all global warming cheaters, treaty violators, or treaty non-signers gain no competitive or other advantages. Some individuals may initially be uncomfortable with bypassing the failed IPCC structures in the manner described below, but please keep an open mind.

We are in a desperate corner and forced to utilize the most effective methods with the right resources—even if the agents of this new solution are not perfect or have checkered histories.

If the solution proposed below makes you uncomfortable, after reviewing it ask yourself: What other current options have any proven track record or realistic hope of being more effective? We are potentially going to be trapped in the perfect storm of perfect storms. To adapt an old saying, we need to consider any port in a superstorm.

In the title of this section, we mention the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These organizations already have a track record of facilitating the negotiation of international agreements and treaties. They also have a history of managing and, in some cases, assisting with enforcing those international agreements or treaties. Additionally, many of the world’s largest corporations and nations have already developed some level of trust and confidence in their existing relationships with these organizations. If requested to do so, the World Trade Organization (WTO) could be tasked to:

A. help negotiate the necessary international global warming reduction laws and treaties with adequate verification and enforcement penalties,

B. arbitrate disputes over execution or implementation of resulting law or treaty enactment issue areas, or specific parts of these.,

C. set up mechanisms to verify that nations or corporations are complying with the negotiated global warming laws and treaties, and

D. impose fees and penalties on trade deals or trade items from any nation or corporation shown to be violating the global warming reduction laws or treaties; increasing trade penalties could accompany repeated violations to always ensure the prompt removal of any profit incentive for ongoing violations.

Also, if requested to do so, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) could:

1. collect and hold in trust all global warming law or treaty violation penalty fees,

2. Disperse global warming fees and penalties collected,

3. impose additional interest penalty fees on every existing bank loan for any nation or corporation caught violating the new global warming reduction laws or treaties; these increased interest penalty fees could also independently escalate with repeated violations to a level that replaces any cheating profits with equal cheating penalties, and

4. on the basis of repeated gross violations of global warming laws or treaties, nations or corporations could even be denied loans.

Additional tools and power centers for enforcing and collecting penalties on carbon pollution cheaters:

There are other well-established international power centers capable of penalizing any corporation or nation—across international borders—that might seek to cheat and violate the negotiated international global warming reduction laws or treaties. Among these power centers are the international and national banking transaction clearinghouses that handle the clearing and processing of the world’s banking transactions.

Once these and similar international organizations act to collect violation penalties, here's how it would work. These transactional banking clearinghouses would impose a small additional penalty fee on every banking or checking transaction of any nation or corporation caught violating the new global warming reduction laws or treaties.

All collected transactional interest penalty fees, Fee and Dividend fees, and other fees or penalties could eventually be directed to the IMF or another similar international banking organization that would act as trustee for holding all collected funds. These collected funds could then be dispersed to various areas (as mentioned above in the Fee and Dividend section). Proper dispersal of these funds could be overseen by qualified legal and accounting administrators and a panel of runaway global heating experts from all nations.

13. Demand new national and international climate laws and treaties that ensure sufficient legal and financial punishment for all politicians, corporations, individuals, and nations that continue to violate the new national and international climate laws and treaties.

14. Ensure climate justice for all nations while executing all of the above action steps.

For almost all of the above actions, those instituting the critical actions above must also take into consideration that there must be justice in this transition to a new clean energy world and economy. This also means a justice that benefits poor nations, people of color, displaced workers, and poor communities. It includes jobs with a family-sustaining wage that maintain the right to unionize. This justice also includes an equitable response to the historical and present-day experiences of low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, rural and urban communities, and the front-line communities most affected by runaway global heating.) 

 

ACTION STEP D, Part 1: Demand world political leaders require their respective national intelligence agencies and national security agencies to take immediate and full responsibility for re-analyzing current climate change research and rapidly reporting the updated security threats, predicted consequences, and new timetables, and monitoring their nation's fossil fuel reduction progress as well as the progress of other nations.

It's time to stop engaging in the false hope that the highly politicized and underfunded Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change of the United Nations (IPCC) can or should be taking on the lead research and analysis responsibility for the future of humanity or producing accurate reports which include tipping points!

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the currently recognized world authority on runaway global heating consequences, time frames, and remedial actions, has consistently politicized the climate science and grossly under-estimated the actual runaway global heating consequences, time frames, and corrective actions. 

The most significant danger with this gross under-estimation is that the world's governments, intelligence agencies, national reserve banks, corporations, think tanks, risk assessment firms, hedge funds, investment bankers, and insurance companies all use the IPCC's grossly underestimated summary reports for their planning and strategies. This widespread use of seriously unreliable climate prediction information means they and the rest of us are in for a series of tremendous climate consequence shocks because of the many calculation problems with the IPCC's climate work.

For those who do not believe that the IPCC climate calculations are unreliable to a very significant level, in the links below you will learn precisely how the IPCC constructs and calculates its climate consequence risk scenarios, timetables, and recommended climate change remedies. Unfortunately, you also will discover that there are many, many very serious climate calculation and process problems going on within the IPCC. The additional problems below further call into question the current reliability or risk analysis usefulness for the IPCC's current consequence prediction scenarios, timeframes, and climate remedies.

In the links below, you will discover precisely why the IPCC's reports cannot be trusted. You will also learn why we need to have the world's largest intelligence agencies independently and immediately redo all of the IPPC climate calculation work by eliminating their gross underestimation, including missing climate factors, and removing or updating all other IPCC errors.

The immediate survival of humanity is at stake. We can no longer rely upon the IPPC's climate calculations to survive.

Click here to understand the long-term history of the IPCC underestimating the consequences, timeframes, and the needed global fossil fuel reduction targets by as much as 20-40% or more.

Click here to see precisely how the IPCC "cooked the books" and grossly skewed the current IPCC global fossil fuel reduction calculations by including unproven and non-existent "carbon sucking unicorn" technology into their projections. 

Click here to see the IPCC's Perfect Day problem with its computer climate modeling.

Click here to see the eleven key climate change tipping points that have been mostly excluded from the IPCC calculations on how much fossil fuel use we must reduce each year globally. 

Click here to see the four key reasons why the IPCC's 26 global climate conferences have failed to produce results or legitimate global fossil fuel reduction targets.

Click here to see the IPCC's huge atmospheric methane calculation problem.

Because of the above information on the IPCC, it is time to recognize and publicly “reassign” the full final responsibility for creating a complete and accurate risk analysis for the current and future security threat levels of the runaway global heating extinction emergency to our respective national intelligence agencies and security agencies.

There are many other good reasons for “transferring” the critical climate change and global warming research and analysis responsibilities besides that, the IPCC has failed to carry out its mandate effectively:

1. Runaway global heating is the one common security threat to all nations, which, if not managed correctly, will eventually destabilize our global civilization. They have the best and brightest staff analysts. They also know that if they continue to fail to properly inform their politicians to protect the world, they also fail to protect their nation and their own families.

They know escalating runaway global heating is the ultimate no-win game where we will all come to a painful end if their politicians do not have all of the non-politicized facts and then act effectively to protect and preserve our common well-being. The intelligence agencies already know that if the runaway global heating extinction emergency reaches late Phase 3 or Phase 4 of the Climageddon Scenario, it is the beginning of the end of civilization itself! Click here to see the step-by-step unfolding of a runaway global heating-triggered global collapse and extinction process.

Because of the sheer power of self-preservation, it is realistic to believe many courageous individuals within our intelligence agencies will sooner or later fight through whatever bureaucratic or political resistance exists to ensure their respective politicians fully understand that climate change and runaway global heating are the largest single and escalating security threat the world faces in the 21st-century.

2. Intelligence also agencies have the mandated first and final legal responsibility to speak truth to power. Excluding global thermonuclear war, runaway global heating is the single most serious risk to both national security and humanity. Therefore, the responsibility for accurate climate and runaway global heating risk analysis and reporting to our political leaders must be “re-assigned” to respective national intelligence agencies and national security agencies. These intelligence agencies are ethically and legally obligated to present this security information clearly and simply enough to their respective politicians to fully understand the scope and scale of all risks, time frames, and consequences involved.

3. Intelligence agencies of the world have the budgets, resources, research capabilities, and expert analytic capabilities to do these annual risk analysis updates far better than an easily politically influenced and grossly underfunded agency like the IPCC. Our well-funded intelligence agencies are far more capable of accessing and hiring the best climate scientists and related researchers to review and re-quantify the escalating security threat of runaway global heating than any other existing entity or organization. 

4. The politicians of any nation whose intelligence agency has produced such reports and briefings will tend to give those reports and briefings more credibility and legitimacy than any presented by an underfunded, under-resourced, and expertise-challenged UN agency. Consequently, it would be immeasurably more difficult for our politicians to ignore these credible dire warnings.

Having climate change and runaway global heating reports produced by national intelligence agencies would also help to educate and motivate the public. The key issue is “believing” the truth that we are in the middle of a runaway global heating extinction emergency of the scope, scale, and urgency presented here. In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt used this as the catalyst to engender a US mass mobilization for warfare. Most people don’t recall that Roosevelt had begun planning and preparation for this mass mobilization and the military was ready to swing into full-scale action. Business was also ready to support the effort.

Currently, with our fractured political system and with mobilization to leave the fossil fuel era remote and still only a suggestion, the first issue is to provide the optimal credibility mechanism so that the US and the nations of the world, along with their citizenry, can “believe” that immediate mass mobilization is truly necessary. Our national intelligence and national security agencies can best substantiate the reality of the dire crisis we find ourselves in as described here and that they are the most likely organizations and entities that can be “believed.” Having these highly credible sources educate the public on why radical fossil fuel reductions must take place immediately is critical. This public education factor could also have the beneficial side effect of creating a more accurately informed citizenry, which will better hold their politicians to account for any delays in taking immediate action to resolve the runaway global heating extinction emergency.

5. Regular reports and briefings from respective intelligence agencies may well be crucial for political systems and their respective publics. For some time to come, it will likely be necessary to both combat and neutralize the anti-science, climate denial propaganda machine abundantly financed by a dying fossil fuel industry. These intelligence agency reports would also serve to validate and confirm good climate science, as well as accurate consequence prediction models and time frames. This validation and credibility factor will be indispensable to politicians as they ask their citizens to make the many costly, difficult, and radical sacrifices now needed to save humanity and civilization.

Despite the military entanglements and extreme nationalism that pervades the histories of national security and intelligence agencies, these intelligence agencies are still one of the best current mechanisms for persuading the world’s political systems and the public that the common enemy, the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency is real. There may be no more credible organizations available to illuminate the overwhelming common plight we all face.

While climate scientists and related disciplines have provided the complex information basis that asserts that the runaway global heating extinction emergency is actually at the scope, scale, and urgency explained on this website, the unfortunate reality is that the “relatively” uncomplex information related to the runaway global heating extinction emergency is both disputed and obscured by vested financial interests. Trillions of dollars are at stake for the dying fossil fuel industry, and it will be defended! Therefore, the world’s intelligence agencies are one of the best last remaining options for both correcting the IPCC’s gross underestimations and their other fossil fuel reduction target and climate consequence deadline flaws as well as for establishing high credibility for the correct climate change and runaway global heating information.

6. In general, there is sufficient intellectual capability, financial resources, and access to information, along with qualified, self-interested people within intelligence agencies, to fix the IPCC climate calculation mess.

ACTION STEP E, Part 2: Have the world’s political leaders demand annual climate change and runaway global heating updates from their respective intelligence agencies, which going forward will always include deadline-based projection scenarios that include crossing more tipping points.

In spite of the escalating climate emergency, runaway global heating update reports are far too infrequent (about once every 5 to 7 years from the IPCC). Carbon ppm levels are rising about 3 parts per million (ppm) each year when they should be dropping dramatically. Each increase in carbon ppm in our atmosphere again tolls the warning bell of IPCC failure.

Unfortunately, by continuing to rely on the IPCC for accurate climate change information, we are doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result—the classic Einsteinian definition of insanity. Our tipping point-prone escalating climate emergency is far too dangerous and moving far too fast to not have annual updates by the most qualified parties with the greatest resources and vested security interests.

We must also create a comprehensive climate change and climate change annual risk report that will include all of the deadlines for the consequences of crossing runaway global heating tipping points. By having every major intelligence agency in the world produce an annual national update on the current state of the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency for both politicians and the public, we would also be creating inherent checks and balances against underestimation, errors, or intentional deceit by rogue intelligence agencies, outlier governments,  or conflicting nongovernmental organizations.

These multiple annual reports coming from many different intelligence agencies would quickly expose any nation hiding critical runaway global heating information for their own temporary financial or other benefits. In time, these national intelligence agencies and the individuals within them would also see the many benefits of cooperating on research and sharing confirmable and comprehensive risk analyses.

Similarly, it would be against the interest of rogue national intelligence agencies to be caught hiding critical information or falsifying information for a perceived temporary national benefit when the other nations’ intelligence agencies publish their contradicting annual climate change reports. As an extra safeguard against deceptive practices, once the multiple intelligence agency annual climate change reports have been made publicly available, leading climate scientists from around the world can review them, looking for common patterns, omissions, or errors within and between these multiple intelligence agency reports.

Similar to how the scientific method works in advanced scientific systems, peer review and consolidation by non-intelligence community scientists would reveal additional valuable information that single intelligence agencies might miss or misrepresent, as well as reveal omissions that could serve to benefit any single nation inequitably. The intelligence agencies that produce the most accurate annual climate change reports will gain prestige worldwide and become the standard for credibility and reliability. This will likely result in increased funding and budget discretion for the best agencies. 

How the three extinction-evoking tipping points of carbon 425, 500, and 600 ppm create a condition where runaway global heating management becomes out of humanity's future control

What most people do not fully realize is that at some soon point after passing the first tipping point of carbon 425-450 ppm, we will no longer be able to avoid unimaginable future runaway global heating catastrophes or mass extinction. After we cross the carbon 425 ppm tipping point, our loss of control is because we will begin triggering:

1. evermore natural climate system tipping points.
2. much larger naturally occurring methane releases from the tundra, permafrost, and ocean shelves.
3. additional natural carbon releases from our deep oceans, trees, and soils. 

Eventually, these natural systems will go into positive feedback loops with each other or cross their own internal tipping points. These positive feedback loops will once again increase the average global temperature. This further triggers increased-heat caused releases of evermore naturally generated methane and carbon, which once again, further increases average global temperature in an endless cycle. Unfortunately, these increasing temperatures will go on and on until the Earth finally corrects itself hundreds or thousands of years in the future. 

Unlike humanity's remaining ability to control and regulate its use of fossil fuels, if we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point, control of our future transfers to nature's control! There will be nothing we can do to keep the other natural sources of carbon and methane from crossing their own internal tipping points or entering into positive feedback loops. Once we pass the carbon 425-450 tipping point, nature takes over and runaway global heating becomes a runaway train of ever-increasing average global temperature lasting for centuries or longer. 

Humanity's inability to control these large, complex natural systems, tipping points, and positive feedback loops IS the most crucial reason why we cannot fail to meet the 2025 global targets. If we do not meet the 2025 targets, as soon as 2025, we will let any remaining control of the runaway global heating extinction emergency slip out of our hands for many human lifespans. 

We do not have until 2050, 2040, or 2035 to make the required global fossil fuel reductions to save ourselves as many governments and fossil fuel companies want you to believe. We also do not have until even 2030 to make the required fossil fuel reductions as many prominent but ill-informed environmental groups want you to believe.

We have only until 2025 to make the required global fossil fuel reductions to prevent going over the carbon 425-450 ppm and losing all meaningful control of our runaway global heating future. 

This extinction emergency creates a series of compelling 600 trillion dollar questions hanging in the air: (600 trillion dollars plus estimates the total runaway global heating damage costs that we will incur if some of us survive.)

1. Why aren't the brightest minds in the world's intelligence agencies screaming at their national politicians about meeting the 2025 targets and this nearly out-of-control extinction emergency?

2. Why aren't they making our politicians understand this is our last chance window of control to keep a dark and destructive new Pandora from getting out of her box? 

3. Why aren't our intelligence agencies (as well as the world's wealthiest individuals and corporations) getting our politicians to realize that they have exposed ALL of humanity to an imminent and irrational extinction? (More will be said about this in the next section.)

The above-listed natural system climate tipping points and positive feedback loops are complicated, but we have further simplified their descriptions and interactions on this page. This page will also help you understand how the increasing methane releases from the tundra, permafrost, and ocean shelves will occur and how massive new carbon releases from our deep oceans, trees, and soils will occur.

The extreme and imminent threat that humanity has only faced in one other area

Because runaway global heating and its tipping points are happening at a global level, we find ourselves at an extreme and unconscionable threat level. In just a few decades, the threat of the runaway global heating extinction emergency will wreak its havoc on almost everyone.

The current runaway global heating threat is extreme because:

1. Its consequences are already intensifying in severity, frequency, and scale and will soon begin to do so exponentially.
2. Its tipping points will continue to be crossed at faster and faster rates. These crossed tipping points will produce more heat increases even faster, and massive climate, biological, and human system crashes.

The time nearness of this threat is imminent because our emergency is developing on a timescale of just a few decades. This is very unlike the centuries or millennia of developmental timescales which have occurred in each of Earth's five previous major extinction events. 

Our current extinction threat is no longer just possible or probable. Once we cross the carbon 425 ppm climate cliff, the extinction threat becomes near-certain. When we pass the carbon 500 and 600 ppm tipping points, it IS a certain human, animal, and biological extinction catastrophe. 

Once we go over the carbon 425 -450 ppm tipping point, our extinction threat level rises to a level comparable to the threat level of a highly probable global nuclear war occurring soon. This is why the extreme threat level is merited. The accumulated destruction caused by runaway global heating over the coming decades has the full capability of equaling or exceeding the devastation, suffering, and death of a global nuclear war. 

Our politicians have ignored 35 years of scientific warnings. Our politicians have utterly failed to do their jobs. Our politicians have failed to protect us and manage this imminent and extreme threat, which not only threatens their nation and citizens, but also the survival of humanity and civilization itself.  

Our politicians have successfully managed the global nuclear threat for the last 75 years. They also have done almost nothing over the last 35 years relating to the equal and eventually even higher risk of runaway global heating extinction. Our runaway global heating extinction emergency will unfold as the "ultimate disruptor" over the next 3 to 5 decades. Already it is causing considerable global financial loss, death, and hardship. 

While you are legitimately panicking over all of this bad news, never forget that only by meeting the 2025 targets can we prevent Earth's sixth great extinction. Never forget that the runaway global heating extinction emergency is not just the greatest disruptor of the 21st century, it is also the ultimate no-win game!

If you still have any confusion on how crossing runaway global heating tipping points will lead us to mass extinction within your lifetime, please click here for detailed global warming tipping point documentation. (Click here for information to help you overcome your legitimate panic or remember this link as you read the next even worse news section.)

The Death and Extinction Spiral We Enter if We Miss the 2025 Global Fossil Fuel Reduction Targets

If we fail to hit our 2025 targets, the annual global fossil fuel reduction targets for the following year(s) will have to be increased even more than our already near unbearably 2025 targets. Consequently, these targets will be far less likely to be achieved in the following years!

If we fail, in addition to dramatically increasing the already high probability of the "game over" conditions and crossed tipping points described in this document happening, the following will also most probably happen:

1. We will have to shift even more resources and people onto the world's emergency backup plan (below,) to prepare for and adapt to the next wave of runaway global heating's unavoidable and escalating consequences.

2. As we continue to fail to hit our even more severe fossil fuel reduction targets (needed to compensate for missing the 2025 targets,) we will be forced to once again shift even more resources and people onto the world's emergency backup plan and operations until most of the world's resources and people become tied up in either recovering from current runaway global heating damages or preparing for the next wave of damages trying to avoid extinction.

Click here to see our new runaway global heating and climate change Doomsday Clock.

Part 2 Our Now Critical "Plan B" Government Emergency Backup Plan Actions: 

Special notice: it is essential to realize that everything described below, which our governments must do as their internal emergency backup plan to save at least some part of humanity, must also be done while our governments are also simultaneously completing all of the global fossil fuel reduction actions described above!

 

Here are the critical adapt and survive Plan B emergency backup actions for the World's Governments Because We Have Already Entered Into the Era of Mutually Assured Climate Extinction.

Key Guiding Principle: We need to Save and Salvage Whatever We Can, before it is too Late!

We will miss our required 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets if our politicians and governments keep going as they are now. These missed targets will cause humanity to unavoidably lose half of the global population by mid-century. This mass die-off will primarily be because of our politicians' and governments' 60 years of inaction or ineffective action on fixing escalating global heating emergency. 

Unfortunately, even if we come close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets but do not get close enough, we will still face a highly probable near-total extinction by 2070-2080. 

We need to prepare ourselves NOW! The unavoidable deaths of half of humanity by mid-century will produce widespread social, economic, and political chaos illustrated by the many climate change consequences and processes described in painful detail on this page. 

We now have to deal with the painful reality that humanity may fail to save much of itself from the climate change extinction emergency. Part of that possibility is facing the fact that we currently are doing very poorly in getting close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.

What this means on a national level is that we need a national-level emergency backup plan or a PLAN B, as it is often called. 

On a national level, as part of our Plan B, we must prepare, adapt, and save and salvage whatever we can before it is too late. We need to build some level of near-total to total extinction resilience quickly. (Ideally, we should be building an international extinction resiliency, but we currently have no genuinely effective international global governance that could do this for us.)

At some point, our politicians and governments will finally begin to do everything they can to come as close to the 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets as fast as they can. Still, unfortunately, at the same time, they must simultaneously also manage the current runaway global heating process of multiple threats and multiple consequences.

Our governments can enact a climate change extinction prevention process and Plan B by moving critical resources, technology, infrastructure, and at-risk populations into the global warming safer zones as soon as possible. But this must be done wisely, equitably, and orderly way.

The following governmental-level Plan B resilience section describes the many actions our governments must manage for a large portion of humanity to survive. The genuinely shocking and painful measures below are necessary because, as things stand now, the odds are not very good that we will get very close to the last-chance 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets for quite a while. This failure to come close to the legitimate reduction targets means that the percentage of human survivors will be pretty low.

For our politicians and governments to effectively manage a global warming-driven extinction and collapse process, they also will have to evolve new forms of international and global governance and cooperation quickly. This new global governance would need powers to verify, enforce or punish any nation that tried to game or cheat making the complex global Plan B changes required to save whatever portion of humanity and civilization we can for the future. 

Only our national governments collaborating in tight alignment can slow down our current runaway global heating enough to allow more people to survive, live longer, and live more stably. But, unfortunately, the probability of our governments cooperating internationally like this before it is too late to save humanity from near-total to total extinction is very low. 

Please click here to read the many near-insurmountable challenges our national governments must overcome to save humanity from the current climate change-driven extinction process.

Please click here to view a detailed description of the many climate change-driven step-by-step processes of mass human extinction.

 

 

This Plan B government-level resilience backup plan will prepare our nations and humanity for the worst possible outcomes. At least, with this governmental level, emergency backup Plan B successfully executed, we can save and salvage more of humanity. Then, hopefully, those survivors can re-populate the earth and preserve the best of our civilization. 

If you still doubt that immediately beginning a government-driven and well-resourced Plan B backup and resiliency plan against climate change failure is necessary, please read this page.

 

 

 

The key runaway global heating government actions to save and salvage what we can while we still have time

Global warming and these other 11 poorly managed critical global challenges we currently face are most likely getting a lot worse before they get better. While the actions below are directly focused on the more immediate threat of the runaway global heating emergency, indirectly, they too will also be helpful to make things more survivable as our other critical global challenges continue to worsen.) 

Action Step 1. Our governments must begin moving critical resources, technology, key infrastructure, and our younger at-risk populations into the global warming safer zones in a wise, equitable, and well-managed way. 

For our long-term future and safety, essential resources, infrastructure, and crucial genetic and social diversity transfers will need to be executed simultaneously as the other individual and business action steps (above) are being done. If things continue to go wrong as they are now, this government action step may turn out to be the most important action taken for the future of humanity and for preserving civilization.

Of all of the things to be done in this step, working out a migration plan for a fair and equitable migration lottery for all those younger individuals who have not already migrated will be the most challenging. This equitable migration management is critical because of the poor soils and shorter growing seasons above the 45th parallel north or below the 45th parallel south.

Those above the 45th parallel north or below the 45th parallel south areas of deficient soils and inadequate sunlight will not be able to grow enough food to feed our current human population. Because of this food production limitation, a fair lottery will be essential to the survival of humanity and civilization.

Even before this lottery begins, our best scientists must determine how much food can be grown in those global warming-safe areas and what the maximum allowable population should be. These calculations are based on the total amount of food needed for that existing population while maintaining adequate food reserves for unplanned and unexpected contingencies. Once they have those calculations, they can set initial and/or adjust lottery migration allocations as conditions change. 

Even before the final number of people that the remaining global warming safe zones will support with adequate food production, we must also mobilize the necessary agricultural resources to scale up food production but only in sustainable and non-fossil fuel fertilizer-dependent ways. This intense scaling-up of sustainable agricultural production output will allow for the rapid increase of new climate migrants (climagees) coming to those safer zones as well as to compensate for the generally more deficient soils, reduced sunlight and shorter growing season found there.

One more thing must be said about the migration lottery. It must be almost entirely for individuals under 30 or those older than 40 with young children. The older generations have failed to pass on a livable legacy to the younger generations. The older generations have also lived far longer and more stable lives than the younger X, Y, and Z generations ever will. Therefore, generational justice demands that the most survivable remaining areas go to the younger generations.

The lottery cannot be hijacked or dominated by wealthy individuals, politicians, high-level government agency staff, corporations, or any nation. No special interest group or nation can unjustly control or determine who can migrate based on privilege, position, wealth, politics, or any other national, cultural, or social categorization.

Politicians and the ultra-wealthy top 5% of the world's citizens especially must be excluded from this lottery because, through either commissions or omissions, they have allowed the climate change extinction emergency to grow continually worse for over 60 years. They had the power of influence to stop the climate nightmare, and they did not. Climate change justice demands they be left behind. 

If it is not a fair and just lottery, based upon what is essential for humanity and civilization to survive and an equitable representation of all of the categories mentioned above, then those left behind will fight to the death and eventually bring about the end of everything. This new lottery failure conflict will occur because those who feel the lottery was unfair will invade the safe zones. They will use whatever nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare technology has been left behind in unsafe zones.

Those with any decision power over who is allowed to migrate can not be allowed to use their political, military, or financial positions, advantages, or privileges to place themselves, their families, friends, allies, or business interests in any better position than any other individual citizen in the unsafe zones in these lotteries. 

Any random lottery winner selection methodology must draw only from a pool of the most qualified climagees with the essential skills and sufficient genetic diversity for the new world we will be living in. It must also have independent safeguards to prevent fraud, bias, and any form of selection favoritism.

This lottery must also allow for the following types of necessary diversity; genetic, national, racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual orientation, gender identity, rural/urban/indigenous, and rich/poor. Communities most affected by global warming damage, which also have contributed the least to the climate change emergency, should receive special consideration if justice is to be served.

Having enough genetic diversity will be extremely important because most of humanity by mid-century will eventually die. This will occur as we approach the final global warming extinction tipping point of carbon 600 ppm. 

Because of the very limited numbers of additional individuals that the global warming safer areas can sustain and feed the lottery selection for legal migration to the global warming safer zones must be just and fair to be viewed as credible and so that it has the best chance to work. 

There are many good reasons for executing this last chance to save humanity and civilization migration, lottery, and infrastructure transfer backup plan simultaneously with the other action steps described at the top of this page. Here are just a few reminders:

First, we are fighting for the very survival of humanity over the next 30 to 50+ years. Most, if not all, of humanity and civilization will end if we fail to slow and lessen global warming enough not to cross carbon 600 ppm and we fail to move our critical infrastructure and essential populations to the far north or the far south in time. 

Secondly, Our fossil fuel "bill of consequences" has come due, and there's no way to escape it. We now have to deal with the horrible accumulated consequences of the fossil fuel carbon pollution of our atmosphere for the last 200 years (since the industrial revolution began. ) Additionally, we also have to deal with the extra accumulating consequences from fossil fuel burning over the next 30-50+ years where we will undoubtedly reach the carbon 500 ppm level (and most likely reach carbon 600 ppm extinction level.) 

Thirdly, the fossil fuel pollution that we have now and will continue to put into our atmosphere for the next 30-50+ years will last for centuries to thousands of years! If we stay on our current path of "too little fossil fuel reductions too late," things will not be better for those who are lucky enough to survive. Our children and future generations will curse us for our selfishness and blind stupidity. They will suffer for many centuries before their climate will re-stabilize and carbon in parts per million level to drop back down to the pre-industrial safer carbon level of 350-270 ppm. (As mentioned earlier, we are now at about carbon 420 ppm adding about three additional carbon ppm each year.)

Forthy, the amount of emergency adaptation work needed and the short amount of time available (from now until about 2031 as things get progressively to exponentially much worse) makes this immediate adaptation and preparation and planning an imperative! Adapting and moving all necessary critical resources, technology, and infrastructure will take a lot of time. This mass transfer means moving them into the safer areas near or above the 45th parallel north or near or below the 45th parallel south. (You do not want to move much above the 55th parallel north or much above the 55th parallel south.)

And finally, these transfers will be a massive undertaking, requiring new levels of cooperation between nations never seen before.

This mass population transfer and the demands for climate justice also mean:

1. Moving willing people that are already suffering and are the most vulnerable today to the worst global warming consequences. This initial series of mass migrations must be done without panic and in a well-organized and well-supported way. These first migration relocations also will be a necessary rehearsal for the additional millions of people that will need to be relocated each year as global warming worsens and makes growing food and surviving impossible in many areas.

2. Moving hundreds of millions of willing people (eventually as many as several billion) from the most unsafe global warming zones into the safer zones. This mass migration will be fraught with challenges that will require profound international cooperation at unprecedented levels. This ongoing year-by-year migration will, by necessity and urgency, become the greatest migration in human history.

Without question, this "Great Global Migration" needs to begin now! If we wait until it's too late, there will be panic, chaos, and severe local, regional, and national conflicts, if not all-out international war, as the remaining trapped populations and any lottery losers desperately try by any means possible to migrate far north or far south.

People will eventually realize that what is happening today is not random, lousy weather. They will finally see our worsening climate as an increasing pattern of storms and other extreme weather consequences regularly increasing in frequency, severity, and scale that has not been seen for thousands of years, if ever. Once they realize this, many more will migrate because they finally realize "it is migrate or die."

By about 2029, we estimate that at least 2-5% of the world's population will have figured out that the wild climate fluctuations and seasonal extremes they are witnessing are not random or freak occurrences. They will have figured out that the climate is destabilizing steadily and rapidly. They, too, will realize the climate catastrophes we are already experiencing are showing a clear pattern of ever-increasing severity, frequency, and scale (the size of the area they are covering). 

Once these hundreds of millions of people realize they need to get out soon or get caught in the suffering, chaos, and death of crashing and soaring real estate, economies, and market prices (depending upon which area you're leaving or moving to,) they will migrate, and they will migrate desperate and fast! 

Once these hundreds of millions migrate, others will see and hear about it. Then those people will begin migrating so they do not get caught with no place to move to or too few resources left to get there.

To avoid the potential chaos of the Great Global Migration not well managed by cooperating world governments, our governments need to act NOW and not ten years from now. 

As part of necessary climate justice, those nations which have caused the most fossil fuel burning atmospheric pollution and damage, which has caused global warming, must also take in the most climate migrants to the highest level that farming in that nation will support. 

Lastly, to make the new migration lottery system work effectively, individuals already living near or above the 45th parallel north or near or above the 45th parallel south cannot and should not be removed to make room for new climagees. This existing resident removal strategy would only cause more conflict, delay, and confusion, further complicating an already massively complex undertaking.

Action Step 2: Pass new laws to prevent all unfair profiteering by any individual, corporation, or nation seeking to exploit the extinction emergency or the mass migrations to safer areas. It is critical to set severe penalties and to remove all profit from any entity charging more than the reasonable pre-emergency prices for food, global warming safer lands, or anything else. 

Actions Step 3: Moving critical infrastructure also includes moving the world's artistic, architectural, and cultural heritage from unsafe global warming zones to safer zones for preservation. The best of our art, architecture, and cultures also makes us human. These things contain critical elements of our history and who we are that will help keep us sane while going through this catastrophe.

Action Step 4: Move all needed global plant and animal diversity into the safest remaining areas.

Many needed plants and animals will be unable to migrate on their own in time to avoid extinction. Almost in Noah's ark fashion, our governments must begin cataloging and making provisions to get all needed global plants and animals into the safer areas where they can survive and may be required.

Action Step 5: Educate and incentivize the citizens of every nation to begin their emergency preparations and backup plans. To be successful in saving the future, it is not only governments that must start acting in this area. Simultaneously, every citizen also needs to be responsible for themselves and become a part of the greatest mobilization of resources and people in human history. It is unlikely any government will have enough resources to protect all of its citizens. That is why you must begin your own Plan B preparations and planning. (The Job One plan has specific steps to help you do this. Click here to begin this section.)

Action Step 6: We must ensure that ALL nuclear reactors, nuclear and biological weapons, and toxic chemical manufacturing sites within all unsafe global warming zones are secured.

Secured means that all remaining more stable governments have an adequately resourced and ready backup plan to manage these contingencies as the less stable governments and economies collapse in the unsafe zones. 

As global warming worsens inside the global warming unsafe zones, the political systems and nations will destabilize, and most of them will collapse. Once those political systems collapse, there will no longer be stable and organized procedures, staffing, or resources for ensuring that:

1. any nuclear reactors within those areas do not meltdown and go critical or that, 

2. nuclear or biological weapons within those areas are not stolen or triggered or that, 

3. toxic chemical manufacturing sites within those areas do not leak.

If any of this happened, it would not only threaten the survival of that particular area, region, or the nations within that unsafe zone but also the whole world's survival. 

Take a moment to imagine the hundreds of nuclear reactors in the global warming unsafe zones becoming new Chernobyls and Fukagimas one after another. There would be no place on earth nor any bunker that would keep you safe from this massive amount of radiation circling the planet for decades to hundreds to thousands of years. 

Now take a moment to imagine all of the biological and chemical weapons and toxic chemical manufacturing sites in the unsafe global warming zones becoming compromised and leaking their slow and painful death out into the world. Surviving this would be a living hell and nearly impossible.

The preceding worst-case nuclear, biological, and chemical catastrophe will likely happen if the nations of the world do not preemptively cooperate in this additional emergency preparation area. The world's nations need to realize that our escalating climate change emergency is a no-win game unless they collaborate and make the best possible decisions to preserve the human species and our civilization.

If the governments of the world do not thoroughly do this action step two, there is no rational or reasonable hope that even the smallest part of the human race will survive to save civilization and repopulate the earth within the global warming safer zones. 

Action Step 7: Each government must create multiple archives containing all human knowledge needed for the post-collapse and post-dark age periods. These multiple archives must survive the post-collapse and probable new dark ages for decades to centuries.

These archives will be essential to the survivors for rebuilding the world. The hope is that when survivors rebuild, they will use the archived knowledge and the many painful lessons of the great extinction and collapse to create a Great Global Rebirth.

Governments must also begin planning how to make the post-collapse dark ages as short as possible. The longer the post-collapse dark age period lasts, the lower the probability much of humanity will survive it. The longer the new dark age lasts, the likelihood of this tragedy empowering the Great Global Rebirth also diminishes radically. 

Action Step 8: While the governments of the world are doing all of the action steps in 1-6 above, it is critically important that they also engage in the radical fossil fuel reduction action steps described in Part 3 of the Job One Plan. These additional steps are absolutely essential to slow down global warming enough so we still have adequate time left to prepare, adapt, and migrate so at least some of humanity will survive.

Never forget that getting close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets is our last best chance to prevent reaching the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point. Unfortunately, it is highly probable that we will cross the carbon 600 ppm final extinction-level tipping point.

(Please see this page if you have doubts about why it is highly unlikely that we will reach the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. This page will also help explain why our world leaders must enact this governmental-level emergency backup Plan B while passing the other action steps listed here in the Job One Plan.) 

Action Step 9: As soon as possible, our governments must honestly inform their citizens that the climate consequence-driven extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century is now unavoidable. 

They must honestly let their citizens know that we must now make great sacrifices to save the other half of humanity because of their own six decades of inaction or ineffective climate action. Unless the public understands what has happened and why they may be unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to save the younger generations. 

To inform their citizens thoroughly and adequately, our politicians must now tell them about the ten most important facts about our climate and runaway global heating condition. 

Giving the public this horrible news will also allow them more time to prepare physically, emotionally, and spiritually as best as possible. If done correctly and soon, it should help prevent public panic and inspire a new level of global cooperation to save the younger X, Y, Z, and A generations.

Additionally, any politician who failed to effectively cut fossil fuel subsidies over the last six decades or order the correct critical fossil fuel reductions must voluntarily exclude and bar themselves (and their families) from any climate migration or enhanced safety program benefit in any global heating safer area. This justice-inspired benefit restriction is because these politicians are the most responsible for failing to do their jobs concerning the decades-long escalation of the climate and global heating extinction threat. And finally,

Action Step 10: Our governments must also convince the older generations to help finance the younger generations getting prepared or migrating and rebuilding in new, safer locations.

It is the right thing to do for those generations who have not had as much time to live as the older generations. It is also the right thing to do because the older generations have a greater responsibility for restitution. This greater restitution and climate justice responsibility is valid because, despite six decades of valid scientific warnings, they allowed the runaway global heating extinction emergency to occur on their watch. 

Action Step 11: As a crucial part of the governmental Plan B, all major fossil fuel-polluting nations must begin to educate their citizens about their obligations under the principles of climate justice. They must thoroughly educate their citizens about the sacrifices that most nations in global warming safer zones will have to make because of climate justice factors. 

It is climate justice for the nations that have created the most fossil fuel pollution (mostly the northern and developed countries) to take in the desperate victims of their fossil fuel pollution acts (mainly refugees from the southern and under-developed countries.) However, unless global warming safer nations actively begin this climate justice educational process today, there will be tremendous turmoil and conflict. This conflict will occur as hundreds of millions (to billions) of "migrate or die" climate refugees mass migrate out of the global warming high-risk southern areas into safer northern regions and nations.

Action Step 11: Humanity must simultaneously work to discover ALL of the deepest causes of the climate change extinction emergency and then begin fixing every cause of the climate change emergency to prevent such a global catastrophe from ever occurring again.

Action Step 12: Humanity must learn to live in a new sustainable relationship with Earth's existing resources and ecosystems.

A smaller humanity will need to learn how to live with far less so those who survive may thrive again.

Mini-Summary

Never forget that the critical deadline prioritized actions needed for this Plan B can only successfully occur if the nations near, above, or below the 45th parallel north and the 45th parallel south work together and cooperate with all of the other nations within the runaway global heating unsafe zones. If fear takes hold, and the global warming safer nations close or restrict borders and do not cooperate, the conflicts/wars that will occur between the unsafe zones and the safe zones will most likely also end humanity. Humanity will find its bitter end in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare or the other toxic meltdown consequences described above. (For more on this see the later phases of the runaway global heating Climageddon Scenario.) 

We do need to begin transferring willing populations and critical infrastructure from high risks unsafe zones to low-risk safer zones immediately! We need to start to put the resources in place and negotiate the treaties (or whatever resources and manpower is necessary,) to ensure that the nuclear sites, the biological and chemical weapons sites, and the toxic chemical manufacturing sites in the unsafe zones go on being correctly maintained no matter how bad it gets in those zones.

There is much to transfer, build, or prepare. There is little time left to save the even smallest part of humanity and our civilization. Only by immediately beginning the above governmental emergency backup plan steps do we have any reasonable hope that human life and civilization will go on.

There are additional good reasons for using the least optimistic predictions for any backup plan as well as for recovery or long-term survival plans, they are:

1. The many serious errors and underestimation problems in runaway global heating prediction scenarios (click here for all the details or see Chapter 7, Part 1 on IPCC underestimation in Climageddon book).

2. The sudden, large-scale unpredictability that each additional crossed tipping point creates. (See this tipping point page or the tipping point chapter in Climageddon. Also, see the updated Climageddon Scenario details here. 

3. We will be very, very lucky if the worst we get is anything close to only the 'IPCC's current least optimistic consequence and timeframe projections! And,

4. If you are involved in mid to long-range planning in any industry, you will probably lose your job if you fail to adequately plan for the new realities of the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency. (Please note that implementing the above backup plan also means our local and regional business planners, city and zoning planners, long-term corporate and, national governmental planners must begin radically restructuring their current 5, 10, 25, and 50-year plans. This time they need to use the least optimistic and far more honest climate prediction scenarios [found on this website here as well as in the new Climageddon book.] 

For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the headquarters of big tech corporations like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Apple, now have to readjust their long-term operational or relocation plans to deal with their low-lying international headquarters facing as much as 13 feet [3.9 meters] of sea-level rise by 2100. This means these billion-dollar high-tech Silicon Valley headquarters buildings will be experiencing first-floor flooding within as little as 20 to 30 years. [A worst-case but far more realistic scenario of a 10-foot, 3-meter rise by 2050 was projected by James Hansen's newest research, with the additional 3-feet, 0.9 meters accounting for by coincident king tides and storm surges.)

Never forget that unless we get the governments of the world to cooperate and manage action step 2 above, there is vastly smaller hope humanity will survive no matter how well prepared we are.

Click here to see our new runaway global heating and climate change Doomsday Clock.

Putting it All Together

Why only top-down government-driven mobilization is now essential for us to survive runaway global heating

It should be clear by now that to be successful and reach the  2025 global fossil fuel targets, we need to effect massive, high-speed change through top-down driven action. We cannot resolve this climate change extinction emergency and save ourselves in time without a mass mobilization of the world through:

1. government and/or internationally driven, verifiable, and enforceable laws and treaties,
2. massive public education programs at all levels to convincingly explain why painful changes are required. These programs would also explain the fantastic survival, health, and economic benefits that our transition to clean green energy will produce.

This does not mean that only top-down critical deadline prioritized action is required to achieve the 2025 targets and the Job One Plan goals. Some public bottom-up individual and group actions will also be needed to get things happening on the 2025 targets. 

Individuals and groups like Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion are already a forceful bottom-up push. This is because they honestly warn that we are facing imminent mass human, animal, and biological extinction. Unlike many other environmental groups, they promote the required radical global fossil fuel reductions at or close to the 2025 targets.

Helpful bottom-up actions will also involve the public demanding changes be made by those politicians with real influence. And finally, once we end the runaway global heating extinction emergency, bottom-up actions will also include doing whatever is necessary to maintain a stable climate.

The window of opportunity for preventing near-total extinction is extremely short. This forces us to emphasize the top-down approach using the legitimate power of governments to verify and enforce compliance with any new laws or treaties necessary to save us in time.

Here is why the time is short. It will take about 5 years to reach the 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets deadline. It will take another 15-20 years to cross the mass extinction carbon 500 ppm tipping point where all ice on earth will begin to melt. Once we pass carbon 500 ppm, it is near certain we will cross the final carbon 600 ppm mass extinction level tipping point. Because of these critical deadlines and tipping points, it primarily will be by top-down, government-driven action based on the necessary laws or treaties, that will give us the required enforcement, and verification of global fossil-fuel reductions that are needed to save us in time.

Relying mostly upon educating and then changing individual behavior from the bottom up or even in groups is too little too late and is doomed to failure. This is also because there is not anywhere close to enough time remaining to break through the world's massive runaway global heating ignorance and the resistance held by almost all of the population toward almost all of the radical reductions we all will be required to make. Only fast change derived from the legal, structural, and cultural power of universally enforced and verified national and international laws or treaties has any hope of being successful and overcoming ignorance and resistance with so little time left. 

The pure beauty of enacting the needed laws or treaties is that they have the best chance of creating the greatest mass mobilization of national and international resources in human history! They should be highly effective because of their market-force financial and non-financial incentives, dividends, disincentives, and penalties. Enacting new global warming laws or treaties responds effectively to the uncomfortable reality that only top-down regulatory action coordinated with a top-down global public education program will be able to save us in time.

The good news here is that at all levels, rational governments, corporations, and individuals will rapidly reorganize themselves to take advantage of the dividends and incentives. They will also organize themselves to avoid disincentives and penalties.

These incentives and disincentives will directly reduce both national and international fossil fuel atmospheric carbon pollution at the fastest possible rate. Because of these enforceable laws, cooperation can be rewarded at every level and failure to cooperate can be appropriately penalized at every level.

Other challenges regarding enacting all of the needed new laws or treaties

These are some additional challenges:

1. All of these various types of international and national laws or treaties in the different categories must be enacted together to create an effective, comprehensive, and integrated systemic solution to runaway global heating. If laws or treaties in only one or two of the above categories are passed, it will greatly slow the pace of solving our runaway global heating extinction emergency, as well as seriously imperil the probability of achieving success.
   
   
2. There will likely also have to be some emergency deficit spending by many governments in order to make the transition from fossil fuels to green energy to prevent unthinkable disasters. Deficit spending is not a dirty word or an unusual or unproven thing. Deficit spending was used in World War II and specifically in the United States to help save a great portion of the world in a previously declared State of Emergency called war. Deficit spending is currently happening in almost every nation in the world. If deficit spending were such a morally or financially bad thing, the greatest portion of the population would not be given credit cards and most of the world governments wouldn't be able to function.  When one accepts the reality that this emergency is far worse in total eventual damage than World War II and parallels the global extinction threat level of nuclear war, deficit spending by our governments is not only appropriate, it is demanded. If our governments do not deficit spend in this even greater emergency, as they did in World War II, it would be a gross dereliction of their legal and moral responsibilities to protect the lives, livelihoods, and futures of the members of their nations.

3. There will be horrendous side effects as we radically reduce global fossil fuel use in the form of The Great Dying. Agriculture without fossil fuels for equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides will mean massive reductions in global food production. Initially, small organic farms will not be able to provide enough food for the world's current population much less the projected additional billions over the next 30 years. There also will be many other unforeseen and horrendous side effects and consequences from the rapid global transition off of fossil fuels.

   There will be mass starvation when we rapidly come off our current fossil fuel-empowered agricultural system. 50% or more of the human population could perish in the Great Dying and in the rocky transition from fossil fuel use to other substitutes.

   Paradoxically, as we radically cut global fossil fuel use, we also may be finally creating the motivating conditions to get humanity to live within the limits of the carrying capacity of the earth. Ironically, the massive fossil fuel reductions may also teach us that infinite and continual growth economics is simply not possible in a finite space such as the earth.

   No matter how bad the many side effects and consequences of the radical reduction in global fossil fuel use are, they will ultimately be far, far less destructive, and less painful than the loss of most (if not all,) of humanity as well as our civilization.

The challenge of our fossil-fuel-free future

We must eliminate the use of almost all fossil fuels to reach the 2025 targets and then eventually begin the process of drawing atmospheric carbon levels back down to safe levels (carbon 325-350 ppm). We also must be functioning worldwide on green energy generation, almost exclusively, except for a few special exemption areas. This will require nothing less than a heroic effort and a massive runaway global heating extinction emergency mobilization. It will also create a great sense of moral purpose because we know that to save humanity and our civilization this is what must be done. Because of the scale and immediacy of this emergency, it is to be expected that both fact and fear are utilized to help motivate us to be successful.

The runaway global heating extinction emergency will inevitably force us into new levels of local, national, and international cooperation

In the past, humanity has cooperated successfully on critical climate issues. We have successfully created international laws, treaties, and agreements regarding the pollution of the atmosphere caused by the gas/liquid refrigerant Freon®. Freon was formerly used in refrigeration and air conditioners. When it leaked out, it rapidly degraded the ozone layer of the atmosphere and created holes in it. Those rapidly-widening holes in the atmosphere’s protective layer of ozone would have greatly increased the incidence of skin cancer in the areas directly beneath them.

We acted quickly because of the escalating danger of a “hole in the ozone” that would have eventually harmed almost everyone on earth. If we did this successfully before with Freon’s pollution, we should be able to do it again with the fossil fuel industries' toxic carbon and methane pollution!

The solution to reversing runaway global heating depends upon radical and immediate global changes in how we produce energy, how we pollute the atmosphere, and how we cooperate collectively as humans. These needed changes are far larger and needed far faster than any change of this scale has ever been previously achieved in human history. Consequently, resolving runaway global heating will require more of Earth's inhabitants to mobilize and cooperatively work together than has ever occurred in the past.

The silver lining bonus for trying to survive runaway global heating is that human global cooperation itself will have to rise to a new and higher evolutionary level that has never been seen before!

To survive the threat of escalating runaway global heating, which transcends national interests and national borders, we will be forced to create a new and greater international cooperative union of nations and peoples that will form an enforcement and verification-empowered global governance well beyond any existing international cooperative structures like the United Nations. This itself would also be a huge evolutionary advantage and advance for humanity!

“The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation—a force for construction and destruction.”    — Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University

One small act you can do right now

If you have not done so already, there is one quick, small act you can do immediately. Click here to sign the emergency meeting petition calling for an immediate gathering of world leaders to resolve the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency and enact steps like those called for in the Job One Plan above. We need to do what we can to get this emergency meeting going fast!  Your next vaccination

How to Get the Above Critical Deadline Prioritized Government-Driven Actions Actually Done

Dealing with the Emotional Impact of all this Difficult and Bad News

Because most of you who have understood the previous difficult actions (who do not fall into a defensive denial,) will naturally and appropriately feel shocked, sad, angry, or even betrayed because we have waited so long to get started on them, the most logical and the best thing to do to deal with those often overwhelming feelings is to continue to work for "the best" while you prepare for "the worst," in case we fail. What this means is that you will need to focus as much as your energy and resources on just two main action strategies:

a. Get busy on getting the 2025 reduction targets met by getting our governments enacting and enforcing the laws needed to reach the 2025 targets.

b. Get busy with emergency preparations and adaptations for you, your family, and/or your business for many of the now unavoidable consequences that will be arriving soon. (Click here to begin this process.)

These two action-based strategies will minimize the natural feelings of being shocked, sad, angry, or feeling completely betrayed by our current world leaders until you can get additional emotional support or assistance from other outsides sources or from working through the Kubler Ross model on your own.

There is only one thing we can always be certain of in this emergency. No matter what, and in spite of all of the challenges and bad outcomes that are possible or probable, the single constant truth for the best possible runaway global heating outcome for humanity is that: 

a. the faster and more we reduce global fossil fuel use the more people that will survive to carry on humanity, life, and our beautiful civilization into the future, and

b. the faster and more we reduce global fossil fuel use the fewer future generations will suffer far from the ever-increasing sequence of runaway global heating consequences and disasters.

Help us get the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction goals met by signing the runaway global heating extinction emergency petition now.

 

Master Summary

• We will not be successful unless the government-driven actions above are extinction-preventing critical deadline prioritized!
• We must never cross the final catastrophic carbon 600 ppm tipping point or it is the end of humanity and civilization!
• Which would you rather learn about: what is easy and makes you feel comfortable, or what will save you and your family’s lives and future?

• The new and ongoing risk analysis and reports for runaway global heating must be assigned solely to those most responsible, those most qualified, and those whose advice has the highest levels of rational influence on our national politicians. Ongoing risk analysis for runaway global heating must be wholly placed in the intelligence agencies of every nation—the correct place of highest responsibility for all national threats and risk analysis.

• We cannot resolve runaway global heating in time to save ourselves unless we can mass mobilize the world from the top down through new verifiable and enforceable national and international global warming reduction laws or treaties.

• We need to come to the collective realization there is no such thing as an allowable amount of carbon and methane emissions anymore or any remaining carbon budget that we can safely burn. Today, there are only damaging carbon and methane emissions to our health and future. Climate catastrophes are already occurring with increasing frequency, scale, and severity at as little as 1°-1.5° degree Celsius (1.8°-2.7° Fahrenheit) of temperature increase.

• The new national and international Fee and Dividend laws or treaties will help the world to change its fossil fuel behavior at the greatest possible speed.

• We cannot resolve runaway global heating in time unless we mobilize the world through the proven power of financial incentives and penalties. Financial incentives and penalties are time-proven facilitators for rapid and radical behavioral change.

• Without the new global warming remedial laws or treaties having strong, enforceable penalties, some nations or corporations will always cheat. Without strong penalties, cheating will spread into the nations and corporations that would be unfairly penalized by the economic advantages accruing to non-compliant nations and corporations. If this is allowed to happen without sanction, we will not solve the runaway global heating extinction emergency in time.

• Among the proposed global warming laws or treaties that need to be passed, the verification and penalty enforcement mechanism laws or treaties are the most critical to making all of the other global warming reduction laws or treaties work.

• New, enforceable, and verifiable international and national laws or treaties to end global warming are the most critical maximum fulcrum and leverage point within the Job One Plan government-driven actions to ensure ending runaway global heating in time. Getting these new laws or treaties passed is by far the most important action we must achieve to survive.

• We have a choice: immediately decommission the world's largest conglomerate, the fossil fuel industry, with all of its related painful costs and problems—or lose humanity and civilization. We either go all-in on green energy generation, or we watch everything we love suffer and be destroyed.

• By completing the Job One Plan action steps as soon as is technologically possible, we preserve an honest and rational hope of still saving ourselves. If we act effectively, together, and immediately, we should be able to keep from crossing more runaway global heating tipping points and entering the later stages of the Climageddon Scenario.

• Make the commitment to help end runaway global heating. It will change your life for the better. It will also release powers, potentials, and opportunities that simply would not have appeared had you not made that decision and committed to putting it into action.

• The Job One Plan was designed to focus exclusively upon correctly answering the most important runaway global heating question: What will actually work in the limited window of effective control we have left to save ourselves from crossing more runaway global heating tipping points, which will eventually bring about the later phases of the Climageddon Scenario? With your help, the Job One Plan may be our best hope to resolve the escalating runaway global heating extinction emergency.

• Runaway global heating is the single most urgent threat humanity must act upon and resolve to continue to survive and thrive.

• Even with using Job One’s new strategies, there are no guarantees we will be able to end runaway global heating in time to avoid global catastrophe. But if we successfully collaborate and innovate together on the key government-driven action steps of the Job One Plan and, if we are very lucky, we might just be able to slow and lessen the worst of the coming catastrophes so that some of us will survive.

• Stop using the term “climate change!” “Climate change” is a term that feeds false illusions and confusion about what is really happening with runaway global heating. If we are ever going to create the necessary widespread awareness within the public to slow down and eventually reverse this emergency, it is imperative that we all stop using the term “climate change” and refer instead to “climate destabilization” or “runaway global heating.” It is time for us to stop allowing the clever fossil fuel industry lobbyists to control the conversation by defining the language and ideas about how we think about runaway global heating and the emergency we now find ourselves in.
• Click here to see where we are today on the Climate Change and Runaway Global Heating Doomsday Clock.
• A critical part of recovering from our worsening climate change emergency is finally having our governments do what is necessary (above) to end the crisis.

(All of the preceding and additional information about the escalating warming emergency can be found in the Climageddon book. Get your copy now! Your book purchase helps support the social benefit mission of Job One for Humanity to end runaway global heating.)

Click here to see our new runaway global heating and climate change Doomsday Clock.

Special Note on Reaching the Politicians Before it is Too Late

How the following required fossil fuel reductions will happen in time to save us is ONLY by our politicians taking the actions described below. If you do not have connections of direct and real influence on government politicians or, you do not have indirect connections of real influence on politicians through your connections to celebrities, intelligence agencies, ultra-wealthy corporations, philanthropies, or ultra-wealthy individuals, we strongly recommend you also go to Part 4 that has creative ideas for creating a non-direct influence on our politicians that anyone can do.)

Additionally, if you think that we can make all of the needed global fossil fuel changes and reductions by grassroots mobilizing with the general public from the bottom up, please see this page on why that will be very, very, very challenging.

We have also just released a critical timeframe update for coming climate consequences and catastrophes based on newly released climate science.

 

 

Things have changed recently with the climate in big ways. The climate change emergency is getting worse far faster than most people understand. Our new climate timeframes update affects ALL previous climate emergency preparation and adaptation timeframes we have previously provided. This critical update shortens those timeframes considerably.

Do not let your family or business get caught off guard without understanding why the climate change preparation and adaptation timeframes have recently changed so significantly.

If you are a member, log in to this location using the same email address you used when becoming a member. Then go to this Critical Climate Change and Global Heating Timeframes link in our Member's section.

If you are not a member, it is easy to become one, and you can still get some great gifts by clicking here. Your membership will also help keep our unpoliticized, unbiased, and non-profit climate think tank operating.

We want to support your successes and your suggestions relating to Part 3 and Part 4 of the Job One Plan

They can also inspire and help others who are also working on the various action steps of the Job One Plan. Each month we will select feedback, success stories, and informational tips from these emails or the members-only area and include them in our monthly newsletter.

Email us at ([email protected]) if you have any questions, problems, or suggestions relating to Parts 3 or 4 of the Job One Plan or if you feel stuck. We will get back to you in two business days or less.

Our ongoing email support is critical if you want the best chance of success. Extensive research has shown that having support for completing a task can be up to 90% of the why that task was completed successfully. 

 

What's next?

Our new runaway global heating risk analysis, adaptation, relocation, and migration consulting services

For individuals, businesses, or governmental bodies that desire individualized assistance, qualified members of the Job One for Humanity team are available for custom consulting on all aspects of climate change and runaway global heating consequence risk analysis, adaptation, relocation, or migration for individuals, small businesses, large corporations, or local, regional, or national governments. Click here to learn more about our individualized consulting services.

Other Climate and Runaway Global Heating actions

Click here for Part 1 of the Job one Plan on how to prepare yourself, your family, and your business for the unavoidable 20 worst coming consequences.

Click here for Part 2 of the Job One Plan on the best individual actions to slow and lessen the unavoidable coming consequences.

Click here for Part 4 of the Job One Plan on how we can get the critical actions of Part 3 of the Job One Plan done.

Sign the Declare a Runaway Global Heating State of Emergency Petition

End Notes

^[1] Job One for Humanity. "The dirty secrets behind the new Paris Climate Conference (COP21) agreement they don't want you to know." Job One for Humanity.org. Accessed December 9, 2016. http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/climate_change_conference

^[2] "Kevin Anderson: Paris, climate & surrealism: how numbers reveal another reality." YouTube video. 52:38, posted by "Cambridge Climate Lecture Series," March 14, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIODRrnHQxg

^[3] Andrew C. Revkin. "Can humans go from unintended global warming to climate by design?" New York Times. October 18, 2016. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/can-humans-go-from-unintended-global-warming-to-climate-by-design/

^[4] Chelsea Harvey. "We’re placing far too much hope in pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, scientists warn." The Washington Post. October 13, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/10/13/were-placing-far-too-much-hope-in-pulling-carbon-dioxide-out-of-the-air-scientists-warn/?utm_term=.7443bd74ae95

^[5] John Vidal. "Time to listen to the ice scientists about the Arctic death spiral." The Guardian. August 18, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/18/ice-scientists-arctic-ice-disappearing-reduce-emissions-peter-wadhams

^[6] when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand. From Wikipedia contributors, "Jevons's paradox," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jevons%27s_paradox&oldid=759401245 (accessed January 10, 2017).

^[7] Umair Irfan. "Engineers work to cut costs and emissions in geothermal power." E&E News. July 29, 2016. http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060040959

^[8] David Coady, Ian Parry, Louis Sears, and Baoping Shang. "How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies?" International Monetary Fund. May 2015. http://www.imf.org/~/media/Websites/IMF/Imported/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/_wp15105pdf.ashx

^[9] Sara Matasci. "What are Some Renewable Resources? Examples of Alternative Energy." EnergySage.com. August 12, 2016. http://news.energysage.com/examples-of-renewable-resources-and-alternative-energy

Special Note: Some climate scientists also believe that no matter what we do, we have already missed our window of opportunity to prevent reaching carbon 600 ppm and, that once we have crossed the carbon 500 ppm level, we will not be able to keep from reaching carbon 800 ppm (the near-final phase of the Climageddon Scenario.) 

Our reading of the current science indicates that if we do not immediately enact the radical fossil fuel cuts described earlier, we will cross the carbon 600 ppm level. (We could hopefully cut enough fossil fuel usage by immediately enacting all of the actions described in this part three of the Job One Plan.) And, just slowing our crossing the carbon 600 ppm tipping point will be a Herculean task of massive global cooperation and mobilization, but the probability that we can at least temporarily, slow and lessen many of the other 20 worst global heating consequences is still quite good.)

Last updated 10.20.22

About Us

The not-for-profit Job One for Humanity organization provides a unique "big picture" and holistic view of the many inter-connected and inter-dependent climate systems creating our current climate change emergency. Unlike other climate change educational organizations, we do provide prioritized, critical-path solutions to the climate change emergency built upon the most accurate global fossil fuel reduction targets and the most dangerous global warming tipping point deadlines we currently face. 

Our website focuses on educating individuals and businesses on adapting to what we can no longer avoid! It will help you and your business survive and thrive through the many soon-arriving climate change crises.

Our website illuminates the "big picture" physics and math-determined interactions of the climate's many complex systems in easy-to-understand illustrations, descriptions, and documentation. We know no other website that so candidly presents such a comprehensive window into viewing our global warming future.

Below you will also find links to the many surprising and significant benefits that you and humanity will acquire as we resolve the global warming challenge, opportunity, and adventure. We must not forget "that our greatest challenges are also our greatest opportunities." 

Overview:

"You cannot be called an alarmist if there really is something to be alarmed about." Unknown

Large-scale changes to our atmosphere and environment that normally happen over thousands of years are now happening over decades.

As our global atmosphere heats up and becomes warmer and more turbulent from fossil fuel burning and its greenhouse gas effect, our personal, business, and national lives will soon become more turbulent in many new ways as described below.

The 20 worst global consequences you read about below can bring about global warming mass human, animal, and biological extinction within our lifetimes. Click here to read why and how this can happen.

The following graphic contains an overview of many of the worst consequences of global warming. Most of the consequences below are already occurring around the world at various levels. A few will soon be occurring as global warming continues to increase our average global temperature.

Further down this page, you will find detailed explanations for each of these consequences we will continue to face.

This list of unfolding consequences above will also provide critical early warning signals that every prudent person should be monitoring.

Month-by-month and year-by-year, the consequences of escalating global warming will increasingly:

• cut into your personal, business, and national budgets,

• change your normal day-to-day personal and work life in increasingly negative ways,

• significantly affect the plans you are making for your future, and eventually,

• cause you to consider migrating above or below the 45 parallel north or south to reduce your suffering and survive longer,

• bring about the extinction of most of humanity by mid-century as well as trigger economic, political, and social chaos within our lifetimes.

Although the list of global warming consequences below is scary, there is still hope to slow and lessen the effect of these consequences. The unhappy vision of future consequences you will see unfolding below occurs only if we fail to act immediately using effective strategies like those offered in the Job One For Humanity Plan.

Receive Free Climate Change & Global Warming Info!

The 20 Worst Consequences of Climate Change and Global Warming

The key global warming consequences to prepare yourself for across climate, human, and biological systems.

(The following list is not in any priority or severity order.)

Spreading of diseases, epidemics, and pandemics

Pandemics and new epidemics are just one of many well-predicted "normal" consequences of the escalating climate change emergency. COVID19 like Ebola, MERS, and SARS (to name just a few dangerous diseases,) was caused and/or exacerbated by global warming.

Escalating global warming is creating or exacerbating pandemics like COVID-19 in several ways:

1. Global warming is quickly destroying the natural habitat of wild animals. This forces the wild animals (like bats) into closer proximity with humans making it easier for the animal viruses (zoological viruses,) to cross over into humans. This has happened with the COVID 19 virus.

2. Global warming is and will continue to cause increasing crop failures, hunger, and famine. This will force poor and starving individuals to hunt, capture, live in closer proximity, and eat more wild animals. This will once again make it easier for animal viruses to cross over into humans. This was also most likely an important component part of the original COVID 19 outbreak in a wild animal market.)

3. Global warming is melting increasing amounts of millennia-old tundra and permafrost, releasing long trapped and frozen bacteria and viruses that humans have never seen. There are also many infectious organisms stored in ancient sea ice and glaciers that will be released into the water system as this ice melts. (20) These may be infections for which we currently have no antibodies or medicines. Additionally,

4. Increased heat from global warming in the atmosphere will spread more tropical diseases, epidemics or pandemics (19) to northern and southern areas as well as higher altitudes where they have never been before—and where most of the population has no immunity. These are tropical diseases like West Nile Disease, Zika, Rift Valley Fever, Dengue Fever, Chikungunya, Cryptococcus Gattii Fungus, and Chagas Disease, all of which are rapidly moving north and appearing in the news on a regular basis.

Tropical diseases rapidly spreading north and south are due in part to migrating humans, animals, and insects trying to escape their heat and/or water-stressed ecosystems. Other diseases likely to spread due to global warming to epidemic or even pandemic levels are new and old strains of avian flu, cholera, plague, Ebola, and tuberculosis.

The above means that it is inevitable that we will be seeing more pandemics, but not every hundred years as has occurred for the last few thousand years. Because of our escalating climate change emergency, global pandemics could quickly become every decade or sooner occurrences. 

Increased heat

Human-caused carbon and methane pollution of the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming. This carbon and methane pollution process traps more of the sun’s solar energy in the form of heat inside our atmosphere. This increased atmospheric heat means more heatwaves and many more 100+-degree days annually. During the growing season, having more than 10 days with 100+-degree temperatures is catastrophic for many of the world’s five key food staples (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, potatoes).

In many of the warmer climates, regular temperatures of 46° to 51° Celsius (115° to 125° degrees Fahrenheit) will become commonplace. During the hottest summer days in some traditionally hot places, temperatures could rise as high as 71° Celsius (160° Fahrenheit) within just decades.

What we are not talking about here are the large-scale changes to our atmosphere, seasons, weather, and environment that happen normally over thousands of years. These large-scale changes are now happening over frighteningly shorter time periods, such as decades!

It's important to understand how increasing heat will affect us personally. For instance, for every degree of Celsius temperature increase, global food production will drop by 10% in many southern areas. Meanwhile, the human population will continue to soar to 9 billion.

As we approach 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) of global warming-caused heat increase, 1.5 billion people will be exposed to heatwaves each year. At a 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) increase, the number of heatwave exposures triples to 4.5 billion. At a 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) increase, 6 billion people will be exposed. Click here (8) to see a 30-second animation called Earth's Long-Term Warming Trend, 1880-2015.

Increased heat during winter seasons will also cause periodic rain in winter and dangerous freezing rain and ice storms. These winter ice and freezing rain storms will take down power lines and disrupt transportation, production, and life in general.

Droughts

Droughts are due to increased heat and reduced moisture over prolonged periods of time. There will be an increased probability and intensity of droughts. As the climate warms, experts estimate drought conditions may increase by 66 percent. Severe droughts are expected in Europe, but Africa will receive the worst of it. Less rainfall is also likely in mid-latitude and subtropical arid and semi-arid regions. For more information, read "California's Drought Could Continue for Centuries." (9)

 

Desertification

Desertification (the process of greener areas turning into deserts) is also caused by the increased long-term heat of global warming. It is aggravated by soil and vegetation loss. Semi-arid and sub-humid areas will likely endure a future of almost irreversible barrenness caused by global warming’s evapotranspiration and the accompanying decrease in rainfall. For more background information, read “95% of Glaciers in Tibetan Plateau Have Receded.” (10)

 

Fires and wildfires

The potential for more fires of every kind rises dramatically as the heat of escalating global warming turns forests around the world into kindling. Fueled by the ever-increasing, long-term heat drying out the land, the Earth will experience endless wildfires increasing in magnitude and frequency with each degree of temperature increase. We are seeing this already in increasing California and European wildfires.

Worse yet, these ever-increasing wildfires due to increasing heat alternating with droughts will create a positive feedback loop that will release more carbon into the atmosphere creating even higher temperatures. There is also a huge danger for the countries with the most forests. Particularly those countries above or near the 45th parallel north such as Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, and Northern Europe. Even though those countries will be generally safer far longer from many of the consequences of global warming, the heavily forested countries between the 45th parallel north and the 45th parallel south will be regularly plagued with wildfires of increasing size, frequency, and severity. For more information, read “Wildfires: A Symptom of Climate Change.” (11)

Loss of biodiversity

As our ecosystems degrade with escalating global warming, current animal habitats become inhospitable to increasing numbers of insects, aquatic, and other animal species. For example, animals that are entirely dependent on colder or cold ecosystems will move to more northerly ecosystems. This animal migration will lead to competitive encroachment upon other ecosystems and the possible displacement or elimination of other animals from their natural colder habitats

If average temperatures rise more than 1.1° to 6.4° Celsius (2°-11.5° Fahrenheit), as much as 30 percent of all plant and animal species alive today risk extinction by or before 2050. Some biologists have already stated we are experiencing what is being called the beginning of the Sixth Great Extinction Event. (43)

Destruction of ecosystems

Many of the world’s critical ecosystems face catastrophic degradation due to the increasing heat of escalating global warming. As coral reefs bleach, deserts expand, soils become unproductive, and the oceans warm, we will lose the critical productivity of the ecosystems we depend upon for food and other critical resources we and other lifeforms need.

 

Toxic air pollution

When we burn fossil fuels we create smog and soot, which is commonly known as air pollution. Some fossil fuel burning—especially coal-burning—also releases toxic heavy metals, radiation, and other chemical toxins. Of the fossil fuels, coal is also the largest single source of airborne mercury poisoning.

Air pollution is the one consequence of global warming that often gets the least attention, yet in many ways, it has the most impact on a personal level. This is because air pollution from fossil fuel burning is a slow and invisible cause of painful respiratory disease and death. It is also responsible for aggravating many other diseases.

Directly or indirectly, air pollution causes approximately 11 to 13% (about 1 in 8) of all deaths globally each year. According to a recent World Health Organization survey, 40 percent of deaths linked to outdoor air pollution are from heart disease; another 40 percent from strokes; 11 percent from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); 6 percent from lung cancer, (30) and 3 percent from acute lower respiratory infections in children.

China has the most air pollution fatalities with nearly 1.4 million deaths a year. India has 645,000 and Pakistan has 110,000. To put this in perspective, air pollution kills more people each year than malaria and AIDS combined!

Because air pollution supports weed growth, it is also a major accelerator of allergy attacks. It has been directly linked to asthma. Within the past 20 years, there has been an observed doubling of pediatric asthma prevalence.

Air pollution also exacerbates pre-existing health conditions such as bronchitis, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Air pollution from fossil fuel burning also dramatically increases national and international health costs, and the burden for those increased health costs falls squarely upon individual taxpayers. Paul Epstein, with the Harvard School of Public Health, found that the hidden costs of burning fossil fuel coal in the U.S. alone to be $345 billion per year!

They calculated these costs based on public health impacts, pollution, toxic waste, and climate disruptions to people’s normal lives and work. When you consider the costs of air pollution the coal industry is currently dumping onto the public without consequence, there is no offsetting net value in the electricity the coal provides!

If global warming and pollution caused by fossil fuel burning did nothing more than kill millions of people every year, that alone would make fossil fuel use a completely untenable energy generation source. Unfortunately, it does much more damage, as our continued exploration of the consequences of global warming will show. For more information, read this article on countries hit hardest by air pollution (31) and this article on the biggest threats to humanity. (32)

And finally, maximum warming from fossil fuel pollution occurs about one decade after carbon dioxide emissions have occurred, so the full global warming and health wrath of the carbon dioxide emissions over the past ten years is still to come.

 

Jetstream disruption

Shifting jet streams will act to significantly change long-established weather patterns. This is already being witnessed in many areas of the world where the normal rains, snowfall, and seasonal temperatures are becoming more unpredictable and atypical.

In what may sound like a paradox, global warming will also produce cold waves in some areas due to the changing location of jet streams and ocean currents. In some areas, winter storms have already become more frequent and intense.

At a 4° Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) increase, the atmospheric circulation of our jet streams is significantly affected. Jet streams commonly found in the mid-latitudes are predicted to shift polewards by 1 or 2 degrees latitude in both hemispheres. For more background information or examples, click here to read "'Arctic amplification' to blame for Greenland's ice melt." (12)

Shrinking sea ice and ice shelves

As the average global temperature rises, temperatures will rise almost twice as fast in the world’s northernmost and polar regions. Because of this, our ice caps are also melting at an unprecedented rate. For more information, see this video on the disappearance of Arctic sea ice (13), and this visualization of Arctic ice melt over the past 25 years. (14)

If the ice shelves on Greenland and Antarctica melt, sea levels could become more than 10-20 feet higher (3-6 meters) in 2100 than they are today. This would flood low-lying areas such as New York City's Lower Manhattan, Miami, and Bangladesh. This sea-level rise would also be perilous for many low-elevation countries and inhabited islands.

Additionally, melting sea ice sheets also disrupt oceanic circulation patterns because they are made of fresh water, and freshwater is less dense than saltwater. Because of the impact of melting freshwater on the Atlantic’s meridional overturning circulation pattern, (15) Europe may become colder. (This meridional overturning circulation drives cold saltwater into the deep ocean while drawing warm water up and northward.) As the ocean currents change, they also can contribute to the shifting of jet streams and the altering of normal storm patterns.

As soon as a 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) increase is reached, the extent of Arctic sea ice in September falls by 43% compared to long-term averages. At a 4° Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) increase, the Arctic would be nearly ice-free in summer. This could occur as early as 2035-2050 or sooner. Rising sea levels will displace up to 350 million people, making the Middle East’s 21st-century refugee crisis seem insignificant by comparison. For more information, read “Historical Data Shows Arctic Melt of Last Two Decades is ‘Unprecedented’.” (16)

Shrinking glaciers and snowpack

The glaciers around the world are shrinking because of the increasing heat due to global warming. In the U.S., Montana’s Glacier National Park has deteriorated over the last seven decades from 150 to just 35 glaciers.

With the approaching 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) heat increase, glaciers will decline in global volume by as much as 55%, and snow cover in the northern hemisphere will decrease by 7%. (This excludes those on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and on Antarctica’s periphery.) At 4° Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) of heat increase, glaciers decline in global volume by as much as 85%, and snow cover in the northern hemisphere decreases by 25%.

Once most of the white sea ice, glaciers and white snowpack melts, there is another serious consequence lurking in our dark future. The white of the glaciers and the snowpack helps reflect the heat of the sunlight back into space (the albedo effect). This helps to cool the Earth.

But if the glaciers, ice caps, and snowpack melt, the only heat reflector left for sunlight is the ocean. The ocean, unfortunately, is much darker than white ice and snow. Darker colors do not reflect the sunlight’s heat; they absorb it, further warming the Earth in another self-reinforcing loop of ever-increasing heat. For more information, read “Crisis On High.” (17)

If you're a techie the following albedo details may interest you. Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge has calculated that the Earth has a total surface area of 510,072,000 square km (196,888,000 square miles) or about 510 million square km. He estimates the present summer area of sea ice at 4 million square km, with a summer albedo of about 0.60 (surface covered with melt pools). When the sea ice disappears, this is replaced by open water with an albedo of about 0.10. This will reduce the albedo of a fraction 4/510's of the earth's surface by an amount of 0.50.

The average albedo of Earth at present is about 0.29. So, the disappearance of summer ice will reduce the global average albedo by 0.0039, which is about 1.35% relative to its present value. As NASA describes, a drop of as little as 0.01 in Earth’s albedo would have a major warming influence on climate—roughly equal to the effect of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would cause Earth to retain an additional 3.4 watts of energy for every square meter of surface area.

Based on these figures, Professor Wadhams concludes that a drop in the albedo of 0.0039 is equivalent to a 1.3 W/sq m increase in radiative forcing globally. The concept of radiative forcing (RF) is useful because a linear relationship has been determined between the global mean equilibrium surface temperature changes and the amount of RF. Furthermore, the units of radiative forcing are watts per square meter, and, if the value is positive (negative), it has a warming (cooling) effect on the climate.

RF does not depict the climate response in its entirety. There are many parameters related to global warming that exist, but they are greatly variable and complex. Since RF is easy to calculate, it provides a general, yet respectable, estimate of how global warming and the climate will respond to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and various other agents.

Overall, the total net human-caused radiative forcing is equal to an average value of 1.6 W/m² [0.6 to 2.4 W/m²]. This level means the overall warming of the climate. Now that you have a better understanding that higher radiative forcings over 1.6 W/m² [0.6 to 2.4 W/m²] will equal increased average global temperature you're ready to continue with more about the different areas relating to albedo.

The albedo change resulting from the snowline retreat on land is similarly large, so the combined impact could be well over 2 W/sq m. By comparison, if all the ice and snow on earth melted this would more than double the net 1.6 W/sq meter of radiative forcing resulting from the emissions caused by all people of the world

The good news is that it is going to decades for ALL of the ice and snow on earth to melt so that there is very little light-reflecting albedo effect left during the year. The bad news is our albedo reflective snow and ice cover is retreating rapidly in many areas around the world particularly the Arctic.

This means that our decreasing albedo will continue to function in a positive feedback loop to continue increasing the average global temperature has more ice and snow melt faster and faster as the temperatures rise. If albedo decreases radically and suddenly albedo has reached its own internal tipping point. 

 

Melting tundra and permafrost

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. This warming in the far north can create another vicious, self-reinforcing cycle and positive feedback loop. This methane is 25-100 times more powerful as a global-warming greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning.

When considering the methane problem, do not forget that the increasing methane releases from fracking and big agribusiness are dangerous on their own. However, when adding in new methane releases from loss of tundra and permafrost, this multiplying factor of methane versus carbon must once again be factored in. With methane 25 to 100 times more powerful than carbon, rising methane pollution may soon become as problematic as carbon. For more information, see here. (18)

Flooding

Many areas will become wetter due to global warming. The high latitudes and equatorial Pacific are likely to see more rainfall. Increased regular flooding represents one of the most dangerous risks to us because it destroys our crops, homes, and businesses for great lengths of time, if not permanently.

While our already existing 1.2° Celsius (2.2° Fahrenheit) temperature increase over pre-industrial levels might sound manageable, it alone will raise sea levels by at least 3 feet (0.9 meters). This will flood some of the world’s richest agricultural lands and river deltas—as well as drown entire nations.

Due to seawater salination and intrusion, many rich lands and river deltas will become unusable. For example, in Bangladesh, a 3-foot (0.9 meters) sea-level rise will inundate about 15% of the land and threaten more than a million hectares of agricultural production. Additionally, the Mekong River Commission warns that a 3-foot (0.9 meters) sea-level rise will wipe out nearly 40% of the Mekong Delta.

Just a 3-foot (0.9 meters) sea-level rise will flood one-fourth of the Nile Delta, forcing more than 10% of Egypt’s population (9.3 million people) from their homes. Because nearly half of Egypt’s crops, including wheat, bananas, and rice, are grown in the delta, starvation and malnutrition will accelerate.   

The damage caused by just 1° Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit) of warming is beyond management and remediation for many nations and peoples. Even this low-level increase will quickly create more failed states among the most vulnerable nations.

For more information on the costs of flooding and sea-level rise, see this article on the exponential rise of flooding costs (23) and this article on which areas in the United States will be hit hardest. (24)

Rising sea levels

Rising sea levels are caused by factors such as the polar ice caps and glaciers melting, as well as thermal expansion. Thermal expansion occurs when global warming warms the seas. Because warmer water expands and takes up more space than cooler water, the sea’s surface level rises.

Of the three causes of rising sea levels, the melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers represents the greatest threat. The National Snow and Ice Data Center says that if all glaciers melted today (about 5,773,000 cubic miles of water in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow), the seas would steadily rise about 230 feet (70 meters) over a period of several centuries or less. (25)

On a considerably shorter time scale, a recent study by a team working with James Hansen (the scientist who first warned us about global warming 30 years ago) says that by 2050 we could see up to 10 feet (3 meters) of sea-level rise. (26) This well-respected new study contradicts the 3-foot (.09 meters) maximum sea-level rise by 2100 that was previously predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). (27)

Rising sea levels will create huge new costs and necessitate the complete relocation of water and sewage treatment plants, refineries, electric, nuclear, and fossil fuel power stations, toxic chemical storage sites, hospitals, homes, and other businesses and institutions located near or at sea level. Low-lying or coastal communities will suffer unbearable costs (28) as well as the threat of complete destruction as the sea levels continue to rise steadily.

With the approaching 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) heat increase, 30 million people will be affected by flooding and sea-level rise each year. At 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) of heat increase, about 60 million people a year will be affected. At 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) of heat increase, about 120 million people a year will be affected. To read how this will affect future generations, read this article on accelerating sea-level rise. (29)

Less food, less water, costing more

The food consequences of escalating global warming are high and could quickly result in chaos in the world food economy. A Stanford University study analyzed the historical relationship between temperature and corn yields from 600 U.S. counties. The report concluded that each 1° Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit) rise in temperature above the growing-season norm dropped yields 17%.

Rice, wheat, and the world’s other food staples are also vulnerable to global warming’s higher temperatures. With each degree of temperature rise and the consequent crop-withering heat waves, food prices will be driven up to unprecedented levels.

This will also cause shrinking harvests, malnutrition, starvation, and famine, which will increase disease, death, and conflict. As food prices and shortages grow, economically or politically unstable countries will descend into chaos. Nations that still retain good water and food resources will probably be unwilling to share these vital commodities or accept the tens or hundreds of millions of “climagees” (climate refugees) who will desperately be seeking new homes.

“The Syrian conflict was preceded by the worst long-term drought and crop failures since civilization began in the region, resulting in 800,000 people losing their livelihoods by 2009, and 2-3 million being driven into extreme poverty.” (From Climate Reality Check by David Spratt.) (33)

The Syrian drought initially triggered a migration of about 1,500,000+ climagees into Europe. Europe as a whole is struggling to deal with them. The Syrian and other Middle Eastern drought climagees are only a tiny preview of the migration tidal wave that is coming.

With the approaching 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) of temperature increase, 1.5 billion people will be exposed to increased water stress. At 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) of temperature increase, there will be significant negative consequences on the production of major crops including corn, rice, and wheat. In temperate and tropical regions, 1.75 billion people will be exposed to increased water stress, and there will be 5.7 million square kilometers (2.2 million square miles) of cropland decline. For more information on water stress, see this article on which areas will be hit hardest (34) and this article on worsening water pollution. (35)

At a 4° Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) increase, it will be hot and humid enough for parts of the year in some areas to compromise day-to-day human work activities such as working outdoors or growing food. At a 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) increase, about 2 billion people will be exposed to increased water stress, and 7.6 million km² (2.9 million mi²) of cropland will decline. By the end of the century, some states in the U.S. Midwest, Southeast, and lower Great Plains risk up to a 70 percent loss in average annual crop yields.

Increased water vapor

For every 0.6° Celsius (1.08° Fahrenheit) rise in average global temperature, the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water vapor grows by 4%. This means as global warming and water vapor increase, storms will pour forth at a greater magnitude.

Water vapor in the atmosphere increases every time more heat evaporates from standing water in rivers, oceans, and lakes. We are already seeing unusually heavy rains occurring at times never encountered before. More than 170 extreme weather events struck America between 1980 and 2014, disrupting daily life. Extreme weather events are defined as the weather at the extremes of the historical distribution or within the most unusual 10 percent in that location's recorded weather history. Extreme weather by definition is unusual, severe or unseasonal—events often thought of as close to or beyond hundred-year storm records. Eventually, increasing water vapor will become the largest indirect human-caused factor increasing global warming.

Global warming’s increasing atmospheric heat energy, along with the increased water vapor, is also available for use in and by the planet's other weather systems. In particular, warmer waters are causing more hurricanes and cyclones. Global warming creates warmer ocean water, which again leads to greater evaporation. This helps to not just “prime” the creation of hurricanes and cyclones, but also to maintain their strength once they form. The destructive power of hurricanes has increased by roughly 50% in the last 30 years, a time frame closely aligned with the rising temperature of the oceans caused by global warming. For more information, read this article on 2016’s Hurricane Matthew. (22)

Mass climagee migrations

The previously mentioned worsening global warming conditions combined with dwindling resources will lead not only to the massive migration of animals and insects but also to massive waves of global warming and climate destabilization-driven human migration. These individuals will be the new climagees.

Millions will migrate at a 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) temperature increase, hundreds of millions at a 4 degrees increase, and eventually billions of climagees will be desperately on the move as we approach a 5°-6° Celsius (9°-10.8° Fahrenheit) temperature increase. They will seek out already overcrowded urban areas in the northernmost countries of the world.

These mass migrations will cost nations more of their resources and cause continual increases in taxes to deal with the ever-growing influxes of new climagees. The northernmost nations will face a compassion dilemma. The more climagees they allow in and support, the more will come in a self-reinforcing cycle that will further diminish emergency resources and budgets for both their own population and the other newly arriving climagees.

Problems with cultural integration will also cause fear and tensions with the nation’s existing citizens. Growing tensions between the indigenous national citizens and the new climagees have already resulted in nationalist backlashes all over Europe.

Today, global warming-related migrations are only in their earliest stages. As the climagee migration pressure continues to increase, tensions will also arise among the wealthy northern countries that do not do their fair share and allow entry for as many climagees as other wealthy northern countries allow. The growing tensions of climagee migration into vulnerable areas and nations will also likely lead to more conflicts.

As temperature increases, we will experience the greatest mass migration in human history, which we are also totally unprepared for. This massive and unprecedented migration will continue to break down law and order in previously stable countries and produce chaos for nations all over the world that is hard to imagine. Luckily, several authors are already writing novels about what it will be like for you and your family to try to migrate if you wait until it is too late.

We strongly recommend that to try to understand the stresses that will be caused in societies all over the world you're read the following books which going to great detail describing the coming chaos. Although the Job One for Humanity website and the new book Climageddon both express a broad and useful overview of the many severe consequences global warming will bring into our lives, both do not adequately portray the immense emotional and physical suffering that people will go through every day as they live in or migrate through these worsening global warming danger zones. Luckily, there are several must-read books by an award-winning writer that will humanize the intimate details of the approaching climagee social, economic, and political meltdown. These two spellbinding books on the effects of global warming migration after it is too late are:

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. This is part one of the two sequential novels. It is set in 2024.

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Talents. Seven Stories Press, 1998. This is part of two of the Parable duology. It is set in 2032

Octavia Butler is a fabulous fiction writer and these two books are absolute must-reads to see the day-to-day ordinary and extraordinary suffering that irreversible global warming will impose upon our future. They will educate you in detailed ways we have not been able to due to our lack of phase-by-phase emotional insight into what happens to real people and families in the kind of regular deep crisis that the escalating climate change emergency will bring.

Franky, we are baffled as to how Octavia Butler was able to so accurately depict the tortuous lives of individuals who waited too long to migrate and suffered the consequences. Scene by scene, she skillfully compels the reader along as a brilliantly-written cast of families migrates up the California coast toward Canada through crisis after crisis. It is impossible not to be drawn into the painful personal details of what happens to these decent, regular families when societies break down at every level because of the consequences of late-stage global warming.

There is a third book we also strongly recommend. For anyone you who does not like reading a lot of science and wants to be entertained, get On Vestige Way by David Spielberg just arrived at Amazon. It is an emotion-packed novel about how global warming affects the future and fate of the world’s Millennials, generation Z, corporations, and the political alliances we take for granted.

Get it for anyone you know who doesn’t like to struggle through global warming science as in books like Climageddon and, who would rather be entertained and educated without ever even knowing that they are being educated. This book is so hard to put down you will be missing work and sleep wondering what happens next to the story’s heroes and heroines struggling with the very real future climate challenges the younger generations will face most of all.

Not only is it exceptionally well-written with compelling characters and elegant descriptions that seamlessly take you in and through every fast-changing scene, quite surprisingly, it also follows real global warming science more honestly than you will find almost anywhere else except in the newest global warming science books such as Climageddon.

For more information, read this article on an Alaskan community (36), and this article on a Louisiana community (37) forced to migrate due to flooding.

Conflict and wars

An ecological crisis such as global warming and violence are inextricably entangled. Nations suffering from climate catastrophes, food shortages and/or crop failure, water shortages, or mass migrations become highly vulnerable to security challenges, including regional panic, social instability, breakdowns in law and order, and aggression. In another deadly self-reinforcing positive feedback loop, diminished quantities of food, water, and arable land invariably further increase mass migrations, global security threats, conflicts, and war.

Escalating global warming started out as an ecological threat. It has now become the world’s greatest security threat and threat multiplier. Over time, one of the most costly consequences of escalating global warming will be the regional, national and international conflicts and wars it will create, intensify, or prolong. As these global warming-induced migrations, resource, and land conflicts expand or worsen, they can quickly escalate from conventional weapons and warfare to small-scale tactical nuclear weapons—possibly even full-scale nuclear war.  

Before these conflicts and wars reach their worst possible levels, those nations involved will institute martial law to quell the chaos that occurs during the breakdown of law and order as these climate conflicts grow. In the areas most affected by the consequences of our escalating climate change emergency, there will always be widespread breakdowns of law and order and political and social instability. 

The books mentioned in the migration section just above particularly, On Vestige Way by David Spielberg will help you envision the coming conflicts in wars in a very detailed and personal way. (We strongly once again recommend you get the books recommended just above so that the statistical facts and scientific information that we are providing for you is also converted into a visceral understanding of the detailed, emotional and day-to-day real consequences that will be coming to your life in the very near future! For more information on the increasing tensions of armed conflict and global warming, read this article.) 

Ocean acidification and marine death

The oceans absorb roughly 30% of all human-caused carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

As global warming increases the average temperature, the process of absorbing carbon dioxide increases both the average ocean temperature as well as the acidification of the oceans. (38)  (Acidification is simply the ocean becoming more acidic from the absorbed carbon, creating carbonic acid.)

The reproductive cycles in many ocean species will be dramatically harmed by the combination of warmer oceans and ocean acidification. A strong connection has already been observed between ocean warming and increases in mortality rates, as well as declines in reproduction among seals, sea lions, and seabirds. The shells of most crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimp, mussels, clams) are destroyed as acidification increases in the oceans. Because of this escalating ocean warming and ocean acidification, ocean fish food stocks will be dramatically reduced beyond their current threatened levels and remaining ocean fish food stocks will increase in price.

At a 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) increase, the oceans become more acidic with the surface ocean pH decreasing by 15-17%. (pH is a numeric scale used to specify the acidity or basicity [alkalinity] of a solution.) At a 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) increase, ocean acidification is much greater, with surface ocean pH decreasing up to 62%. At a 4° Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) increase, ocean acidification accelerates hugely, with surface ocean pH decreasing up to 109%. For more information on ocean acidification, read this article about its effects on the Atlantic ocean (39) and this article on how it is already affecting phytoplankton. (40)

Loss of breathable air from phytoplankton

Ocean phytoplankton create oxygen that rises into our atmosphere and creates breathable air. Ocean phytoplankton are responsible for up to 50 to 80% of all the oxygen we breathe! One of the most critical longer-term consequences of ocean warming and ocean acidification is the reduction of ocean phytoplankton. These are living microalgae are also indispensable to the ocean’s marine food cycle.

A study published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology calculated how unrestrained global warming could affect phytoplankton and thus the ocean’s ability to generate breathable air. Their computer models looked at what would happen to phytoplankton’s ability to photosynthesize at different temperatures. According to the Bulletin study, if global emissions continue unabated, and if the world’s oceans warmed (41) by 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit), the phytoplankton would halt oxygen production! What this means is that if we cross over the 6° Celsius global warming tipping point, the oceans will stop producing breathable oxygen and we will run out of breathable air. (42)

Animal attacks

As animal habitats degrade or are lost, animals will be forced to migrate to new areas. In these new habitats, they often come into contact with humans. This, in turn, leads to an increase in animal attacks. For instance, we are already seeing this happen with bears when residential development encroaches on urban-forest interfaces.

At a 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) increase, many species and ecosystems with limited ability to adapt to higher temperatures will be subject to very high risks. At a 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) increase, most small mammals without high ground to escape, will not be able to keep up with the rate of climate change. At a 4°Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) increase, wildlife and ecosystems will be hit by severe and widespread impacts, with substantial numbers of species going extinct.

Increased volcanic activity

The shifting weights of melting glaciers over the planet’s surface can initiate episodes of volcanic activity. Sustained large-scale volcanic activity can have a catastrophic effect on human life. If the volcano is large enough, such as with a supervolcano, the eruption could actually cool the planet and create two or three years of nuclear winter. Such a development creates its own extinction-level destruction in the form of severe negative impacts on agriculture and other living systems.

 

Tsunamis

Glacial ice sheets apply massive pressure to the surface beneath them. As glaciers melt from global warming, their massive weight decreases—lessening the total weight over the tectonic plates below them. As the tectonic plates move and shift, this unweighting can lead to volcanic activity and earthquakes. Whenever these tectonic plates move significantly, they are also capable of creating deadly tsunamis.

 

Methane time bomb, and key extinction event probability

In addition to the many consequences listed above, there is one additional consequence that could rapidly turn into a mass extinction event. See more about this and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) extinction event click here.

This theory suggests that a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop between permafrost-melting methane emissions and warming of methane clathrate crystals on the bottom of the ocean created a massive and rapid global warming temperature surge. As the ocean temperatures rose, gigatons of frozen methane hydrate crystals trapped along the continental shelves of our oceans thawed. This caused a sudden and dramatic release of carbon into the atmosphere (from melted methane hydrate crystals.) This caused another sudden heat increase. As a result, roughly 70 percent of all life on the planet was killed off.

An extinction event of this scale happening today would decimate populations so completely that either there would be no survivors or there might be as few as 200 million surviving close to the poles. The onset of this PETM extinction event has been linked to an initial 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit and about carbon 600 ppm) temperature increase and extreme changes in Earth's carbon-eating and carbon-releasing cycles. To read more about how today’s carbon levels mimic those from about 56 million years ago, read this article. (44) (Please also click here to watch a short video that brilliantly explains the extinction process once we start releasing methane clathrate from our coastal shelves. New research shows we actually begin this release process once we reach 5°C and by 6°C it is in full bloom.) 

 

Increasing deaths and debilitating illnesses from the toxic plastic by-products of fossil fuels.

As plastics produced from fossil fuels decay, they eventually become toxic micro-particles. These harmful microplastic particles are turning up in soils, water, and oceans to such a degree they are found in most fish and much of the plants and animals we eat.

This microplastic particle explosion is terrible for long-term human health. New studies show that these strange microplastic particles cannot be adequately processed by our bodies and are sources of cancers and other illnesses. As more research is done on our food and water supplies, it may turn out that this toxic microplastic by-product of fossil fuel will create more long-term problems than the poisonous carbon and other atmospheric pollution it produces when we burn fossil fuels.

 

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The general financial costs, losses, and economic consequences of the escalating climate change emergency

(These financial consequences are found in the members-only section of our website at the top right of the menu bar. Become a member here or click the image below.)

 

There are more primary and secondary climate change consequences, which are critical to know

On this 2nd most read page on our website, we have rearranged and prioritized the 20 primary climate consequences above. We also have listed the 20 plus indirect climate consequences, which will, over time will be as bad if not worse than the 20 above primary consequences. This page will take your understanding of the horrors humanity faces in the near future to levels few have seen.

 

Here are important additional "outside" global challenges and contextual factors that will directly or indirectly interact to worsen the coming climate change and global warming consequences

The accelerating climate change emergency is not taking place in a vacuum. There are many other global challenges in play. The world is dealing with 11 other global challenges (described below) that provide a powerful interactive, inter-connected, and inter-dependent context in which accelerating global warming consequences are occurring.

These 11 other global challenges will accelerate many of the worst global warming consequences (described above.) Simultaneously, the accelerating climate change emergency and its consequences will also multiply or amplify many of the worst consequences of these 11 other global challenges.

Because of the negative consequences of how all of these global challenges feed off each other, once we go over the 2025 global warming Climate Cliff, we will make most of humanity's global challenges so much worse that humanity's survival is unlikely. If we miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, and because of the global challenges below, what we will face is the eventual near-complete collapse of our global civilization within a matter of 3-5 decades.

Here are today's 11 most dangerous global challenges (other than global warming) fueling the high likelihood of the first great global collapse in human history.

As you are reading the challenges below, also think about how they can, and will affect each other and the 20 major global warming consequences as they worsen: As you will discover below, humanity is not dealing with only a single-incident, non-interconnected local or regional crisis. Humanity is heading into a deteriorating and undeclared globalized emergency involving the collapse of its critical global survival and stability systems, (such as the climate, the environment, the economy, and our political and social systems.) 

As you read about the 12 global crises, it is helpful to also think about our key deteriorating global systems like the angry, unpredictable, and attacking heads on the dragon below. 

 

Our 12 most dangerous global crises and challenges

(The single most urgent and dangerous global crisis is listed last.) 

Global Crisis and Challenge 1: Ever-rising over-population, the Earth has the carrying capacity for about 1and 1/2 billion to 2 billion people maximum as shown in the illustration below. On average, about 141 million people are born every year, and normally pre-pandemic 50 million people a year die.

We are currently at near 8 billion people racing to 9.8 billion by or before 2050. Even though we are far, far over sustainable population levels already, no government is currently setting human reproduction policy! Future and current generations will suffer unthinkable catastrophes because, as humanity, we failed to manage the size of our global population to match the sustainable carrying capacity of our global environment and the Earth's available and renewable resources.

 

 

Overpopulation and its inherent over-consumption beyond our carrying capacity IS the core major cause behind today's climate change emergency. Furthermore, as the global population continues to rise, the additional population serves to further multiply and amplify the most harmful consequences of almost all the other 11 global crises below. This is particularly true for global resource depletion aka global resources overshoot. (See Global Crisis and Challenge 2.)

 

 

Overpopulation also greatly worsens the many primary and secondary global warming consequences further down this page.

(For a candid and balanced article on the immense suffering caused by our overpopulation global challenge, please see this article, Population, the Great Knee-Jerker: A Holistic Survey and Plea to Reduce Suffering.) Please also click this carrying capacity link for more about why our beyond carrying capacity and rapidly rising overpopulation challenge is extremely dangerous to everyone's future.)

As you will discover, overpopulation and Crisis 2 below are intimately intertwined and connected.

Global Crisis and Challenge 2: Over-consumption causing ever-rising global resource depletion. This overconsumption is also known as global resources overshoot.) This overshoot is driven first by overpopulation in relation to the carrying capacity of the land and sea acreage available for a given population.

Overshoot also manifests itself in the consequent toxic pollution of water, lands, and air, crop failures, overfishing, topsoil loss, resource distribution injustice, and the massive "overconsumption and waste" of the Earth's very finite resources and its limited carrying capacity. In addition to the many crop-failing consequences of global warming, global resource depletion itself will significantly increase food shortages and cause soaring food prices leading to mass starvation and mass migrations.

The future holds many resource shortages due to overshoot. Expect shortages in clean drinkable water, food, many raw materials, and even medical and other manufactured supplies. Never forget a single critical or necessary missing resource can stop a whole system from continuing to function. 

We are going to have many soon arriving resource shortages. For example, the following are estimates of when only a few of our critical global resources will be depleted:

freshwater in 12 years (2032),

fish stocks will be almost totally gone by 2050,

adequate topsoil for crop growing gone by 2070.

(See this page to see 90 percent of fish stock already overfished and to see charts on how this loss will throw much of the world into starvation.) Of particular concern is the depletion of phosphorous critically needed for crop fertilizers. Adequate access to this could run out in as little as 35-45 years.

 

 

If you still do not believe that resource depletion and overshoot of our carrying capacity is a huge problem. Watch this fantastic resource overshoot video with great graphics and global resource depletion amounts and time frames in simple illustrations by Hugh Montgomery, a noted English professor. (We strongly recommend you watch this video for all of the food and non-food resources that are in an accelerating depletion adding to the mass starvation peril. [Forward the video to the 10 minutes and 30-second mark to begin watching Professor Hugh Montgomery's compelling graphic presentation.])

There are also many other critical mineral and non-mineral resources that will also run out soon, click here for more about these. After overpopulation which is a main amplifier of global resource depletion, overshoot is considered by most experts to be the key major cause behind or feeding global warming and almost all of our other 11 global crises listed below.

Global Crisis and Challenge 3: escalating pollution of lands, air, and waters. Ongoing and accelerating toxic pollution kills crops, fish stocks, and poisons our air, water, and soil creating and accelerating all types of global health, social, and economic problems. (Ocean heating and ocean acidification from carbon from global warming will eventually kill off much of the oceans' oxygen-producing plankton. These plankton are responsible for as much as 50% of all oxygen produced on the planet.) 

 

 

Global Crisis and Challenge 4: loss of biodiversity, we are having more plants and animals go extinct than at any other time in human history. This is due to an ongoing and accelerating loss of natural habitat due to overpopulation, global warming, overuse, pollution, etc. (Leading Stanford University biologists, who were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner, which may be another tipping point for the collapse of human civilization.)

 

 

This biodiversity is critical because it supports or is an essential part of our critical food chains.

 

Global Crisis and Challenge 5: Resolving the current COVID-19 global pandemic beyond just within the wealthiest nations! 

 

 

Because of a continuous chain of emerging new Covid mutations in all global populations that remain unvaccinated, the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to continue globally until mid to late 2023 to 2025. It will take at least that long until most of the world's population is vaccinated or until a "herd immunity" is developed. 

Worse yet, it is estimated we will have a new global pandemic threat about every 5-10 years because of the direct and indirect consequences of rising global warming. (Most people have no idea that pandemics and epidemics are also the part of the predicted "normal" results of the escalating climate change emergency.) 

Directly and indirectly, the severe loss of natural wild animal habitat caused by global warming, the eating more wild and non-domesticated animals, and the exploding of hungry world populations crowding into urban areas will be a continuous contributing or the prime cause of new zoological Covid-like diseases crossing over from animal populations into human populations and becoming pandemics.

Pandemics, like COVID-19, Ebola, MERS, and SARS have occurred about every ten years from each other over the last decades. These diseases will continue to happen regularly or will be exacerbated by the accelerating climate change emergency. (The many other reasons why accelerating global warming will create more regular global pandemics and epidemics are listed in this eye-opening article.)

Global Crisis and Challenge 6: increasing global economic instabilities that are leading to regularly reoccurring cycles of global and national recessions or depressions over shorter and shorter time periods. (These recessions and depressions are fueled by existing economic weaknesses, lack of financial reserves, huge national deficits, low financial system resilience, and major unexpected shocks or events (like COVID-19 and escalating regional global warming catastrophes,) hitting both the national and the global markets and global financial systems.

Global Crisis and Challenge 7: growing economic inequality, social and racial injustice, hunger, and poverty. Today less than 1% of the world's population owns more than 50% of all wealth. Over the last several decades, this ownership percentage continues to grow in favor of the wealthy.

Growing economic inequality and poverty often increase food shortages and often cause food prices to soar leading once again to mass starvation and mass migrations. This year (2020,) 130 million people are lacking adequate food and could starve to death. COVID-19's effect on the world economy could double that number in the next few years. Over the following decades, global warming consequences will raise that number into the hundreds of millions eventually rising well past a billion.) 

 

Global Crisis and Challenge 8: Escalating local, regional, and international criminality, conflicts, terrorism, and war. Expect these population-destabilizing security and stability threats to increase in their intensity, frequency, and scale. This threat escalation will occur from the urban and rural local levels to regional and international levels.

Vastly increased levels of survival-driven criminality, conflicts, terrorism, and war will be due to the world experiencing almost all of the global challenges on this page getting steadily worse. Global nuclear war or widespread chemical or biological war is also a real and escalating threat as most of the global challenges on this page worsen.

Nations with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons will eventually fight to the death for the few global warming safer lands, dwindling food supplies, and other critical resources. In addition, the ever-increasing mass migrations of desperate climate refugees (climagees) illegally crossing borders will soon be treated as hostile territorial invasions.

 

 

Global Crisis and Challenge 9: Mass migrations, political and economic instability, increasing terrorism, conflicts, and war plus global warming and many of the other listed global challenges on this page will both create and expand sudden, massive migrations of millions then billions of desperate refugees and climagees. During this phase, as most of the listed global challenges on this page intensify, various stronger governments will order precautionary evacuations of selected individuals and groups to limit casualties and losses from their most vulnerable areas. Before 2030-2035 because of global warming alone, the world will see hundreds of millions of climagees (climate refugees.)

Global Crisis and Challenge 10: increasing political instability and collapsing governments. Fueled by existing internal and external conflicts, soaring deficits, and the intensifying global challenges listed on this page, poorly managed nations with weak economies and low existing resilience will fall first. In 2020 we already see numerous countries on the verge of economic or political collapse. As the increased stresses of these listed global challenges continue to increase upon all nations, stronger nations will also steadily collapse. And finally, what is the most dangerous challenge and collapse accelerator of all.

 

 

Global Crisis and Challenge 11: New COVID-19 like pandemics as well as other new and older disease epidemics will continue to flare up every decade or less. This will in part be due to global warming melting of the permafrost, loss of natural animal habitat, eating more wild animals, overcrowding, less resilient health systems, mass migrations, wars and conflicts, and many of the other challenges and consequences listed on this page.

Additionally, new and older disease epidemics will occur more frequently and be more severe because of the abuse of antibiotics in animal product production. This abuse has resulted in bacteria that are now resistant to every known type of antibiotic.

Worse yet, because of accelerating global warming, more COVID-19 type global pandemics could come as often as every decade. The AIDS virus became widespread in the late 1970s, the SARS virus in 2003, the MERS virus in 2012, and the Ebola virus in 2013. Click here for more about how escalating global warming may begin producing COVID-19 like pandemics every decade. 

 

Global Crisis and Challenge 12: The ever-accelerating climate change emergency. This global warming is causing escalating desertification, sea-level rise, flooding, deforestation, reef collapse, droughts, wildfires, extreme storms, and the spread of diseases through epidemics and pandemics. All of these global warming-specific consequences are increasing scale, severity, and frequency as our average global temperature continues to rise. 

Accelerating global warming is the single greatest disruptor and global threat multiplier of the 21st century. It can directly or indirectly significantly amplify and multiply the adverse consequences of almost every other global crisis listed on this page. The climate change emergency in itself, if not resolved soon, will cause the deaths of most of humanity by mid-century. Worse yet, because of global warming long before 2050 we will also cross three extinction-evoking global warming tipping points. (These three critical global warming tipping points are described here.)

Global warming is also very bad for the world's economy. The rising consequences of the climate change emergency will eventually consume larger and larger percentages of every nation's Gross Domestic Productivity (GDP.) Loss estimates run from 3-5% of national GDPs now to as much as 30% of the total national GDPs in the final phases of the climate change emergency!

As global warming reaches its later Climageddon Scenario phases, it will become far more likely that we will destroy ourselves in a massive war or nuclear conflict over the remaining scarce resources or the very limited global warming safest lands.

 

Excluding the challenge of having no real global government (which is an evolutionary, structural, and developmental issue) and immediate global thermonuclear war, our out of control global warming is the single most dangerous global challenge today. It is also the most dangerous global challenge because:

a.) It is also the most immediate and probable meta-trigger for the growing possibility of a chain reaction of whipsawing and simultaneous ecological, economic, social, and political catastrophes and converging global system collapses involving directly or indirectly most of the other critical global challenges listed above.

If you think about accelerating global warming as a brightly burning match that will ignite the highly explosive and destructive "fuels" already existing within most of the other 12 critical challenges listed above, you would have another good idea why we have to get the climate change emergency under control as our immediate and top priority.

b.) Global warming is a severe security threat already unfolding. It is causing substantial global problems right now and, it is rapidly growing toward crossing four critical extinction-evoking tipping points.  It is in fact, already all but out of our control. It can and will end most of the human species within our lifetimes if we do not act soon! 

 

These additional interactions with the 20 major global warming consequences will make our lives far worse. 

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How the collective consequences of global warming will unfold to destabilize the climate as well as human and biological systems

Far beyond what we generally understand to be the painful individual consequences of global warming that are listed above is global warming’s effect on the overall global climate as well as the ensuing destabilization it causes within our human and biological systems. This is what takes place when many of the global warming consequences continue to increase in magnitude, as well as interact with each other in an accelerating and multiplying way as a whole system.

To further break down what this means, know that as global warming consequences unfold at a greater magnitude, the climate destabilizes, which then destabilizes everything else dependent on the climate. To see how this process unfolds, see the illustration below.

With each degree of increased temperature, our weather will become considerably more unpredictable and violent. An exact year time frame of when many of the worst global warming consequences mentioned above will occur is still being researched. How global warming will unfold as a process is much better established.

With each degree of increased temperature, global warming’s destabilization consequences will almost always increase in their severity, scope of affected areas, and frequency. Global warming consequences in terms of climate, human, and biological systems such as floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, economic recessions or depressions, the spread of disease, species die-offs, seasonal disruptions, and catastrophic superstorms will unfold irregularly.

As most of the world warms, a few places will get colder. Seasons will not feel like they used to anymore. Monsoons will be too short and come at the wrong time. Winters will last too long or springs will come too early. Winter snows or monsoon moisture will run off long before it can be captured in properly positioned reservoirs for spring and summer use by our farmers. Crops will fail and people will starve and migrate.

As more critical global warming tipping points are crossed, there will be sudden, more extreme, and larger-scale chains of negative weather, human, and biological system consequences will be drastically greater than ever before experienced.

Our normal day-to-day lives will experience more unpleasant changes such as less spendable money in our budgets, more volatility, and instability in our physical environments, and less future planning predictability. (Note: Global warming “tipping points” are explained here.)

Eventually, the exponential growth of carbon and methane pollution in the atmosphere will cause the dynamic climate balance that has existed for hundreds of thousands of years to destabilize and collapse into some new unknown state. The normal cycle of glacial and non-glacial periods may never return as they were.

If this happens, the new climate conditions may no longer be suitable for human life as it is now. If the climate collapses and destabilizes to a new condition unsuitable for maintaining almost eight billion human beings, war and conflict will escalate radically in the fight for scarce remaining resources, and martial law will be quickly imposed in every climate-stressed nation. This would, unfortunately, cancel out centuries of hard-won, traditional protections of civil rights.

As the escalating individual consequences of global warming tumble further into human and biological systems we will face many costly and painful catastrophes within those systems (economics, politics, pandemics, mass species die-offs, etc.). When this happens, consequences will be multiplied and we will have created what is properly called the perfect storm of perfect storms, which is described in the later phases of the Climageddon Scenario.

A quick summary of what at least 30-50 more years of our currently out of control global warming means in unthinkable consequences for your future safety and security

a. What has been hidden from you? 

1. We have actually increased fossil fuel use more this century than in the last two decades of the 20th century. To make this point alarmingly clear, more than half of all fossil fuel emissions that have been released in the last 25 years and parked in the atmosphere are more than was released in all of recorded history before 1990. 

2. Even though we have had over 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction, and we had international treaties since at least 1993 pledging we would reduce global warming, worldwide we still are about 67% higher in carbon emissions than the early 1990s. (Atmospheric carbon emissions is probably the best way to measure future global warming.)

3. In 2018 carbon emissions increased another dramatic 2.7% and they are projected to increase once again in 2019.

Yes, intentionally or through ignorance, our governments, the media, and most of the world's environmental groups have not been telling us the REAL facts about how what our REAL lack of any progress whatsoever in reducing the rate of fossil fuel use increases, much less the complete absence of any substantive reductions anywhere across the world in reducing atmospheric carbon.

Keeping the preceding horrific failure of any appreciable efforts to take seriously fossil fuel reductions, or even reducing the rates of increases, now please explore the REAL fossil fuel reductions that must be made to save our future. (If you don't believe we are telling you the facts about our dismal failure in reducing global warming over the last 35 years, click here to view a short video by climate Professor Kevin Anderson in a recent presentation to the Oxford University Climate Society.)

b. Because global warming has become out of control for at least the next 30-50 years it is necessary to talk about several unthinkable of the worst consequences that will most likely occur during this 30-50-year window of out-of-control global warming.

You will need a little background to fully understand how bad it's going to get and what we will not be able to stop unless we make the following immediate, radical, and painful cuts to our global fossil fuel use. 

The absolute minimum total fossil fuel reductions that must occur to prevent the likelihood of going extinct within the next few decades are:

1. All industrially developed nations must reduce their total fossil fuel use by 75% by 2025 and then continue reducing fossil fuel use to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035.  Net carbon zero emissions in this solution means that no additional fossil fuel emissions are going into the atmosphere that is not also simultaneously being removed from the atmosphere by natural means. (Only about 20 countries produce 70% or more of the world's carbon emissions.)

Think of developed nations like most members of the G 20 group; Argentina, Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and India. (See technical note 1 near the end of this page for why China and India had to be included in the list of developed countries.) 

2. All developing nations must maintain their total fossil fuel emission levels as they are at the beginning of 2019 and not allow them to go any higher. Then by 2045, all developing nations must also be at net-zero carbon emissions. This allowance for developing nations to stay at the level they are now and gradually reduce down to net-zero carbon emissions by 2045 is part of an essential justice and equity equation. The developed nations created their wealth by producing the far greatest majority of all carbon emissions in the atmosphere today, thus causing almost all of our current climate change emergency. (See technical note 2 near the end of this page for more about justice and equity allowances.)

Here are your annual personal, business, and national fossil fuel reduction targets

The above total targets break down to every person, every business, and every government in the developed world each year, reducing their total fossil fuel use by about 25% or more per year over the next six years. This will allow us to reach the most critical first 75% reduction target. Once we have reached that target successfully, we must then further reduce fossil fuel use at least another 10% per year over the next 10 years and before 2035. 

If you are in a developing nation, you cannot increase your annual fossil fuel use at all. You also will need to begin reducing your fossil fuel use on the average by around 5-7 % per year for the next 26 years to hit your critical net zero emissions target by 2045. 

What is essential to know is that these shockingly large amounts of required fossil fuel reductions and their soon arriving deadlines are absolutely critical immediately because our past and current reduction strategies have resulted in l use.

Yes, we have been continually deceived about global warming reduction progress as well as the REAL fossil fuel reduction targets we should have started making each year beginning over 35 years ago.

If you are in a developed country, here are some very important questions to ask yourself:

How are you doing on reducing your total personal fossil fuel use this year by 25%?

How is the business that you are working at doing in reducing its total annual fossil fuel use this year by 25%?

How is your nation doing in reducing its total annual fossil fuel use by its 25% target for this year?

It is critical to keep in mind that hitting the first six-year target is tantamount for avoiding the likelihood of entering the extinction process. Consequently, the greatest emphasis must be made to successfully reach this first target level.

Please also keep in mind that for every year any individual, business or nation does not hit their targets, it causes their individual, business, and national reduction targets for the following years to be increased accordingly. (For all the other information and qualifications on these REAL and honest fossil fuel reduction targets, click here.)

c. Now for the rest of the background information that you will need to access your future risk and threat levels.

Carbon is the current key greenhouse gas in raising the average global temperature. The carbon level in the atmosphere measured in parts per million (ppm) comes significantly from our burning of fossil fuels. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, most of this atmospheric carbon has been caused by fossil fuel burning. (If you do not understand how fossil fuel emissions of carbon into the atmosphere creates global warming, please click here for a set of simple illustrations and then continue reading.) 

Because of the known effects of greenhouse gases like carbon, an increasing carbon ppm level in our atmosphere is one of the best, if not the best predictor of future global warming temperature increases. On average, over the last 60 years, for every additional 25 PPM of carbon that goes into the atmosphere, our average global temperature goes up .5 degrees Fahrenheit or about .25 degrees C.

Understanding the coming major consequence trigger levels for our atmospheric carbon levels described below is how the people and nations of the world will manage their future safety and security. The following will help you understand these major atmospheric carbon consequence trigger levels coming up.

As of May 2018, we have 411 parts per million (ppm) of carbon in our atmosphere. On average, over the last 6 decades, we are adding about an increase of 3 + new carbon ppm in the atmosphere each year.

If you look at the trendline on the graph below, you can clearly see we are in serious trouble! In spite of everything you are hearing about all we are doing to reduce global warming over the past 30+ years, from the graph below you can clearly see that global warming from increased atmospheric carbon is not only continuing to get worse, but it is also getting worse at an even faster rate. 

 

 

There are minor monthly variations in carbon ppm levels from year to year, as well as cyclical weather variations due to things like El Nino or La Nina. In spite of such normal carbon ppm variations, the clearly dominant trend shown above for the last 70 years is carbon ppm rising faster and faster.

At just these current carbon levels, the stability of the bellwether West Antarctic ice sheet has already been breached and this ice loss is now irreversible. (The West Antarctic ice sheet is an excellent example of another critical global warming tipping point the world has hurdled past far faster than anyone had predicted or foreseen.)

At the current carbon level and as it rises we will continue crossing more of the 11 critical global warming tipping points within the climate’s many systems and subsystems, but now at an even faster rate. Once we cross the carbon 500 ppm level, as soon as 2042-2067 or earlier, ALL ice and ALL glaciers on Earth will go into complete meltdown!

Crossing the carbon 500 ppm threshold has, in fact, happened repeatedly in Earth's geological history. When this has occurred, the sea level inevitably rose to the 70 meters (230 feet) range. At our current annual carbon ppm emission rates, we will reach this catastrophic carbon 500 ppm range. 

If we cross that final battle line bypassing the atmospheric carbon level of 500 parts per million (ppm), our average global temperature will soar to 4°C (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). At 4°C, a large portion of humanity will die of starvation (or of increased heat's other related consequences) and, governments and society will collapse in many areas of the world.

Even though it will take many centuries for the seas to rise 230 feet, there will still be sea level rise spurts within those centuries where sea-level rise 10 feet or more in just a few decades as it has also done repeatedly in Earth's past. 

Take a moment to visualize the seas eventually rising 230 feet and what this will mean to the generations that follow us. Take a moment to visualize massive crop failures around the world because of the increased heat and the consequent mass suffering of slow starvation if we pass the carbon 500 ppm level. 

Unfortunately, this is not even the worst-case problem we will soon be facing on the slippery steep slope of carbon 500 ppm. If we cross the carbon 500 ppm battle line, it is also highly probable we will quickly reach a carbon 600 ppm level within another 25-30 years.

This new carbon 600 ppm level will raise the average global temperature to 5°C (9 degrees Fahrenheit) and bring about additional massive methane clathrate releases from ocean coastal shelves and permafrost. Because methane is 86 times more potent than carbon as a greenhouse gas, this will once again rapidly spike average global temperatures and bring about the extinction of most of humanity and the end of civilization as we know it. Several past mass extinction events possibly linked in this way to ocean coastal shelves suddenly releasing methane clathrate are the  Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. (Please click here to watch a short video that brilliantly explains the extinction process once we start releasing methane clathrate from our coastal shelves. New research shows we actually begin this release process once we reach 5°C and by 6°C it is in full bloom.) 

When we reach carbon 500 ppm in about another 20 years or carbon 600 ppm about 25 to 30 years after that as soon as 2077-2097 or earlier, we will greatly accelerate the process of crossing more global warming tipping points. This will further spike the average global temperature. As we reach the carbon 500 ppm and carbon 600 ppm levels, we will also cross into the later and most dangerous phases of the Climageddon Scenario (described in the new Climageddon book.) with all of its related unconscionable consequences.

Take a moment and think about the reality that at carbon 600 ppm as soon as 2077-2097 or earlier, we trigger the final processes that will bring about the extinction of 70 to 90% of humanity if not more. At this carbon level, civilization will also collapse and the unlucky survivors will enter into an ecological and climate hell and social dark age that will make the survivors wish they were dead.

As if the above was not bad enough, there are several additional factors that need to be considered in the nightmare global warming Climageddon Scenario we are now all facing:

1. At the minimum, the relative time frame for removing (sequestering) the carbon particles we are currently adding to our atmosphere is centuries to thousands of years. This means that long, long after we stop polluting our atmosphere with fossil fuels, the two carbon 500 and 600 ppm consequence levels discussed above and many of the other 20 most deadly consequences of those actions and global warming will last for many, many generations, and both we and future generations will suffer dearly for our failures to address and resolve this emergency now.

2. Because of the laws of physics concerning adding additional atmospheric greenhouse gases like carbon, global temperature will continue to rise as we continue adding more carbon and other greenhouses gas particles into the atmosphere from our fossil fuel use. Adding the additional three or more carbon ppm per year as we are doing now is based only on the current population. It does not include any additional amounts for the added carbon ppm amounts to compensate for the additional fossil fuel energy use of the human population soaring from 7 billion today to 14 billion people by around 2050 or, that many more people from the developing world will by 2050 move into the middle class demanding the same high carbon fossil fuel use comforts of the developed world! When you add all of the additional carbon that will be burned from these two factors to our current average annual increase of three carbon ppm per year at our current population level, the future looks considerably worse and predicted consequences will arrive even sooner.

3. The steady rise of methane in the atmosphere from new releases of methane from increased fracking, melting permafrost, and leaking natural gas lines. Methane is about 86 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon to increase global warming. There is also a concerted effort by the fracking industry to keep the ominous growing total methane release amounts hidden from the public. When you add in the effects of methane for raising our temperature along with the effects of carbon, we are probably already well above our current carbon 411 ppm.

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A positive vaccination to all the bad news

Overcoming the climate change emergency will force us to grow in maturity as one human global society

How we collectively face the adaptive challenge of the escalating climate change emergency may become humanity's greatest evolutionary teacher to date, producing unforeseen benefits, as well as severe consequences. It's not the disasters of global warming that are beneficial, of course.

What’s positive is the potential innovation, cooperation, and community building we will have to develop in order to overcome these unfolding disasters. This will when achieved, directly expand our evolutionary maturity as a global society. Please also see this the most read page on our website, The Surprise Benefits of Global Warming.

The essential positive perspective on the above disruptive global warming and climate change news

Despite the many types of challenging global warming consequences and past fossil fuel reduction mistakes that we now face, we can still learn from their feedback, and we can adapt and evolve to make life as good and as happy as is possible. No matter how severe the coming global warming consequences might become, if we wisely play the remaining cards that we have been dealt with, we can still achieve the best remaining possible outcomes. 

We can yet make a significant difference to reduce global fossil fuel use to stabilize and save the future of humanity by executing a comprehensive reduction and survival plan like the Job One for Humanity global warming action plan. 

We can still maintain the perseverance needed to succeed in this monumental task by regularly reviewing the many benefits which will occur as we work successfully on this project together. Although we are now in what could be called a Great Global Collapse process triggered by accelerating global warming, this collapse process will eventually offer equal to (or even greater than) long-term benefits in the form of a potential Great Rebirth beyond the coming suffering and loss.

First on this page (that has been read almost 2 million times,) and then this other critical global warming benefit page, you will find the many often hidden surprise benefits of the global warming challenge. You also will find a framework and the possibilities for what could be called a post-collapse Great Rebirth, no matter how bad the collapse process gets.

We can persevere through this time of emergency. We just need to remember that our greatest challenges are also the seeds of our greatest opportunities.

We are engaged in nothing less than the most critical and meaningful evolutionary opportunity, challenge, and adventure in human history! It is our last opportunity to slow down the mass human extinction threat by getting close to these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. Only reaching these targets will fully remove the total extinction threat. In reaching these targets, we also significantly improve many of the world's other 12 major challenges. (Click here to discover why total human extinction is not realistic or probable and the worst humanity will experience is near-total extinction (50 to 90+% of humanity going extinct.)

Get started today on the Job One for Humanity global warming reduction and survival plan. Help save and salvage as much of humanity and our beautiful civilization as is possible.

 

Summary

• Global warming started out as an environmental problem. It has now evolved into the world’s largest, continually escalating economic and security problem.

• Our air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning has been linked to autism, learning disabilities, and developmental problems in the brains and lungs of babies and children.

• The continuously rising costs of escalating global warming act like a gaping hole in the bottom of a bathtub, draining our resources. By 2100 we may be spending one-third of our whole global GDP—about $100 trillion a year—just to cope with global warming disasters.

• Most of the consequences of global warming are interconnected and interdependent. Understanding the relationships of these consequences and how their processes affect each other as well as how they affect the overall climate, and human and biological systems are essential to understanding the nearly unimaginable destructiveness inherent within the now unfolding Climageddon Scenario.

• The escalating consequences of global warming are grossly unfair to millennials and today’s younger generations in particular. If escalating global warming continues as it is now, they are robbed of any legitimate economic or survival optimism concerning the future.

• Our situation has many similarities to the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction event—a massive methane release that occurred 55 million years ago and killed roughly 70% of all life on the planet. We could face a similar event once we reach a 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) temperature increase.

• Once temperatures surpass a 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) increase, the ocean phytoplankton responsible for producing 50-80% of the atmosphere’s breathable air will halt oxygen production and we will run out of breathable air.

• Knowing the global warming consequences and how they are unfolding will serve as critical warning signs about the future quality of your life and future.

• As people become more fearful of escalating climate change consequences, they will become more conservative, aggressive, and competitive for what they perceive to be a scarcity of remaining resources.

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Click this link and start feeling better.

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If you are interested in understanding the climate science and analysis procedures we used to present the above information, click here for a technical explanation of our climate research process.

Click here to read about the primary and secondary climate change consequences which covers, far far more of the climate consequences that are covered on the page above.

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Learn how to prepare your family and business for the rapidly escalating consequences of global warming.

What can you do? See the Positive Actions to Slow and Lessen Global Warming

All of the preceding, and far more information about the escalating warming emergency can be found in the Climageddon book. Get your copy now! Your book purchase helps support the social benefit mission of Job One for Humanity to end global warming.

End Notes

1. Ben Gruber. "Unmitigated climate change to shrink the global economy by 23 percent, researchers find." Reuters. November 16, 2015.
2. Kenneth Rapoza. "Climate change will be disastrous for these economies." Forbes. October 26, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/10/26/climate-change-will-be-disastrous-for-these-economies/#246817eb4052
3. Tim Garrett, interview by Alex Smith, Radio Ecoshock, October 19, 2011, transcript. http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/climate2010/ES_Garrett_101119_LoFi.mp3
4. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. "U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters." NOAA.gov. 2016. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
5. Paul Douglas. "Meteorologists are seeing global warming's effect on the weather." The Guardian. May 27, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/may/27/meteorologists-are-seeing-global-warmings-effect-on-the-weather
6. Maria Gallucci. "Climate change could be worse than student debt, Great Recession for millennials' income." Mashable. August 22, 2016. http://mashable.com/2016/08/22/climate-change-cost-millennials-trillions/#MPVks6RnU8q6
7. Megan Darby. "Climate change could push 100m into extreme poverty." Climate Change News. August 11, 2015. http://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/11/08/climate-change-could-push-100m-into-extreme-poverty/
8. "Earth's Long-Term Warming Trend, 1880-2015." YouTube video. 0:30, posted by "NASA.gov," January 20, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGOzHVUQCw0
9. Jacob Margolis. "California's Drought Could Continue for Centuries." Take Two. September 15, 2016. http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2016/09/15/52133/california-s-drought-could-continue-for-centuries/
10. Seema Sharma. "95% of Glaciers in Tibetan Plateau Have Receded." The Times of India. June 17, 2016. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/95-of-glaciers-on-Tibetan-plateau-receded/articleshow/52799320.cms
11. Michael Finneran. “Wildfires: A Symptom of Climate Change.” NASA.gov. September 24, 2010. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/wildfires.html
12. Ben Thompson. "'Arctic amplification' to blame for Greenland's ice melt, scientists say." The Christian Science Monitor. June 12, 2016. http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0612/Arctic-amplification-to-blame-for-Greenland-s-ice-melt-scientists-say
13. Older Arctic Sea Ice Disappearing." YouTube video. 2:35, posted by "NASA Goddard," October 28, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj1G9gqhkYA
14. "Watch 25 Years of Arctic Sea Ice Disappear in 1 Minute." YouTube video. 1:04, posted by "climatecentral.org," December 15, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw7GfNR5PLA
15. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Meridional Overturning Circulation." NOAA.gov. Last modified November 10, 2016. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/research/moc/namoc/
16. Bob Berwyn, "Historical Data Shows Arctic Melt of Last Two Decades Is 'Unprecedented'," InsideClimate News, August 18, 2016. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18082016/arctic-sea-ice-melting-historical-data-noaa-climate-change-global-warming-greenhouse-gases
17. Matthew Carney. "Crisis On High." Australian Broadcasting Corporation. July 25, 2016. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/climate-change-the-third-pole-under-threat/7657672
18. University of Cambridge. "Emissions from melting permafrost could cost $43 trillion." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150921112731.htm
19. Greg Mercer. "The link between Zika and climate change." The Atlantic. February 24, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/zika-and-climate-change/470643/
20. Jonathan Gornall. "Unpredictable weather raises ‘zombie’ diseases from the ground." The National. August 28, 2016. http://www.thenational.ae/world/unpredictable-weather-raises-zombie-diseases-from-the-ground
21. Suzanne Goldenberg. "Climate change threat to public health worse than polio, White House warns." The Guardian. April 4, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/04/climate-change-public-health-threat-white-house-report
22. Joe Romm. "Hurricane Matthew is super strong — because of climate change." ThinkProgress. October 5, 2016. https://thinkprogress.org/global-warming-hurricanes-1c3a1ddca521#.t9qojtlbe
23. Zahra Hirji. "Flood damage costs will rise faster than sea levels, study says." InsideClimate News. March 1, 2016. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29022016/flood-damage-sea-level-rise-potsdam-institute-copenhagen-denmark
24. Benjamin Strauss. "Sea level rise upping ante on 'sunny day' floods.' ClimateCentral.org. October 17, 2016. http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-increases-sunny-day-floods-20784
25. "All About Glaciers." National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed December 10, 2016. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers.
26. Hansen, J., Sato, M., Hearty, P., Ruedy, R., Kelley, M., Masson-Delmotte, V., Russell, G., Tselioudis, G., Cao, J., Rignot, E., Velicogna, I., Tormey, B., Donovan, B., Kandiano, E., von Schuckmann, K., Kharecha, P., Legrande, A. N., Bauer, M., and Lo, K.-W. "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous." Atmos.Chem.Phys.net, 16, (2015): doi:10.5194/acp-16-3761-2016, 2016.
27. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed., “Sea Level Change,” in Climate Change 2013 - The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY (2013): 1137–1216, doi:10.1017/ CBO9781107415324.026
28. Patrick Clark. Rising sea levels could cost U.S. homeowners close to $1 trillion." Bloomberg.com. August 2, 2016. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-02/rising-sea-levels-could-cost-u-s-homeowners-close-to-1-trillion
29. PBS Newshour. "What do rising sea levels mean for future generations?" PBS.org. February 23, 2016. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/what-do-rising-sea-levels-mean-for-future-generations-2/
30. Maria Cheng. "WHO agency: air pollution causes cancer." NBC News.com. October 17, 2013. http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-agency-air-pollution-causes-cancer-f8C11410692
31. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis. "WHO: Global air pollution is worsening, and poor countries are being hit the hardest." The Washington Post. May 12, 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/12/who-global-air-pollution-is-worsening-and-poor-countries-are-being-hit-the-hardest/?utm_term=.8da44d4f601e
32. Gabriel Samuels. "Stephen Hawking says pollution and 'stupidity' still biggest threats to mankind." Independent. June 28, 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-pollution-stupidity-artifical-intelligence-warfare-biggest-threats-mankind-a7106916.html
33. David Spratt. "Climate Reality Check." Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration. March 2016. http://media.wix.com/ugd/148cb0_4868352168ba49d89358a8a01bc5f80f.pdf
34. Suzanne Goldenburg. "Global water shortages to deliver 'severe hit' to economies, World Bank warns." The Guardian. May 3, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/climate-change-water-shortage-middle-east-asia-africa-world-bank
35. Chris Mooney. "Air and water problems are worsening on a global scale, U.N. says." The Washington Post. May 23, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/23/the-pace-of-environmental-damage-is-intensifying-across-the-globe-u-n-agency-says/?utm_term=.1fad1f5490ce&wpisrc=nl_daily202&wpmm=1
36. Victoria Herrmann. "America's climate refugee crisis has already begun." LA Times. January 25, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0125-herrmann-climate-refugees-20160125-story.html
37. Hannah Thomas-Peter. "Isle De Jean Charles: Louisiana community to be climate change refugees." Sky News. August 30, 2016. http://news.sky.com/story/isle-de-jean-charles-louisiana-community-to-be-climate-change-refugees-10556485
38. Alejandro Dávila Fragoso. "The link between armed conflict and climate change just got a bit stronger." ThinkProgress.org. July 26, 2016. https://thinkprogress.org/the-link-between-armed-conflict-and-climate-change-just-got-a-bit-stronger-87193e5391da#.xmqq4bh1e
39. Sean Greene. "The damage wrought by acidic oceans hurts more than marine life and lasts longer than you think." LA Times. July 8, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-phytoplankton-acidic-oceans-20160708-snap-story.html
40. Emily J. Gertz. "The Atlantic ocean is acidifying at a rapid rate." TakePart. February 3, 2016. http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/02/03/atlantic-ocean-now-acidifying-at-a-rapid-rate
41. Taylor Hill. "The West Coast's massive algal bloom could be the toxic wave of the future." TakePart. June 19, 2015. http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/19/toxic-algal-bloom-climate-change-rising-water-west-coast
42. Taylor Hill. "Report: the world will run out of breathable air unless carbon is cut." TakePart. December 5, 2015. http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/12/03/climate-change-oxygen-ocean
43. Nadia Drake. "Will humans survive the Sixth Great Extinction?" National Geographic. June 23, 2015. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150623-sixth-extinction-kolbert-animals-conservation-science-world/
44. Alister Doyle. "Carbon emissions highest in 66 million years, since dinosaur age." Reuters. March 21, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-carbon-idUSKCN0WN1QR

 

(This page is derived substantially from the 2016 book, Climageddon, The Global Warming Emergency and How to Survive It. It has been updated with new climate research since 2016 as applicable. Climageddon is Available on Amazon.)

 

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How a movie story and an asteroid metaphor will help you understand the Climageddon Scenario and the massive climate change and global warming catastrophes that are coming... 

A very good metaphor and way to think about the 6 phases of the unfolding Climageddon Scenario (described below,) is to imagine numerous waves of larger and larger asteroids crashing into the earth over shorter and shorter periods of time between the next wave of asteroids. For the sake of the metaphor's accuracy, imagine these waves of asteroids have already begun and will continue throughout 10-60 years. 

(Please see the illustration below which will provide a quick but necessary minimal overview of the many consequences of 6 phases of the Climageddon Scenario for the sake of the asteroid story. The temperatures listed below in both Celsius and Fahrenheit are the predicted increases in average global temperature that will most probably occur at each of the 6 phases of the Climageddon Scenario due to increasing global warming consequences.)

 

 

Now that you can see that temperatures (consequences,) will continue to rise at each new Climageddon Scenario phase, you are ready to continue with the asteroid story and metaphor.

At first, the asteroid waves are made of smaller asteroids and the waves will be farther apart. In the earlier asteroid waves, the asteroid impact consequences grow in a slower, gradual, and linear manner. In later waves, the asteroids grow larger and the waves now grow closer and closer together in time. Unfortunately, in the later larger waves, the asteroid consequences will grow faster and exponentially. 

Next, imagine that each new wave of the asteroids almost always hits the earth in the illustration below between the 45th parallel north and the 45th parallel south (between the two yellow/mustard colored lines.)

These would be the most asteroid-unsafe areas to live in in the future.

 

 

And finally, imagine the last wave of “planet-killing” large asteroids also hit the earth between the 45th parallel north and the 45th parallel south. 

To help you envision what will likely happen to society and your life during this unfolding asteroid cataclysm story and metaphor, it is useful to look to another story, the 1998 Hollywood science fiction disaster film called Deep Impact. This movie depicted humanity’s combined efforts to prepare for and destroy a 7-mile (11 km) wide planet-killer asteroid set to collide with Earth and cause a mass extinction. 

In this movie, to prevent the asteroid from reaching Earth, Russia and the United States send a spacecraft with nuclear weapons to destroy it before it reaches the critical minimal distance from Earth. The spaceship reaches the proper critical distance in time, but the nuclear weapons’ first attempt fails and instead splits the comet into two smaller masses, both still heading directly for Earth. 

After the U.S. President announces the failure to prevent the asteroid catastrophe, he declares martial law and reveals that in anticipation of this possible failure, governments worldwide have been secretly building underground shelters in what they believe will be the safest areas to ride out the impact. The U.S. government then conducts an emergency lottery and randomly selects 800,000 Americans under age 50. The government has also chosen 200,000 secretly pre-selected individuals to also enter the survival shelters bypassing the lottery. Not surprisingly, they are top government officials, top military brass, key scientists, and powerful corporate elites.

Around the world, the lucky and the pre-selected few go to the underground shelters, which also contain seeds for every species of plant, important viable animals, as well as massive food supplies for the would-be shelter survivors.

The first asteroid mass impacts Cape Hatteras in the Atlantic Ocean, causing a tsunami up to 3,500 feet (1,100 meters) high. The second mass is due to impact western Canada, creating a cloud of dust that will block out the sun for two years, killing all unsheltered life on Earth in a matter of weeks. 

At the last minute, the damaged spacecraft carrying the remaining nuclear weapons hits the larger second mass in a suicide mission, breaking it up so that most of it burns up in the atmosphere or misses the planet completely.

After the survivors finally come out of their shelters, the President speaks to a large crowd, telling them they've been blessed with a second chance to call Earth their home...

Here's what's important about this story and its metaphor in relation to its similarities to the unfolding Climageddon Scenario. In the preceding metaphor and story, the most obvious parallels to the escalating global warming emergency and the Climageddon Scenario are: 

1. Just as they are in the asteroid wave metaphor, our global warming consequences will come faster and faster and grow larger and larger with each new phase of the six Climageddon Scenario phases. (Worse yet, in the mid to later phases of the Climageddon Scenario our consequences (which you will be reading about soon,) will begin growing exponentially.)

2. As we move through the six phases of the Climageddon Scenario there will be many of other unthinkable consequences that occur within our social, economic, and political systems just as in the movie when humanity faces its end. Some of those are rare and noble sacrifices, others are widespread panic, chaos, looting, crime, cruelty, and loss of basic human rights.

2 As global warming consequences continue to worsen in the later phases of the Climageddon Scenario, governments will be forced to declare martial law, and there will be lotteries and secret pre-selection and quotas for who still will be able to move to the global warming safer zones near or above the 45th parallel north or near or below the 45th parallel south to escape the chaos occurring within that middle highest danger zone a little longer. 

3. If we keep going as we are now without radically reducing global fossil fuel use to meet the 2025 global fossil fuel reductions targets and we somehow survive the coming global warming consequences, most of humanity will die and there will have to be a massive, difficult, and costly rebuilding of civilization by the few remaining survivors if there are any survivors. 

As you continue to think about the many kinds of facts in the Climageddon Scenario article, please keep in mind the Deep Impact end-of-the-world asteroid movie story because its unfolding process is a good metaphor for how the Climageddon Scenario’s most serious consequences will also grow worse, closer and closer, and faster and faster over time. Also, please don't forget we still do have a last chance for humanity and civilization to survive, but only if we successfully reach the challenging 2025 global fossil fuel reductions targets.

Who most needs to understand how the Climageddon Scenario Extinction Countdown unfolds

Understanding the rapidly unfolding progression of the 6 phases of the Climageddon Countdown scenario is critical for every individual, business, or nation that wants to thrive or survive over the next 5, 10, 20, 30 or more years and takes planning for their or financial, physical and political future security seriously. 

Understanding the Climageddon Scenario is crucial information for anyone involved in:

1. personal, financial, or security short or mid-to long-range planning,
   
2. city, corporate, or national mid-to long-range planning, 
   
3. planning, financing, or building mid-to long-term infrastructures such as highways, water treatment or sewage plants, power plants, power transfer stations, power lines, hospitals, government buildings, manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, military bases, corporate headquarters, real estate developments, and telecommunications facilities, and
4. the threat, hazard, and business or insurance risk assessment.

Here is additional key information to help you better understand the global warming future consequences and timetables using the 6 Phases of the Climageddon Extinction Scenario and Countdown as a model 

In the following detailed descriptions, warning signs, and consequence countdown timetables for the Climageddon Scenario's 6 phases, you will learn what you need to know to protect your family, finances, business, and nation. But, to get the most out of what you are about to read and to plan your global warming safer future if you have not done so already, you will need to have a good basic understanding of the dynamics of global warming. If you don't, be sure to click the following links basic and illustrated global warming education articles as needed.

a. what global warming is and how it works,

b. what are global warming's 20 worst consequences,

In order to have the necessary understanding of how global warming tipping points will throw our shared future into turmoil and chaos, we also strongly recommend that you read these pages as well:

c. the four extinction-accelerating global warming tipping points, and

d. the 11 key global warming tipping points. This will help you better understand how global warming's 11 major tipping points create climate and human system crashes and collapses, (This article covers the basics of positive feedback loops, complex adaptive systems, systems theory, and things like nonlinear consequence responses common after tipping points are crossed.) 

Although you will be able to understand much of the Climageddon Scenario without reading and understanding the four links above, it will be more difficult for you to see how most of the consequences within each of the 6 Climageddon phases will synergetically multiply, accelerate and amplify each other and produce the very scary reality of the following Climageddon Extinction Scenario six phases.

We have made the inherently very complex Climageddon 6 phase extinction model as simple as possible with lots of additional illustrations as you will soon see, but if you do not understand the basics of global warming listed in a-d above, you may not see the seriousness of what is already happening or, it will be difficult for you to see how the following layers and levels of the phase-by-phase Climageddon consequences fit together to create a mass extinction event which will occur within our lifetimes if we miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets by plus or minus 5 percent. 

And finally, here are some important technical details relating to the Climageddon Scenario extinction model:

1. The timeframes and costs for the various global warming consequences described below for the six phases of the Climageddon Scenario are based on the best available science as well as compensatory calculations and projections for underestimated or politicized official global warming reports as well as "cooked" calculations for non-existent carbon capture technology and the missing additional calculations due to the absence of almost all tipping point calculations in official global warming reports. (See the links in this paragraph for detailed descriptions for these compensatory calculations.)

2. There is no doubt that critics may find some minor areas where they can say this or that prediction is off by a few percent due to some new research. Still, that minor detail does not and will not outweigh the overwhelming body of global warming knowledge or facts fairly presented in the Climageddon Scenario extinction model. Climageddon convincingly demonstrates that humanity faces a high probability of mass extinction within 3-5 decades if we fail to reach the necessary global fossil fuel reductions.

3. Please keep in mind that the temperature, carbon ppm, and loss or cost levels for each of the 6 phases of the Climageddon Scenario described below are not hard and rigid boundaries. They may and will be updated by future research. So far, new research has supported the details of the Climageddon Scenario research and, in some places, has shown several of its predictions to be too conservative.

4. ll temperature amounts in this document (or any other document on our website) are always displayed as the Celsius or Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial average global temperatures. 

5. The severity, frequency, and scale of the many consequences listed below will not always occur in a steadily increasing linear line, curve, or pattern. There will be intermittent periods of relatively stable levels of consequences and EVEN periods of lessening consequences before the next phase and wave of consequences continue to increase in severity, frequency, and scale to the next level.

6. The beginning and ending boundaries for each phase of the 6 Climageddon Scenario phases are approximate for temperature, time frame, and carbon ppm levels. As such, there will be some inherent overlap in temperature, timetable, and carbon parts per million (ppm) levels between the different scenario phases. 

7. In the Climageddon temperature and time illustrations, the CS Phase stands for another one of the six Climageddon Scenario phases.

8. There will be many warning signs and timetables to take in on the Climageddon Scenario phases below, but don't worry. If you can't remember or process all of the details, the summary, charts, and illustrations near the end of the Climageddon Scenario will simplify and summarize the critical information described within its six phases.)

9. The Climageddon Scenario was first explained in the 2017 book Climageddon. The new Climageddon Scenario version 2.0 which you are about to read, contains major upgrades and additions based on new research studies and analysis that has occurred since 2017.

Here are the 6 phases of the Climageddon Countdown Extinction Scenario 

The next section describes the 6 phases of the Climageddon Countdown Extinction Scenario in phase-by-phase detail. It also contains many more illustrations and charts (like the one below) as well as decade-by-decade global warming consequence information that was difficult and expensive for our organization to acquire. This detailed year-by-year information is invaluable is to any individual, business, or nation attempting to plan for how the escalating global warming emergency will directly affect their future life quality, finances, and security. 

 

 

Climageddon Scenario Phase 1, From 2020 until as soon as 2026-2032

The temperature continues to rise, catastrophes increase, and carbon hits 400-450 ppm!

Phase 1 is the beginning of catastrophic climate destabilization. Phase 1 is associated with a measurement of atmospheric carbon in the range of 400-450 ppm. As of August 2020, we were already at about carbon 414 ppm. 

(If you do not already understand why the atmospheric CO2 carbon graph (above) will be the best indicator of what your future will be like, click here and look down the page until you see another graphic illustration.)

In Phase 1, the atmospheric carbon ppm rate continues to increase each year at only about 3 ppm per year. The average global temperature continues to go up in a continuous but hopefully only in a linear degree-by-degree manner.

In this phase, the many global warming consequences continue increasing in frequency, severity, and scale (area covered,) but once again in a linear manner. In Phase 1, the cost of significant single-instance, global warming-influenced disasters will average in the $30-$100 billion range.

The early stage of phase 1

In the early stage of Phase 1 (from carbon 407-425 ppm,) which we are in now (at carbon 414 ppm) and will be in until about 2025, temperatures will increase beyond the estimated current 1.2° Celsius^[1] (about 2.2° Fahrenheit) rise. They will eventually increase our average global temperature by about 1.7°-2.2° Celsius (3°-4° Fahrenheit.)

“[The] ...atmospheric greenhouse gas levels (~400ppm CO2 and ~485 CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent]) are likely the highest in the last 15 million years, and never previously experienced by humans. The current conditions, if maintained over centuries/millennia (that is until the system reaches equilibrium), would likely produce temperature increases of +3-6° Celsius and sea levels 25–40 meters higher, based on evidence of past climates.”  —David Spratt, “Climate Reality Check”^[2]

If the average global temperature in Phase 1 continues to rise degree-by-degree, even without crossing any more points of no return or global warming, climate, human, and biological system tipping points, the bad news is we still likely and quite easily bring about the end-of-humanity scenario as described in the later phases of the Climageddon Scenario. Please keep in mind that just the small average global temperature increase we have had thus far is already causing millions of people to become climagees and migrate toward the more northern countries in Europe and North America.

Please also note that early phase 1 could end as early as 2026 if fossil fuel burning goes up considerably and/or we cross additional key global warming tipping points.

 

The later stage of phase 1, the first and most important tipping point

(Special note for the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point. This section contains the key reasons why we have only about 6 years left to slow down the coming mass extinction event and our crossing of the two most dangerous global warming tipping points described further below. Additionally, only by reaching or coming very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets do we have any reasonable chance of preventing an even worse, near-total extinction event from ending humanity and civilization. As you read about the three major global warming tipping points below, our current extreme extinction threat will become more real to you. )

In the later stage of Phase 1, if we continue only up to carbon 425-450 ppm, in about 16 years or less (about 2022-2032) we can expect an eventual increase in average global temperature of about 2.2°-2.7° Celsius (4°-4.9° Fahrenheit), and millions of more people will be forced to either migrate or die. 

When we cross the very dangerous carbon 425 ppm level and enter the very slippery slope of the later stage of phase one of the Climageddon Scenario to just before we hit carbon 450 ppm in early Phase 2, it is highly probable because of crossing more global warming tipping points, points of no return and positive feedback loops at these higher temperatures, we will have reached a key threshold transition point where we will continue near uncontrollably on this very slippery slope toward 3°, 4°, 5°, and 6° Celsius temperature increases (5.4°, 7.2°, 9°, and 10.8° Fahrenheit.) These temperature levels would eventually lead to the extinction of most of humanity.

When we cross this carbon 425-450 ppm battle line, in addition to leading us to likely mass extinction in as little as the next 30 to 50 years, its consequences will also be irreversible for centuries to thousands of years. 

In essence, we cannot ever allow ourselves to enter into the later stage of phase one (carbon 425-450 ppm) of the Climageddon Scenario because we will almost certainly go over the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point and into the processes of likely extinction. The only way to keep from crossing the carbon 425 to 450 ppm tipping point is to radically and immediately and radically reduce fossil fuel usage by the correct amounts (which will soon be discussed.)

In order to prepare you for the shocking, REAL and correct fossil fuel reductions that must be made if we are going to save humanity from unimaginable loss, suffering, death, and likely extinction, it is first necessary to see just how poorly our previous fossil fuel reduction agreements and actions have fared since we were first notified about the global warming extinction danger by our scientists over 35 years ago. 

What has been hidden from you: 

1. We have actually increased fossil fuel use more this century than in the last two decades of the 20th century. To make this point alarmingly clear, more than half of all fossil fuel emissions that have been released in the last 25 years and parked in the atmosphere are more than was released in all of recorded history before 1990. 
2. Even though we have had over 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction, and we had international treaties since at least 1993 pledging we would reduce global warming, worldwide we still are about 67% higher in carbon emissions than in the early 1990s. (Atmospheric carbon emissions is probably the best way to measure future global warming.)
3. In 2018 carbon emissions increased another dramatic 2.7% and they are projected to increase once again in 2019.

Yes, intentionally or through ignorance, our governments, the media, and most of the world's environmental groups have not been telling us the REAL facts about how our REAL lack of any progress whatsoever in reducing the rate of fossil fuel use increases, much less the complete absence of any substantive reductions anywhere across the world in reducing atmospheric carbon.

Keeping the preceding horrific failure of any appreciable efforts to take seriously fossil fuel reductions, or even reducing the rates of increases, now please explore the REAL fossil fuel reductions that must be made to save our future. (If you don't believe we are telling you the facts about our dismal failure in reducing global warming over the last 35 years, click here to view a short video by climate Professor Kevin Anderson in a recent presentation to the Oxford University Climate Society.)

(If you do not understand or are uncertain about how fossil fuel emissions of carbon in the atmosphere create global warming, please click here for a set of simple illustrations and then continue reading... 

What must now be done to correctly reduce our fossil fuel usage and save humanity and our future

The absolute minimum total fossil fuel reductions that must occur to prevent the likelihood of our going extinct within the next few decades are:

1. All industrially developed nations must reduce their total fossil fuel use by 75% by 2025 and then continue reducing fossil fuel use to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035. Net-zero carbon emissions in this solution mean that no additional fossil fuel emissions are going into the atmosphere that are not also being simultaneously removed from the atmosphere by natural means. (Only about 20 countries produce 70% or more of the world's carbon emissions.)

Think of developed nations like most members of the G 20 group; Argentina, Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and India. (See technical note 1 near the end of this page for why China and India had to be included in the list of developed countries.) 

2. All developing nations must maintain their total fossil fuel emission levels as they are at the beginning of 2019 and not allow them to go any higher. Then by 2045, all developing nations must also be at net-zero carbon emissions. This allowance for developing nations to stay at the level they are now and gradually reduce down to net-zero carbon emissions by 2045 is part of an essential justice and equity equation. The developed nations created their wealth by producing the far greatest majority of all carbon emissions in the atmosphere today, thus causing almost all of our current global warming extinction emergency. (See technical note 2 near the end of this page for more about justice and equity allowances.)

(Please click here for all of the related information and qualifying factors relating to the above targets for developing and developed nations listed above.)

As mentioned previously, the steadily rising temperatures of Climageddon's Phase 1 will feed and accelerate the processes of crossing more points of no return, positive feedback loops and global warming, climate, human, and biological system tipping points pushing us ever closer to dangerous carbon 425 to 450 ppm range. The probability of maintaining only a gradually increasing average global temperature without random tipping point-related temperature spikes is highly unlikely (less than 10-20%.) This is because as the temperature goes up the probability of crossing more tipping points goes up as well.

It is important to keep in mind that as we continue crossing more global warming tipping points, the 20 worst global warming consequences and the consequences of the tipping points themselves will of themselves continue to increase in severity, frequency, and scale. This is because:

1. The points of no return before a tipping point is crossed as well as the crossed tipping point itself, create "slippery" conditions where it becomes far easier for that condition or consequence to worsen far more quickly and at a far steeper gradient.
2. tipping points when crossed create sudden and extremely difficult to recover from steep drop-offs or complete system crashes,
3. any positive feedback loop contained within the tipping point processes will also significantly amplify either the positive or negative consequences of that tipping point, and 
4. a crossed tipping point within a system or subsystem tends to push other tipping points over their tipping points in the subsystems or systems associated with or interconnected to the original tipping point.

In the later stage of Phase 1, (as well as all of the other 5 phases below,) unless we make the required radical global fossil fuel reductions described above, it is also unlikely that:

1. we will be able to maintain the previous average annual increase of only carbon 3 ppm. (In part it will probably go higher because of the Earth's population soaring to 9 billion, causing our estimated energy needs to skyrocket by 40% as more of the world’s population enters the middle class.) And, most importantly

2. because of our fossil fuel burning momentum and human system inertias, once we hit the 425 to 450 carbon PPM range we will not be able to keep from rapidly sliding down a much steeper and very slippery slope into and through the other following Climageddon Scenario phases. 

At the 425 to 450 carbon ppm range, there will be so much climate system momentum from previously committed carbon and other greenhouse gas pollution of our atmosphere towards moving quickly to even higher temperatures, that stopping this momentum will be like trying to stop a gigantic boulder from rolling faster and faster down a hill that keeps getting steeper and steeper.

The terrifying thought that is completely real and critical for you to burn into your brain is that most of humanity will suffer and die by mid-century, but our ability to have any real or meaningful control over this looming emergency ends around about 2025 when we enter the carbon 425-450 ppm range. But this will only occur if we fail to successfully execute global fossil fuel reductions described above.

 

And in case you're still thinking technology will save us at the last minute, no new carbon removal technologies (that we call magical carbon sucking unicorns,) will be able to save us in time because even those who believe they might save us are projecting that they will not even be available at the earliest until sometime after 2050. This will be long after the damage is done and long after anything can be done for the billions of people who will suffer and die!

Because of the preceding, we have no other rational alternative other than to prevent ever crossing into this highly dangerous transitional carbon 425-450 ppm range and tipping point, at which our current rate of greenhouse gas pollution will begin sometime around 2025. 

Do you still have doubts if the 425 to 450 carbon ppm range safe? Here is some other research that while we feel that it still suffers from politicizing underestimation errors and lack of factoring in the crossing of any tipping points, it is still worth reviewing so you know it is not just us warning you how bad this threshold is.  

Click here to learn more about how another 10 climate scientists view the serious dangers of crossing the 425 to 450 carbon ppm range.

“The OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: Key Findings on Climate Change” summarizes predictions by climate scientists’ models: we have a 50% chance of stabilizing the average global temperature at a 2°C increase over the pre-industrial period if we keep concentrations of CO₂ under 450 ppm. A November 2013 report by PwC, Busting the carbon Budget, says that at our current rate of fossil fuel usage in the global economy, we will exceed that limit by 2034.

The probability of crossing from Phase 1 below carbon 425 ppm into Phase 2 over 425 ppm is inevitable because of the many factors described above and because of the 13 reasons described near the top of the following link, Is global warming out of our meaningful control for at least the next 30-50+ years?

The warning signs of phase 1, 2026-2032

The following listing of positive feedback loops, points of no return, tipping points, consequences, and interactions with our other current global challenges should be considered as good early warning signs we are both in phase 1 or moving rapidly through phase 1 into phase 2. Watch for information about these warning signs, consequences, and events occurring in the news.

Particularly watch to see if they're being described as worse than before or as breaking all previous records. Look carefully at what the consequence pattern and trend is moving toward.

The following are the best objective warning signs that individuals can see for themselves and that will motivate thoughtful individuals to act appropriately:

Phase 1: The most probable initial positive feedback loops, points of no return, and tipping points to occur or be crossed are as follows:

1. Decreased albedo from reduced snow cover and melting Arctic ice increasing the earth's heat,

2. Increased sea ice and glacier melt resulting in additional sea-level rise,

3. Increased atmospheric water vapor increases resulting in more extreme weather,

4. Increased permafrost and tundra heating releasing more carbon and methane and which results in more heat and more disease epidemics and possible pandemics. This once again speeds up the whole process of more positive feedback loops and crossing more points of no return and tipping points. 

Please also note that melting permafrost in the tundra is because the northernmost areas are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. This permafrost melting also has the potential to cause local and global pandemics caused by ancient viruses and bacteria being released from the permafrost. Already in Siberia they have had localized anthrax and smallpox outbreaks because of the decomposition of ancient frozen animals from the melting permafrost and tundra which residents either had no immunity to or who were not prepared to deal with these outbreaks due to lack of available vaccines. 

5. Decreased carbon capture from the world's forests as temperatures rise and forests go from removing carbon from the atmosphere to carbon-neutral, no longer removing carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon neutral is the state that occurs before overheated over-stressed forests begin to release carbon back into the atmosphere.

(Click here to learn more about each item listed above.)

The most likely major tipping point to be crossed and worsen sometime in phase 1

There is an extinction-accelerating tipping point area that is the most likely first candidate to significantly accelerate the beginning of the end of humanity. It is the increased melting of summer and year-round arctic polar ice due to global warming.

It will truly have profound effects not only on worldwide weather but more importantly, on lowering global crop yields and increasing global crop failures. It will cause an accelerating massive global starvation, which will then also destabilize national economics, politics, and society.

In the summer, when Arctic ice melts there is less cooling of all of the growing season areas affected anywhere by arctic weather. The more polar ice melts each year the less cooling and the more heat in and during these critical growing season areas. 

To make matters worse, food crops are more sensitive to heat when there are droughts and, they are more sensitive to heat, rain bombs, and cold spells when they are just beginning to grow. Unfortunately, because more ice is melting in the Arctic ocean almost every summer and staying melted longer in the year we are losing more and more critical cooling for our absolutely vital food crop growing season. 

The five major food grains are the largest source of the world's food supply. They are corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, and sorghum.

All of these grains have upper and lower temperature limits. Most of them cannot survive more than 10 days during their growing season over 100° Fahrenheit particularly, if this heat comes early in their growing season or when their soils are drought dry.  

Because of the continually increasing loss of the cooling effect on growing regions below the Arctic because of the continually diminishing Arctic ice, the number of growing season days with temperatures over 100° will continue increasing steadily as more and more Arctic ice melts and remains melted longer throughout the year.

Because melting Arctic ice also affects and disrupts the jet stream and ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, you will also have radical and unseasonable cold spells appearing during the prime crop growing seasons around the world. This will also reduce food yields and produce more crop failures during the fragile growing season.

This means that the world is going to continue to experience more and larger crop reductions and failures as more polar ice melts and stays melted longer. To make matters even worse, corn is one of the largest food staples for humanity and it is also one of the most sensitive crops to increasing 100 degrees plus temperatures and drought.

The following is from Wikipedia:

“Since 1979, the minimum annual area of sea ice in the Arctic has dropped by about 40%, as measured each September. From sea ice models and recent satellite images, it can be expected that a sea ice-free summer will come before 2020. Models that best match historical trends project a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer by the 2030s. However, these models do tend to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss since 2007.” (If you would like to see a video of how more polar ice is melting each summer as the years go by click here for this NASA video.)

The increasing melting of arctic polar ice is a clear warning sign of increasing global warming and future serious reductions in major future crop yields as well as serious increases in future crop failures. This means not only higher prices but ever-increasing food scarcity and increasing global starvation.

This is not something far-off in the future. It is already happening in many areas of the world.

It is also already causing major migrations. This expanding and increasing polar ice melting is a major “canary in the coal mine” for increasing future mass starvation not way off in 2100 as we have been told but in the near years and new few decades to follow.

Already in the growing belt of the United States, we are seeing increased and record-breaking heat, droughts, rain bombs, and other extreme seasonal weather that is having a direct effect in reducing crop yields and crop failures in the most vulnerable areas. This pattern of greater crop yield reductions and crop failures will continue to increase as long as more polar ice disappears and the Arctic remains relatively ice-free into longer and longer summers. As the process of massive crop reductions and failures expands and continues, mass starvation will begin to destabilize all of our other economic, social, and political systems. 

Additionally, reduced polar ice also reduces the albedo effect, which simply is that white snow or ice reflects heat back away from the earth and out into the atmosphere keeping the earth cooler. As more Arctic polar ice is melted the darker polar oceans absorb the heat, and then heat up more, which once again, causes more global warming.

If temperatures continue rising, the time frames in which we will be crossing more of the tipping points listed above will get shorter. But that will not be the only significant effect of melting Arctic ice due to global warming. Paradoxically, according to new studies, because of melting Arctic ice we will also have more extreme cold and heavier snows during the US winters. 

In general, increased crop yield reductions and crop failures will increasingly occur in each of the following Climageddon Scenario phases because of arctic ice melt, increased heat, increased droughts, increase cold spells and increased extreme weather storms that will make it more and more impossible for modern agriculture and the major food crops to survive throughout their current growing seasons. There are estimates that crop yield reductions and crop failures will average 5 to 10% or more for each degree that the average global temperature rises until the planet becomes so warm that far too many days of the growing season will be at 100° or more. This will make successfully growing the world's major grains all but impossible.

 

Additional thoughts on the critical importance of the global warming tipping point emergency

Because we have ignored 60 years of warming, we are already deep into the global warming trajectory toward the collapse of civilization. This collapse outcome is highly likely because nine of the known global warming and climate change tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated. See below.

 

 

These nine activated tipping points can trigger abrupt and significant releases of carbon back into the atmosphere, such as the release of carbon dioxide and methane caused by the irreversible thawing of the Arctic permafrost.

After global warming tipping points are crossed, additional warming would become self-sustaining due to both positive feedback loops within the climate system and the mutual interaction of these global warming tipping points. It is best to think about these nine interacting global warming tipping points within the climate system like a row of dominos. 

These climate system tipping points are so interconnected that knocking over the first couple of "dominos" will most likely lead to a cascade knocking over many, if not all, of them. Once the above global warming tipping point "dominos" begin their falling cascade, we are already at a criminal point of no return.

Because of these global warming tipping points and positive feedback loops, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, believes that if we go much above 2° C, we will quickly get to 4° C anyway. A 4° C increase would spell the end of human civilization.

Distinguished Professor of Meteorology Michael Mann from the University of Pennsylvania recently stated that once we have reached the carbon 405 ppm level in our atmosphere, a 2 degrees C average global temperature increase is already baked in, and there is nothing we can do to stop it! As of June 2020, we are currently at carbon 416 ppm.

Johan Rockström, the head of one of Europe's leading research institutes, warned that in a 4°C warmer world, it would be "difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that. Not even a rich minority world survive with modern lifestyles in the post 4°C-warmer turbulent, conflict-ridden world". 

Other climate scientists have warned that once the climate warms 4 degrees C over our preindustrial average temperate, human adaptation to these temperature levels will be all but impossible!

Leading Stanford University biologists, released new research recently showing species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner. This rapid loss of biodiversity is another likely tipping point for the collapse of human civilization. (These are the same Stanford biologists who were first to warn us that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction on Earth.)

Soon we will lose control of the tipping points for the Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Greenland ice sheet in much less time than it's going to take us to get to global net-zero emissions. There is a crucial way to think about this race to get to net-zero emissions before we cross more extinction creating global warming tipping points. 

Imagine that the captain on the Titanic suddenly sees the iceberg in front of him. To slow and steer the Titanic, he needs at least 3 miles, but he is only 1 mile away from the iceberg. In this example, the titanic is already doomed the moment the captain notices the iceberg.

This Titanic example is not much different than our current situation with our trying to reach the last chance 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and get to net-zero emissions. We have wasted so much time over the previous 35 years ignoring valid scientific warnings; we may not have enough time to "steer" away from extinction. 

We already have a baked-in minimal 2 degrees C in average global temperature increase and, we have initiated the global tipping point cascade effect, which will quickly get us to 4°C and the collapse of civilization. This alone will rapidly take us to a far less habitable planet and climate regardless of any additional global fossil fuel emission reductions we might now make.

 

 

In the image above, the Planetary Threshold dividing line is the tipping point previously mentioned of crossing over the carbon 425-450 ppm-level. As one can see, once we cross that carbon 425-450 ppm Planetary Threshold line the stability of the planetary climate rapidly collapses into an over-heating uninhabitable Earth! 

Phase 1: The following complete list of phase 1 global warming consequences will continue to increase in severity, frequency, and scale from 2020-2032.

Many of these consequences are interconnected and interdependent. Some also exist in transformational relationships and processes which can amplify or multiply each other's consequences, or disrupt our abilities to control these consequences.

The complete list of global warming-related consequences that will occur and continue to increase in this phase from continuing to burn fossil fuels at anything close to the rates we are now are:

1. atmospheric heating which increases average global temperature,

2. new disease outbreaks, epidemics, and more COVID-19 like pandemics in areas where they have never been before. (This is due to loss of natural animal habitat, eating more wild animals, additional melting of the permafrost, overcrowding, less resilient health systems, and mass migrations. Because of accelerating global warming consequences, we could be experiencing COVID-19 type pandemics every decade.)

3. shrinking sea ice and ice shelves, glaciers and snowpack,

4. ever-increasing crop failures (because of heatwaves, rain bombs, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and other extreme weather) increasing mass starvation, and causing soaring food prices. (Please note that the world's five principal grains (rice, wheat, maize [corn], millet, and sorghum,) are particularly vulnerable to crop failure when temperatures are near or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit more than 20-30 days during their regular growing periods.)

 

 

5. extreme storms of all kinds, (hurricanes, tornadoes, rain bombs, bomb cyclones, etc,)

6. droughts,

7. clean drinking water scarcity,

8. desertification,

9. fires and wildfires,

10. flooding,

11. toxic air pollution,

12. ocean acidification, (which causes critical sea life and reefs to die. Ocean heating and ocean acidification from carbon from global warming will eventually kill off much of the oceans' oxygen-producing plankton. These plankton are responsible for as much as 50% of all oxygen produced on the planet.) )

13. loss of biodiversity,

14. jet stream disruption,

15. mass human migrations,

16 animal and insect migrations, 

17. forests that were a major stabilizing force absorbing carbon become neutral in their carbon absorption and stop taking carbon from the atmosphere. (Soon in later phases the forests will begin to release their vast stores of carbon pushing temperatures higher even faster.)

18. economic losses. (In this phase, most nations will spend 1-3 percent of their total gross domestic product (GDP) directly or indirectly paying for the consequences of the global warming emergency.)

Click here to learn more of the technical details about how each of the previous global warming consequences will increase in severity, frequency, and scale with each progressive Climageddon phase. 

 

 

In one way or another, directly or indirectly as the above list of heat-driven global warming consequences increase in severity, frequency, and scale the following things occur. Many of these consequences are interconnected and interdependent. Some also exist in transformational relationships and processes which can amplify or multiply each other's consequences, or disrupt our abilities to control these consequences.

They are the critical warning signs to watch in the news to know that the global collapse process is accelerating and worsening:

1. Because of increased global warming and other global challenge-related work disruptions, the total human capacity to work or produce will go down significantly. This will cause more business and product distribution interruptions, business and personal uncertainty as well as more unemployment and homelessness.

2. There will be less food available from failed and shrinking food crops due to many of the extreme climate consequences such as extreme heat, droughts, flooding, rain bombs, nonseasonal weather, and other extreme weather events.

3. Many food prices will rise considerably more than the normal cost of living increases. (For example, fish prices will rise considerably as the remaining over-stressed fish stocks are depleted to near extinction.

4. More people will be starving.

5. The cost of living, for repair, maintenance, building, or rebuilding in global warming safer areas will continue to rise significantly. There will be more homelessness everywhere.

6. There will be increasing disease, epidemics, and pandemics as conditions worsen and health services are stretched thin.

7. There be increasing mass migrations of starving, sick, and unemployed people fleeing from the many climate consequences as well as from an ever-increasing number of unstable or collapsed economies or nations.

8. There will be widespread, survival-driven criminality by larger and larger portions of a starving, unemployed, homeless, or migrant populations. (Imagine increasing numbers of desperate individuals and groups trying to stay alive by any means possible. Now imagine your favorite dystopian movie like Mad Max. This will give you a small taste of what the future struggle to stay alive will be like as most of the global challenges mentioned earlier continue to worsen.

9. Because of the growing survival-driven criminality, migrations, and social and political chaos, governments will impose states of emergency and martial law resulting in increased restrictions, suffering, and the loss of many hard-won human rights. Nations will be forced to become more military and totalitarian in their control of the population to deal with the growing losses, chaos, and shortages of essential resources.

10. As the social, economic, and political chaos spreads, it will trigger more regional, national, and international conflicts and more conventional wars. There also will be a significantly large potential for a new nuclear, biological, or chemical war. These conflicts and wars will be due to increasing food and other resource scarcity, scarcity of global warming-safe land, unstoppable mass migrations, and the other consequences listed on this page.

11. When all of the above items are taken collectively, it will cause even the strongest nations' economies and political systems to collapse. 

12. Once most of the national governments have collapsed, the nuclear reactors, chemical, and biological weapons, and their manufacturing, service, and storage facilities will become compromised. This is because there will be no or few functioning national governments to maintain operations or security for these sites. Hundreds of millions will sicken and die as nuclear reactors go critical and meltdown spewing toxic radiation worldwide. Millions more will sicken as die from the releases of insecure biological weapons and industrial chemicals. If too many nuclear reactors go critical and meltdown, the radiation circling the planets will kill off everything.  

13. As all of the above intensifies, human suffering and global deaths will continue to rise exponentially. Human deaths will eventually reach mass extinction or even near-total extinction levels, and what we have known to be our civilization will collapse.

14. If there are any unlucky survivors after the global collapse, they will most likely enter a new Dark Age. But, this will not be like the Dark Age that occurred during the Middle Ages. It will be far worse because most of the natural resources available during the original Dark Age already will have been depleted, and much of the planet will be toxic. And finally,

15. Suppose we do not experience a complete runaway global warming event, and we make it through the post-collapse new Dark Ages. In that case, it will take centuries to thousands of years for nature and the climate system to come back into balance. Only then will the conditions suitable for humans to thrive once again exist-- if any humans are left at that time. (Complete runaway global warming is where the average global temperature keeps rising until Earth's atmosphere is ripped off into space like what happened on Venus.)

Hopefully, at this far distant time, any surviving bands, clans, tribes, or communities still functioning will have learned the first great global collapse lessons, and they will have changed their behaviors. They will now model the needed new behaviors, such as the principles of sustainable prosperity and the principles of evolutionary success, among other new possible policies to finally resolve all of the issues raised in the global challenges described above. 

If these survivors have genuinely learned the lessons from the first great global collapse of civilization, they will develop a new worldview and new economic, political, and social systems. This new worldview will provide the tools and opportunity for a tremendous new re-building and reboot of humanity. 

Humanity will have an opportunity to experience a unique renaissance where humankind and nature come into a balance that allows both to flourish once again. Whatever is left of humanity will restart the greatest evolutionary adventure in our history.

Fasten your seat belts. Strap on your shoulder harness and put on your helmets. We are entering the extreme turbulence of the beginning of the global collapse process. The COVID-19 pandemic and the current global recession/depression are just a small beginning of it.

Unfortunately, it is going to get a whole lot worse before our governments take it seriously and act! The baby boomers (born from 1946 to 1964) are likely to be the last generation that will experience any near-continuous measure of stability, security, and safety during their lifespans. But even they will have a very rough ride as they approach the end of their years.

 

 

Phase 1: From 2020-2032, there will be continual critical reactions of global warming consequences with our other global challenges (listed below,) which will cross-intensify and worsen many of the global warming consequences of this phase as well as our other global challenges themselves.

Here are the other non-global warming challenges to our global society that will both interact with each other and likely continue to worsen in this phase of the Climageddon Scenario. Please note that while the Climageddon Scenario is mainly focused on global warming, it also must include all of our major other global challenges, as listed below. This is because most of these other different global challenges will interact with global warming, and many of them will further intensify the consequences of global warming.

These other major global challenges listed below are steadily getting worse over time and are also likely to add additional economic, social, and political instability, uncertainty, and chaos to the destruction caused by global warming in this phase. In some cases, these challenges getting worse over time can even speed up the negative effects of economic, social, and political instability, uncertainty, and chaos caused by global warming within this particular Climageddon Scenario phase. 

Today's most dangerous global challenges fueling the likelihood of the first great global collapse are:

Global Challenge 1: Resolving the current COVID-19 global pandemic. Directly and indirectly, the current COVID-19 pandemic is due in significant part to the loss of natural wild animal habitats caused by global warming and other man-made causes such as eating more wild and not domesticated animals, the exploding and hungry world populations crowding into urban areas, and the overall deterioration of global health services. 

If a vaccine is ever found, the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to go on around the world until mid to late 2021 or even into early 2022 before everyone is vaccinated. If no vaccine is found, like what has happened with AIDS, Lyme disease, and many other viruses over the last 30 years, we will be living with the effects of COVID-19 until a “herd immunity” is developed and if that immunity is even applicable to this virus. A somewhat safer global herd immunity could take as many a 3-5 years to develop.) 

Global Challenge 2: increasing global economic instabilities that are leading to regularly reoccurring global and national recessions or depressions over shorter and shorter time periods. (These recessions and depressions are fueled by existing economic weaknesses, lack of financial reserves, huge national deficits, low financial system resilience, and major unexpected shocks or events (like COVID-19,) hitting the global markets and global financial systems.

COVID-19 is predicted to create a global financial recession or depression that could last until late 2022 or until 2025 or as long as 2030. (Ten years for recovery from a COVID-19 global recession or depression is not that long when you consider that ten years is the time it took to recover from the 2008 global banking and housing meltdown and recession.)

Global Challenge 3: ever-rising over-population, (the Earth has the carrying capacity for about 1 1/2 - 2 billion people. Currently, we are near 8 billion people adding about 130 million additional people each year racing to 9.8 billion by or before 2050. (About 50 million people a year normally die.)

We are way over sustainable population levels already yet, no government other than China seems willing to set a one child per couple policy! Future and current generations will suffer unthinkable catastrophes because, as humanity, we failed to manage the size of our global population to match the carrying capacity of our global environment and the Earth's available resources.

 

 

Please note that as the global population continues to rise, the additional population serves to further amplify and multiply the most harmful consequences of almost all the 12 other global challenges and consequences listed on this page.) One could easily say that overpopulation and its inherent over-consumption beyond our carrying capacity is also a major cause behind today's global warming emergency. (Please click this carrying capacity link to learn more about why this rapidly rising overpopulation challenge is so dangerous.)

For a candid and balanced article on the immense suffering caused by our overpopulation global challenge, please see this article, Population, the Great Knee-Jerker: A Holistic Survey and Plea to Reduce Suffering.

Global Challenge 4: Over-consumption causing ever-rising global resource depletion (aka overshoot) caused by overpopulation, toxic pollution of water, lands, and air, crop failures, overfishing, topsoil loss, resource distribution injustice, and the massive “overconsumption and waste” of the Earth's finite resources. Global resource depletion will significantly increase food shortages and cause soaring food prices leading to more starvation and mass migrations. For example, the following are estimates of when only a few of our critical global resources will be depleted; freshwater 12 years (2032), fish stocks almost totally gone by 2050, adequate topsoil for crop growing gone by 2070. (See this page to see 90 percent of fish stock already overfished and to see charts on how this loss will throw much of the world into starvation.)

Of particular concern is the depletion of phosphorous critically needed for crop fertilizers. Adequate access to this could run out in as little as 35-45 years.

 

 

If you still do not believe that massive resource depletion and overshoot is a huge soon-arriving problem? Watch this fantastic resource overshoot video with great graphics and global resource depletion amounts and time frames in simple illustrations by Hugh Montgomery, a noted English professor. (We strongly recommend you watch this video for all of the food and non-food resources that are in an accelerating depletion peril. [Forward the video to the 10 minutes and 30-second mark to begin watching Professor Hugh Montgomery's compelling graphic presentation.])

There are also many other critical mineral and non-mineral resources that will also run out soon, click here for more about these.

Global Challenge 5: escalating pollution of lands, air, and waters. Ongoing and accelerating toxic pollution kills crops, fish stocks, and poisons our air, water, and soil creating and accelerating all types of global health, social, and economic problems. (Ocean heating and ocean acidification from carbon from global warming will eventually kill off much of the oceans' oxygen-producing plankton. These plankton are responsible for as much as 50% of all oxygen produced on the planet.) 

 

 

Global Challenge 6: loss of biodiversity, we are having more plants and animals go extinct than at any other time in human history. This is due to an ongoing and accelerating loss of natural habitat due to overpopulation, global warming, overuse, pollution, etc. (Leading Stanford University biologists, who were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner, which may be another tipping point for the collapse of human civilization.)

 

 

Global Challenge 7: growing economic inequality, social and racial injustice, hunger, and poverty. Today less than 1% of the world's population owns more than 50% of all wealth. Over for the last several decades, this ownership percentage continues to grow in favor of the wealthy.

Growing economic inequality and poverty often increase food shortages and often cause food prices to soar leading once again to mass starvation and mass migrations. This year (2020,) 130 million people are lacking adequate food and could starve to death. COVID-19's effect on the world economy could double that number of the next few years. Over the following decades, global warming consequences will raise that number into the hundreds of millions eventually rising well past a billion.) 

 

 

Global Challenge 8: Escalating local, regional, and international criminality, conflicts, terrorism, and war. Expect these population-destabilizing security and stability threats to increase in their intensity, frequency, and scale. This threat escalation will occur from the urban and rural local levels to regional and international levels.

Vastly increased levels of survival-driven criminality, conflicts, terrorism, and war will be due to the world experiencing almost all of the global challenges on this page getting steadily worse. Global nuclear war or widespread chemical or biological war is also a real and escalating threat as most of the global challenges on this page worsen. Nations with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons will compete to the death for the few global warming safer lands or the dwindling food and other resources.

 

 

Global Challenge 9: Mass migrations, political and economic instability, increasing terrorism, conflicts, and war plus global warming and many of the other listed global challenges on this page will both create and expand sudden, massive migrations of millions then billions of desperate refugees and climagees. During this phase, as most of the listed global challenges on this page intensify, various stronger governments will order precautionary evacuations of selected individuals and groups to limit casualties and losses from their most vulnerable areas. Before 2030-2035 because of global warming alone, the world will see hundreds of millions of climagees (climate refugees.)

Global Challenge 10: New COVID-19 like pandemics as well as other new and older disease epidemics that will likely flare up every decade. This will in part be due to global warming melting of the permafrost, loss of natural animal habitat, eating more wild animals, overcrowding, less resilient health systems, mass migrations, wars and conflicts, and many of the other challenges and consequences listed on this page.

Additionally, new and older disease epidemics will occur more frequently and be more severe because of the abuse of antibiotics in animal product production. This abuse has resulted in bacteria that are now resistant to every known type of antibiotic. Worse yet, because of accelerating global warming, more COVID-19 type global pandemics could come as often as every decade. The AIDS virus became widespread in the late 1970s, the SARS virus in 2003, the MERS virus in 2012, and the Ebola virus in 2013. Click here for more about how escalating global warming may begin producing COVID-19 like pandemics every decade. 

 

Global Challenge 11: increasing political instability and collapsing governments. Fueled by existing internal and external conflicts, soaring deficits, and the intensifying global challenges listed on this page, poorly managed nations with weak economies and low existing resilience will fall first. In 2020 we already see numerous countries on the verge of economic or political collapse. As the increased stresses of these listed global challenges continue to increase upon all nations, stronger nations will also steadily collapse. And finally, what is the most dangerous challenge and collapse accelerator of all.

 

 

The other non-global warming challenges to our global society that will both interact with each other and likely continue to worsen in this phase of the Climageddon Scenario are the same as above. When you mix the accelerating global warming threat multiplier in with the above expanding global challenges you create for yourself a converging cascade of endless catastrophes. 

Some reasons why most of our above critical global challenges have not been solved or will be nearly impossible to fix

The following are not all of the reasons that it is highly unlikely that we will be able to resolve the above global challenges. They are only several of the most important and overarching reasons:  

Reason 1: Our failure to evolve effective global governance with the needed legislative, judicial, and enforceable executive powers to solve all of the global challenges that cross national borders. If you think about it deeply, you will discover that this critical evolutionary failure of not having yet developed effective global governance is a core structural cause of why most of the above global challenges have not been resolved, and they continue to worsen. 

Even though it looks like someone manages the well-being of the planet as a whole from the United Nations or our international treaties, this is an illusion! No one governing body is effectively or responsibly driving the global "car," and it is speeding toward a cliff without a driver. 

Reason 2: Wealthy vested interests have compromised the effectiveness of our national governments. More often than not, our national government's decisions are not based on the general population's long-term wellbeing. They are based on increasing the short-term financial and power advantages of a very few ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations funding politicians openly or secretly. Consequently, decisions favoring the interests of the privileged ultra-wealthy most often harm the general wellbeing of the many. 

Reason 3: We have hunter/gatherer's brains developed before the stone age, trying to manage the twenty-first century highly complex, self-organizing global systems. The physical structure of our minds has not advanced in over a million years. Our biological brains were developed in response to the simple stone-age demands of hunting and gathering food. 

Our stone age brain structure cannot sufficiently understand or do all of the complex data, analyses, and calculations needed to manage complex adaptable systems like the global climate, the global economy, the global environment, and balancing and managing international and global politics without endless war and conflicts. 

The average planetary IQ is only about 100. Even genius-level individuals (IQ 140 and up) cannot stay up with the ever-increasing amounts of new information and ever-increasing technical and other global system complexities. To cope, our stone-age brains automatically revert to behaviors based on emotions, self-interest, and the comfort of superstitions. Consequently, we regularly do not understand or see the most severe problems within the various global systems until it is too late to avoid the worst possible catastrophes, i.e., the global warming extinction emergency and the ongoing collapse of global civilization. (Both of which are occurring because of either the convergence or the amplification of the global challenges listed above.)

Reason 4: Most of our current leaders have both stone-age minds and stone-age leadership qualities.
We are still evolving members of the ape family. We proudly try to distance ourselves from our ape animal roots by calling ourselves, humans. Despite our cultures continually trying to make us unaware of being evolving animals, we are all still mostly subject to our ancient biological animal drives, and so too it is with our current leaders.

Most of our current leaders had to have a high degree of stone-age alpha male qualities, or they would have never become leaders in their area. Those stone-age alpha leadership qualities are used to command the pack with fear of violence, actual violence, and deceit. They most often use these and other aggressive intimidation tactics for maintaining their power, privilege, and self-interest.

Stone age alphas will give excellent lip service to the common goals or the greater good of all, but they are always cleverly protecting and forwarding their own interests or adding to their assets, most often, at the expense of those they lead.

Unless society can remove these unevolved stone-age alphas from group leadership positions, it will continue to have the world we have now, and it will be far more difficult fixing it.

This deficient stone-age leadership problem means societies worldwide will soon need to establish minimum levels for their leaders' cognitive, social/emotional, and moral developmental levels. To manage the complexity and vast amounts of modern society information, our societies should also set minimum educational and intelligence levels for all critical leaders. We also need to ensure our leaders are well versed in scientific falsification methodology, basic logic, systems thinking, ethics, and dialectical meta-systemic thinking (Otto Laske.)

Not only should there be minimal developmental and skill levels set for all critical leadership positions, but there also should be recommended levels for cognitive, social-emotional, and moral development, education, and intelligence. This way the population can make better choices about who to elect or choose for their leaders for critical positions. (Luckily, science has already laid out the highest levels of human cognitive, social-emotional, and moral development in the works of Abraham Maslow, Claire Graves, Robert Kegan, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Otto Laske.

Today's world does not need more aggressive, self-centered, and genetically confident stone-age alpha leaders. We need more of the new and evolved alpha leaders. 

To successfully solve the world's current challenges, societies must eventually remove all stone-age alpha leaders from its most crucial power positions. It must replace them with the best-educated, smartest, and most cognitively, social-emotionally and morally developed new alpha leaders.

With these highly-evolved new alpha leaders, we will have the leaders needed for today's complex world. They will be the leaders genuinely dedicated to using their skills and gifts to resolve our current problems in ways that truly improve the collective's overall wellbeing.

For more about dialectical meta systemic thinking, click here.

Reason 5: Fundamental Evolutionary Flaws in Human Language

Human language is produced in the brain in layers. Human language is initially learned, in infancy, based on memorized sound patterns. The patterns are associated, not with logic, but with emotion. The next brain level, again in early childhood, groups sound patterns of simple words and simple-logical phrases. These are referred to as Single Sentence Logic (SSL). These two processes, each with their own brain layer, work very fast. This fast response provides a substantial survival advantage in a hunter-gatherer environment.

It is not until much later in a child's development that the ability to handle intricate word patterns like paragraphs, pages, books, and libraries, on a logical basis, is formed in additional separate layers. The problem is, this brain structure leads to significant difficulties for complex modern communications. It takes a relatively long time interval to process complex issues. 

Many private, corporate, and governmental forces want to manipulate people. Using quickly presented, short "sound bites," filled with emotional "trigger" words, they can effectively saturate the fast layers, blocking higher levels of thinking in most people. As social complexity explodes, most people's ability to understand and resolve complex problems is entirely overwhelmed by the media's bombardment with very rapid emotional triggers.

Reason 6: The explosion of technology and complexity is not compatible with how human brains evolved

The explosion of technology has also introduced extreme complexity into how we use tools and instruments, and into all commercial and social interactions! For all the technical elements to work together, very complex sets of rules and information are required. We would have to memorize many thousands of pages of detailed directions. To fully engage in all our commercial and social interactions, we would also have to memorize many thousands of pages of law books, and read and remember all the words in every contract and agreement we sign. This high complexity also means actions and decisions must be made much faster. Timing becomes critical, and every piece of technology-dependent information must be precise. There isn't time to check into the reference material. Human brains can't do even a small fraction of this. So, people don't do it. They make up their own "workarounds" (i.e., superstitions), which, of course, are not compatible with anyone else's. The result is, that interactions with both machines and other people constantly don't work the way we expect! 

Reason 7: Evolved human psychology drives individuals toward self-centered individual survival

Humans cannot escape the numerous strong survival drives that have been hard-wired into them over millions of years of vertebrate evolution.

Because of the rapidness of messaging, we can't take the time to research and understand complex issues or correctly operate the equipment. To "cope," the human brain invents "shortcuts" - i.e., "superstitions" about what has been said or how things work. Because of the continual breakdown of equipment and interpersonal interactions and the rapid emotional media assault of messages, individuals believe they are being assaulted. The assaults are interpreted as "threats" by our evolved self-centered personal defenses for survival. They are direct attacks on our inherent concepts of individual freedom. Our "fight or flight" defenses evolved to deal with "tangible" adversaries. Our brain uses the invented superstitions to assign "blame" for their pain. The blame must have a "name"! This complexity and flawed language vs. freedom dichotomy directly explains the current extreme polarization of social groups, governments, and political beliefs.

Ironically, before science broke open our vast understanding of nature, the forces of nature, in the form of demons, were the most common culprits. With such thinking largely discredited, our made-up superstitions are now more often aimed at each other! These "selfish gene" drives lead to social conflict and violence. When confronted with this, society's response has gone from simple admonishment to putting people in prison or even putting them to death. The problem is, these drives run so deep, even this entire range of responses has failed. The results have been 12,000+ years of war and conflict. To reach a peaceful, sustainable future, radically new approaches are needed for managing the self-interest vs. community-interest conflict. A patchwork of fixes has not worked and will not work.

Reason 8: Our stone-age impaired brains are also being attacked and compromised by 4th generation mind control technology enabled by supercomputers, advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) software, and today's social media and search platforms. This social media-enabled mind control attack of hidden manipulation is not only enhancing tensions and polarizing people worldwide. It is also causing people to no longer be able to reason out or understand what is true or fake.

This mind control is dangerous because, without the ability to see and know truth from falsehood independently, the world will continue making terrible decisions on our many global challenges. Social media fake news propagation is also super-charging racial, ethnic, religious, and national political tensions worldwide to make matters worse. This super-charging effect will eventually and most certainly produce more racial, ethnic, religious, and national conflicts, maybe even new race, ethnic, religious, and national wars.

Before we describe the basics of 4th generation mind control, we strongly recommend first watching the shocking Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma. It will set the necessary foundation for you to understand the invisible tactics used and to know why fourth-generation mind control is already another severe and vast problem inhibiting our ability to solve our current global challenges. Additionally, the everyday use of fourth-generation mind control by social media companies is not only inhibiting our ability to think and solve our global challenges; it is also significantly accelerating the worse consequences of those challenges.

In this new documentary, you will hear top executives from Silicon Valley's most prominent social media companies telling you the world is in new grave danger, and that we must regulate and remove this danger immediately. They also will warn you that AI and supercomputers have twisted social media into a new form of ultra-sophisticated, hidden nano-manipulation whose fundamental purpose is to get you to change your opinions, beliefs, and sense of identity to ultimately change your behavior without either your awareness or conscious consent.

Once you have viewed the Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma, you are ready to continue with this brief explanation of the four generations of mind control:

a. First-generation mild control is almost as old as humanity. It appeared in ancient Egyptian and other cults where a member was put through many highly restrictive, cathartic, and stressful experiences. This process would often also involve the use of drugs and a fake death and a "miraculous drugged "rebirth from the "death" experience. The reborn individual would then assume the cult's new identity because the cult had saved their lives.

The subject usually also became a fanatical true believer. First-generation mind control was time-consuming and labor-intensive. Think of it as a one-by-one assembly line. (For more, see the initiation rites of Hashish Assassins.)

b. Second-generation mild control was advanced in the 1950s when modern psychology tactics were integrated with many ancient first-generation cult tactics. The Russians, Koreans, and the Chinese all used second-generation tactics in their Gulags and though-reform prison camps on political dissidents. The Koreans made second-generation mind control effectiveness famous when the captured US Air Force pilots and used it so effectively that the pilots went on International TV and denounced America and the American way of life.

Second-generation mind control was more refined and also less time-consuming. Numerous handlers were still needed in the prison camps to execute the program to apply and maintain continuous stress on the subject until they broke. Think of an assembly line that could produce more cost-effective mind control victims whose opinions, beliefs, and identities had been radically changed. (For more, search the descriptions of what was done in Korea to downed US pilots during the Korean war.

c. Third-generation mild control was advanced in the 1960s by cults like Scientology, the Moonies, and Hare Krishna. Here coercive influence tactics of modern psychology were integrated with many of the ancient first-generation cult tactics. Unlike the Russians, Korean, and the Chinese Gulags and their use of thought-reform prison camps, these modern cults had refined the mind control tactics to newer micro-influence levels no longer requiring physical constraint or physical abuse.

Third-generation mind control was less time-consuming and labor-intensive because it could be done not one-by-one, like in earlier mind control generations, but on a whole group of people at the same time. This group application was achieved by controlling almost every area of their existence by the cult. (What they wore, ate, thought, did, etc.)

Stress was still applied continuously but more skillfully, secretively, and gradually in micro-steps. Think of a faster, better coercive influence group assembly line, which also could produce more cost-effective mind control victims whose opinions, beliefs, and identity had been radically changed more efficiently and faster. (If you read George Orwell's 1984, you will have a good idea of what life was like inside these third-generation mind-control cults. For more, search for what was done to victims of the cults mentioned above in the many lawsuits filed against them.)

d. Fourth-generation mild control began not long after the creation of social media, and Silicon Valley launched the new search platforms. Fourth-generation mind control makes a very significant big jump from an individual or group application to mass application. No longer did one have to be imprisoned or even be in a high-control, high-restriction cult to be the victim of this new hidden and even more dangerous mind control.

Fourth-generation mind control uses supercomputers, artificial intelligence, complex algorithms, the psychology of influence and behavioral change, tightly controlled echo chambers, and some earlier generation deceit and hidden influence tactics. Fourth-generation mind control can create a meaningful and continuous influence over the subject in gradual nano-steps. These nano-steps make it even easier to change the subject's opinions, beliefs, and even their core sense of who they are (their identity), and they have no idea this is even being done.

Fourth-generation mind control is the least time-consuming and labor-intensive because it is done mostly by machines. It is being done to billions of people simultaneously, not just the small groups as in third-generation mind control. Stress is still applied continuously but far skillfully, secretively, and more gradually than in any other generation.

Think of a faster, better mass production assembly line that can more cost-effectively produce billions of mind control victims over the next few decades. Think of it as the fastest, most invisible, and advanced technology of modern civilization being used against our stone-age brains. Yes, our stone-age brains will never have a chance unless we regulate and ban them from being used on our children or manipulating every person now using social media. (For more, watch the Social Dilemma documentary on NetFlix. In clear and precise ways, it will show you the many subtle and invisible ways that today's social media is using fourth-generation mind control to invisibly change your opinions, beliefs, identity, and behavior without your awareness or consent.

Reason 9: Our current form of democracy has reached its limits.

"Democracy," or more specifically, "Athenian Democracy" in the form of a Republic, as it is now implemented worldwide, is incompatible with the technology-produced conditions of modern society. Ancient Athens had a small, sparse population, simple technology, and relatively similar self-sufficient farmers. Their culture was dominated by one national religion and very homogeneous practices. This simple "social environment" continued well into the 18th century. It allowed the concept of "majority voting" to work and provide most people with an "acceptable" outcome. ALL these factors have now changed.

We now have huge populations with hundreds of interspersed beliefs and cultures that are radically different. A hyper-specialized workforce breaks down the prevailing "agricultural culture" that bonded most people. Additionally, complex, hyper-integrated new technologies force all of these cultures to adopt narrow approaches for communication and interaction unfamiliar to all of them. All of the alternate forms of democracy currently in use or being discussed rely on the limiting singular "winner" outcome of "majority voting" to determine social action. In societies with hundreds of competing cultures, no "singular result" can come anywhere near close to providing most people with an acceptable result. The result is, that most people "feel" the result of any government decision, which always has many provisions that don't address their needs, as a "government tyranny" against them. The product is population unrest and distrust or hate of government around the world.

In ancient Athens, with a population under 100,000, "congresses" of as many as 4,000 citizens were assembled as "representatives". These were predominantly farmers, making decisions for farmers. Even so, a very sophisticated machine was built to ensure that every representative was selected without bias or allegiance to a social group!

Today, a few hundred people (politicians) are chosen to represent hundreds of millions of citizens, each with very different job skills, social situations, educational backgrounds, etc. The requirements for preventing bias or allegiance, which the Athenians in 500BC already understood, was a cornerstone for democracy to work and have been thrown to the wind. So, not only is the majority wins "singular result" a major flaw, the process that actively steers representatives into the hands of political parties and industrial "lobbying" completely severs any logical connection between current "democracies" and the original implementation of that term. By design, contemporary "democracies" can only be hotbeds for corruption and government failure. "Democracy" must now evolve to new forms that solve all the 8 problems listed above if we are ever to solve our critical global challenges (described above.)

What happens when you mix everything above together in Phase 1?

When you are thinking about the interacting collective and individual impacts of the above, you must also consider their direct and indirect impacts upon human social, economic and political systems and the tipping points within those unique human systems. For example, as we continue to experience more of the multiplying, amplifying, and magnifying consequences mentioned above that will also increase in frequency, severity, and scale, we will also begin to experience more random human system crashes and collapses which have previously occurred when severe stresses arise within our social, economic and political human systems. This will then eventually push these human systems ever closer toward or over their own internal tipping points.

For example, as crops fail from Arctic Sea ice loss, droughts, rain bombs, extreme storms, cold spells, and extreme temperatures, food prices will skyrocket. Populations will eventually riot before they starve to death and then as more people die or struggle not to die, law and order will break down. Eventually, the weaker countries will collapse under the ever-increasing weight of these rising internal economic political, and social climate-related catastrophes and resource conflicts.

What also will begin to happen as we leave Phase 1 and enter Phase 2 is that nuclear reactors, toxic chemical manufacturing plants, and any chemical or biological weapons stockpiles in the weakest nations will become more vulnerable to accidental meltdown, release or theft as the governments of weaker nations no longer have the resources or manpower to keep these critical sites secure and operational.

As the world's weakest nations collapse from the mounting global warming, our other global challenges, they will create more and more desperate climagees (climate refugees in the millions.) As this rising migration seeks to enter the stronger and safer nations, the stronger nations will also begin to experience local and regional breakdowns in law and order as they experience greater and greater stresses upon their own economic, social, and political systems as they too simultaneously struggle with most of the same consequences.

Here is An Illustrated Quick Overview of the Climageddon Climate Change and Global Warming Extinction Scenario Processes 

At this point, an illustration will help simplify the many things you have just read. The Climageddon extinction scenario process illustrated below will help you understand global warming's many levels of processes and interactions as a holistic gestalt.

A gestalt in holism is the idea that the properties and processes of natural systems and subsystems should also be viewed as having synergetic processes and as an interconnected and unified whole, not simply as collections of, or summations of, separate and individual non-inter-dependent or inter-connected parts or actions.

Review the following Climageddon Scenario illustration starting from the bottom up! Starting from the bottom, this illustration reflects the unfolding natural progression of ever-worsening and interacting consequences and tipping point processes that will occur as global warming continues to escalate pushing us toward our extinction.

The top of the illustration below shows you the later phase Climageddon Scenario consequences. The bottom shows you the earlier consequences. For now just get a general idea of all the global warming consequences, tipping points, and human system factors will be interacting and colliding as well as amplifying and multiplying each other as the Climageddon extinction scenario unfolds in phases and waves. (Full explanations of each tipping point and consequence are found here, the 11 key global warming tipping points and, here the 20 worst global warming consequences.)

Remember to review this illustration from the bottom up beginning with the heating of global warming escalating!

 

About the Climageddon Extinction Scenario and Countdown as a whole system

As you can see from the illustration above, the Climageddon Scenario is far more than just a summary listing of the individual global warming consequences and tipping points. In the above illustrated intertwined unfolding phases and interactions, it becomes easier to see the continually heat-intensified individual consequences and tipping points churning into something far more dangerous than just the individual summation of these things.

Collectively, all of these moving consequences and interactions of our global warming emergency synergize with each other at various levels and accelerate the intensity and speed of the more deadly later stages of the Climageddon extinction scenario. When you begin to see the Climageddon extinction scenario model as an integrated climate, human, and biological super-system, you will discover:

1. new critical relationships and processes occurring between the climate, human, and biological systems,
   
   
2. new qualifying and conditioning climate, human, and biological contexts, and finally,
   
   
3. new phase-by-phase interactions and magnifying transformations of the interconnected and interdependent climate, human, and biological system consequences that will both suddenly and dramatically worsen our lives.

To help you get this "big picture" synergetic consequence interaction perspective, you will find many illustrations like the one above showing the major tipping points and other global warming consequences colliding with our financial, social, and political systems. 

"Because of its, scores of variables, complexity, and constantly evolving and emerging new tipping points and synergies, one of the hardest things to grasp about the Climageddon extinction prediction model is that it is a unique viewing gestalt for our probable future relating to almost every level of our current existence." Lawrence Wollersheim

Now that you have learned about Phase 1 of the Climageddon Scenario, it is time to learn about assigning risk levels to every Climageddon phase.

How to assign risk evaluation levels to each the 6 phases of the Climageddon extinction scenario

To help you put into perspective the serious implications of the consequences unfolding at each level of the 6 phases of the Climageddon Scenario, we use three recognized risk, threat, and hazard alert scales.

Those three risk evaluation scales are:

1. The Torino Impact Hazard 0-10 Scale was used to quantify the many risks and hazards of asteroids of different sizes hitting the earth.

2. The DEFCON 5-1 levels used by the U.S. government and military regarding preparedness for nuclear or conventional war. And,

3. The current US Homeland Security Advisory System. 

Here are the three risk analyses and how they are used to rate the six phases of the Climageddon Scenario:

1. The Torino Impact Hazard 0-10 Scale was used to quantify the many risks and hazards of asteroids of different sizes hitting the earth. (The Torino Scale goes from 0 to 10, where a 0 rating is no hazard or threat and a 10 is “a collision is certain, capable of causing a global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean.”)

 

 

There is a good reason to use the Torino Impact Hazard Scale with the Climageddon Scenario. Depending upon what phase of the scenario we enter, how we adapt to the threat may be uncannily similar to how we might adapt to survive impacts of ever-increasing asteroid sizes hitting the earth in repeated waves.

For example, if we knew well in advance that a small, survivable asteroid would hit the earth, using the Torino scale threat level 3 advisories could provide enough time to relocate almost everyone from the local hazardous area of impact. If a larger but still survivable asteroid were to hit, once again using the Torino scale threat level 4 advisory, we could have time to relocate almost everyone from the larger regional area of impact.

Similar to these asteroid impact scenarios, as the escalating global warming emergency continues through the 6 Climageddon Scenario phases, it will also eventually force us to relocate first millions, then billions of people. We will relocate them first locally, then regionally, nationally, and eventually internationally to the far north or far south. But, we may be able to move only as much of the total human population as can survive in the poorer soils and shorter growing seasons of the northernmost and southernmost countries of the world (above the 45th parallel north to Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Alaska, Iceland, and Greenland, etc), and also below the 45th parallel south like some areas on the south island of New Zealand or at the tip of South America.

2. The DEFCON 5-1 levels used by the U.S. government and military regarding preparedness for nuclear or conventional war. (The DEFCON rating system goes from 5 to 1. DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime military readiness, and 1 is the highest military alert, such as imminent nuclear war. As the climate continues to destabilize, at some point the nations of the world will have to declare emergency regulations and martial law to deal with the escalating crisis and the internal and external instability it creates. Using this scale is appropriate because if left unchecked, global warming will parallel and eventually exceed the destructiveness of all non-nuclear world wars.)

 

3. The current US Homeland Security Advisory System. (The Homeland Security Advisory System is a color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale. The different levels trigger specific actions by federal agencies and state and local governments, and they affect the level of security at some airports and other public facilities. Although this is a terrorist threat risk system, it is also useful for climate crises. In the mid-to-late phases of the Climageddon Scenario, as our political, economic, and social systems break down, the nations of the world will react similarly to how they would react to a high-level terrorist threat or an actual attack. Martial law and other restrictive emergency measures with curfews, new regulations, loss of civil rights, and normal legal protections will be enacted.)

 

Phase 1 Risk and threat ratings:

As described earlier, for each Climageddon phase, three different risk ratings are provided. Here are the risk ratings for phase 1:

Phase 1 Torino impact rating:

Torino rating 8: The threat is highly certain for localized and regional destruction. Attention by public and governmental contingency planning is merited if the events are less than 3 decades away. Click here and go to the section of the page called Action Plan Section 2 near the bottom of the page to learn what the governments must start doing immediately.

Phase 1 US military DEFCON rating:

DEFCON 4, described as increased intelligence gathering and security measures.

Phase 1 US Homeland Security risk rating:

Orange: High risk.

The essential positive perspective on the above disruptive global warming and climate change news

Despite the many types of challenging global warming consequences and past fossil fuel reduction mistakes that we now face, we can still learn from their feedback, and we can adapt and evolve to make life as good and as happy as is possible. No matter how severe the coming global warming consequences might become, if we wisely play the remaining cards that we have been dealt with, we can still achieve the best remaining possible outcomes. 

We can yet make a significant difference to reduce global fossil fuel use to stabilize and save the future of humanity by executing a comprehensive reduction and survival plan like the Job One for Humanity global warming action plan. 

We can still maintain the perseverance needed to succeed in this monumental task by regularly reviewing the many benefits which will unfold as we work successfully on this together. (Click here to review those benefits.) 

We can persevere through this time of emergency. We just need to remember that our greatest challenges are also the seeds of our greatest opportunities.

We are engaged in nothing less than the most critical and meaningful evolutionary opportunity, challenge, and adventure in human history! It is our last opportunity to slow down the mass human extinction threat by getting close to these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. Only reaching these targets will fully remove the near-total extinction threat. In reaching these targets, we also significantly improve many of the world's other 12 major challenges.

Get started today on the Job One for Humanity global warming reduction and survival plan. Help save and salvage as much of humanity and our beautiful civilization as is possible.

 

 

Congratulations!

You have finished Phase 1 of the Climageddon Scenario. There are 5 more well-illustrated and soon-arriving Climageddon Scenario phases to review where, unfortunately, things get even worse as global warming worsens.

Because the Climageddon Scenario is already unfolding, please do not forget that if we do reach the last chance 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets by plus or minus 5 percent, we will avoid the worst consequences of the Climageddon Scenario and mass extinction! Life over the millennia always seems to find a way to solve its previous mass extinction challenges!

To help prevent the 6 phases of the Climageddon Scenario from unfolding there exists a deadline-prioritized, effective action plan to ensure we do not trigger the later mass extinction phases. Click here for a brief overview of this plan.

Click here to see where we are today on the Climate Change and Global Warming Doomsday Clock.

If you get discouraged reading the many consequences of the Climageddon Scenario, please go to this Surprise Benefits of Global Warming page, which is the most-read page on our website.

The July 2020 Special Update on changing preparation and adaption timeframes for the global warming emergency: Please click here and go to our member's area critical timeframe update on these issues as soon as possible. This update is vital if you want to prepare your family or business for what is now unavoidable!  

 

Click here for the Climageddon Scenario Phase 2, beginning as soon as 2032-2050

The information and illustrations of the detailed consequences, costs, and timetables for phase 2, as well as for each of the other 4 Climageddon Scenario, phases are contained on this next page.

This next page is normally only found in our member's only section, which we have made temporarily viewable to the general public. Much of the recently updated consequences, costs, and timetable information that you are reading in the 6 phases are not found in the Climageddon book.

If the consequence, costs, and timetable link above is not working in the paragraph above, use the following to get to this additional Climageddon Scenario phase 2-6 information:

If you are a member and you are logged in, click the Members link on the top menu bar on the far right side of the page. Then click the link called Climageddon Scenario Consequence Timetables.

If you are not already a member, you also can see this critical information and the rest of this Climagageddon Scenario document by becoming a member by clicking here.)

Our Members Only section of the website contains much information like the following. We recommend that you click Members link at the top of the page and see what else is available.

 

 

Please keep in mind that the global warming disaster costs in the chart above are only for single disasters during phases 1-4. In phase 5 you see the total cost to the world.

 

Ask them why they are not adequately managing the greatest threat multiplier and global problem amplifier of the 21st century by enacting the governmental steps described here!

 

(This page and all other Climageddon-related pages are derived substantially from the 2016 book, Climageddon, The Global Warming Emergency and How to Survive It. It has been updated with new climate research since 2016 as applicable. Climageddon is Available on Amazon.)

Let's start with a few of today's most concerning climate change emergency facts:

In spite of all the media PR, all the 21 climate conferences over the last 30 years, and all the national reduction pledges, things are not just getting gradually worse in a linear progression (1,2,3,4, etc.), they're getting worse in an exponential progression (2,4,8,16, etc.)! When we measure current rates of toxic carbon and methane pollution going into the atmosphere, there is now no way to deny it; we are not winning the escalating global warming battle!  

In spite of 30 years of warnings by credible scientists, the environmental movement and an increasing body of compelling scientific evidence (now agreed to by almost all of the scientists qualified in climate science), the toxic carbon and methane pollution of the atmosphere has not slowed or even leveled off.

Leading climate scientists like James Hansen (former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who also originally warned us about the global warming danger 30 years ago) say that we would remain safe if carbon in the atmosphere did not go over 350 parts per million (ppm). As of February of 2016, carbon ppm was near 405.35 ppm and increasing at about 2-3+ ppm per year in a nonlinear, exponential progression.

 

 

Worse yet, if you include atmospheric methane and other greenhouse gas pollutants, our current adjusted carbon ppm is already near 430 ppm or 430 ppm of CO2e! (When you combine the global warming heating effect of carbon with other greenhouse gases it is called the CO2e ppm rating. Also, see the rapidly rising carbon only ppm graph curve farther below. It does not show atmospheric methane included.) 

See the rapidly rising carbon ppm graph curve just below. Please note that It does not include and show atmospheric methane pollution. If it did, it would be at an effect-combined level of about 430 ppm.

We will be at carbon 450 ppm in 10 years or less if we include atmospheric methane in our calculations. To put this in a time-lapse perspective, from 1850 to about 1950, carbon pollution was steady at about a 1 ppm per year increase. From 1950 to 2000, the increase rose to 2 ppm per year, and now in its current exponential curve, it is at 2.75 ppm per year and rising rapidly toward 3+ ppm per year in possibly just a few more years. If carbon continues to rise in this exponentially and nonlinear way and continues virtually unchecked by our ineffective actions as it appears it may, after the year 2025 the increase will reach a possible level of 3-4+ ppm per year from its current level of about 2.7 ppm per year.

According to James Hansen, carbon 450 ppm would correspond to an average global temperature increase of 6 degrees Fahrenheit in this century and “the end of human civilization as we’ve come to know it.” Based on carbon ppm levels already in the system and soon reaching the 450 mark, this means that a 2.7-degree Celsius global temperature increase (6 plus degrees Fahrenheit) may already be an inescapable reality.

Unfortunately, it gets much worse! It is also highly probable that because of our denial and delay in facing and addressing the escalating global warming emergency with honest and effective measures, carbon parts per million in the atmosphere will most likely continue to rapidly rise to and beyond carbon 550 ppm, which translates to a 3-4+ degree Celsius increase (6-8+ degrees Fahrenheit) in average global temperature. For every degree of Celsius temperature increase, global food production will drop 10% in many southern areas while the human population will continue to soar toward 9 billion. Climate scientists who are normally guarded in their language call a 4 degree Celsius increase (6-8 degrees Fahrenheit) in average global temperature "Hell on Earth."

More "big picture" climate change facts:

1. We the general public are not being honestly told how bad escalating global warming actually is right now, or how bad it will become if we continue as we are now. The fossil fuel heavily lobbied or owned global media are telling us what will not alarm us to the real dangers and will allow the fossil fuel industry to continue “business as usual.”  Current fossil fuel use values for toxic carbon air pollution are more than 404 parts per million (ppm.) This is higher than at any other time in the last 1 million years (and maybe higher than any time in the last 25 million years.) This new carbon pollution record represents an increase of 85 carbon ppm in the 55 years since David Keeling began making his revolutionary atmospheric carbon pollution measurements at Mauna Loa. (See graphs one and four below.)

2. Even more disturbing than the historic magnitude of this change is the fact that the rate of toxic carbon pollution accumulating in the atmosphere has been rapidly increasing over the last few decades. If we keep doing only what we have been doing to resolve global warming, this also means that future increases will happen even faster. (See graphs one and two below.)

3. When averaged over 55 years, the increase in toxic carbon pollution has been about 1.55 ppm per year. However, the most recent data suggest that the annual increase is more than 2.75 ppm of carbon pollution per year. Carbon pollution of our atmosphere is getting worse, not better! We are not making progress in reducing our fossil fuel burning addiction.

Our 30-year inability to get the climate change emergency under control is in part due to:

1. The lack of national and international verifiable and enforceable international laws making large-scale toxic carbon and methane pollution of the atmosphere a strongly punished crime against both current society members and future generations.

2. The physical time lags in developing and deploying the infrastructure needed for the new green energy technologies (10-15 years if everyone on the planet and every government all agreed to do this immediately and there were no budgetary or resource restrictions in completing this life-critical project).

3. The existing carbon pollution momentum is already in the atmosphere. It will take numerous decades if not the rest of this century to eliminate it if we could immediately get our carbon 430 ppm level back down to carbon 350 to 325 ppm.

If the escalating global warming emergency and its consequent climate destabilization proceed to the levels currently being predicted, it will eventually cost the global society hundreds of trillions of dollars in crisis recovery as well as soaring insurance rates, massive real estate depreciation, and massive coastal and other infrastructure losses, in addition to the vast amount of human suffering and death. The Stern Review estimated that the costs of catastrophic climate destabilization will eventually grow to consume as much as 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every nation on earth—and that is not even at climate destabilization's latter, or worse, stages! (The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a 700-page report released for the British government. The report discusses the effect of global warming on the world economy.)

Right now most nations are struggling with over-indebtedness and their economies are in trouble with anemic annual growth. How will many of these nations, particularly the weakest ones, remain politically or financially viable, stable, or even in existence if another 5% or more of their total GDP is drained off each year into the continually escalating costs of climate destabilization?

The global warming emergency and its consequent climate destabilization are already here! Its super storms, flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, migrating insect infestations, and droughts will continue increasing in scale, severity, and frequency.

In fact, we are already in a state of irreversible global warming that will last at least another 50 years. We are now facing an extinction-level event where human-caused carbon and methane pollution levels in the atmosphere push the global temperature increases to 5-6 degrees Celsius (8-12 degrees Fahrenheit) and beyond.

Please Go to the next page in this special briefing called: Future global warming - unfortunately, it gets worse.

Go to the previous page

Get access to the free Job One Plan here!

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Prologue

Our accelerating climate change and global heating (aka global warming) emergency is what energizes climate marchers, climate protestors, climate conferences, and climate summit attendees to keep going no matter what the odds.

We ask you to read the following and make up your own mind after verifying the facts we present below. At the bottom of this page is a link to effective global warming and climate emergency solutions.)

At the end of this article, to counterbalance these highly disruptive global warming facts, you will find a link to a comprehensive four-part plan for what you can do to help manage the climate change emergency! You will also find a link to the many surprising and significant benefits that you and humanity will acquire as we resolve the global warming challenge, opportunity, and adventure. We must not forget "that our greatest challenges are also our greatest opportunities." 

Introduction:

We are unfortunately facing a mass to total extinction event within our lifetimes (the next 30-50 years.) It is being caused by the many escalating consequences of the global warming and climate change emergency. The following will help you understand the definition of the climate change emergency and why this is real even though most likely, you have heard little to anything about this from our media or governments.

Quick Climate Change and Global Heating Emergency Overview:

• Life on Earth has flourished best when atmospheric carbon levels were in a range of 200-270 ppm ( this is what they were in the pre-industrial age).

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has failed to properly educate global leaders and has significantly underestimated timetables, which in turn has dangerously diminished awareness of the real climate change emergency we are in.

• The battle to keep global warming at less than 2° Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) has already been lost.

• It is highly probable carbon parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere will rise beyond the carbon 550 ppm total, which translates to a 3° to 4°+ Celsius increase (5.4° to 7.2°+ Fahrenheit) in average global temperature. This level of temperature increase would create a "Hell on Earth."

• A 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) increase at carbon 600 ppm is also a realistic projection, and it will occur long before 2100 if we do not radically cut global fossil fuel use immediately to these global levels. (Click here to discover the details concerning what soon crossing the carbon 500 and carbon 600 ppm will mean to your survival.)

• When we resolve the climate change emergency, there will be many benefits. We will also create a new and green Third Industrial Revolution. This will, directly and indirectly, create millions of new green energy-related jobs worldwide to replace millions of lost fossil fuel industry-related jobs.

Welcome to a not-so-happy summary of the global heating and climate change emergency...

On the following pages, you will discover the uncomfortable facts and science defining what the climate change emergency is and how fast global warming is really escalating. You will also discover the many additional reasons why we are now in an undeclared but climate change extinction emergency. 

While reading this candid briefing, keep in mind that if we act wisely, together, and with urgency, we can still slow the catastrophic global warming consequences that are coming. But, before we can wisely survive global warming, it is necessary to honestly face exactly the facts on where we are starting from.

Why 40 plus years of climate change and global heating reduction failure?

In spite of 40 years of warnings by credible scientists and the work of the environmental movement, plus a preponderance of collaborating scientific evidence, as well as numerous conferences (21 to date,) and previous treaties, the carbon dioxide and methane pollution of the atmosphere, has not stopped, slowed, or even leveled off. On the contrary, it is getting worse faster than ever before! (See atmospheric carbon graph in parts per million below.)

Leading climate scientists like James Hansen, who originally warned us about the global warming danger 35 years ago, say we would remain safe if carbon in the atmosphere did not go over 350 parts per million (ppm). As of June 2019, carbon was near 420 ppm and increasing at about 3-4 ppm per year in a near exponential progression.

When you combine the heating effect of carbon with the other greenhouse gases, it is called the CO2e ppm rating. CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent. CO2e is a standard unit for measuring all greenhouse gases in terms of the amount of warming they create compared to CO2.carbon footprints.

When you include atmospheric methane and the other greenhouse gas pollutants, our current adjusted CO2e rating has already risen to the shocking level of 430 ppmv of CO2e! Worse yet, we will be at carbon 450 ppm in 10 years or less when we include atmospheric methane in our calculations.

To put this in a time-lapse perspective, from 1850 to about 1950, the increase in carbon pollution was steady at about 1 ppm per year. From 1950 to 2000, the increase rose to 2 ppm per year, and now in its current exponential curve, it is at about 3 ppm per year and rising rapidly toward 3-4 ppm per year. If carbon continues to rise in this exponential, nonlinear way, virtually unchecked by our ineffective previous actions, the increase could easily reach a level of 4 plus ppm per year by 2025.

 

Image via Stephen Stoft at zfacts.com

 

According to James Hansen one of the world's most important climate researchers, a carbon 450 ppm level would eventually correspond and develop into an average global temperature increase of 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) in this century and the end of human civilization as we’ve come to know it. Based on carbon ppm levels already in the system and reaching the 450 mark, this also means at least another 2.7° Celsius (4.9° Fahrenheit) global temperature increase beyond where we are now is the eventual and inescapable future reality.

This 2.7° Celsius would also be the most realistic minimal temperature increase to predict as part of any future planning over the next 10-30 years. Bear in mind that even this scenario applies only if everything goes perfectly and we cross no additional global warming tipping points.

Unfortunately, it is highly probable that because of our ongoing denial and delay in addressing escalating global warming, atmospheric carbon parts per million will most likely continue to rapidly rise beyond the carbon 450-550 ppm total, which translates to a 3° to 4° Celsius increase (5.4° to 7.2°+ Fahrenheit) up to as much as a 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) increase in average global temperature. (A 4° Celsius increase [7.2° Fahrenheit] in average global temperature would become “Hell on earth” as Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, has stated.)

Hansen’s projections for “ending human civilization as we know it” is not the same as mass human extinction as we approach the 5° or 6° Celsius (9° to 10.8° Fahrenheit) temperature levels. In Hansen’s 6° Celsius rise coming from eventually crossing the carbon 450 ppm mark, what would be considered normal, comfortable, or predictable daily life in developed nations will be severely impaired. In undeveloped nations, there will be a level of chaos and breakdown that will rapidly render most of these nations politically and economically unsustainable. As it is already occurring, the chaos of existing less-developed nations destabilized by factors such as war and the climate change emergency will affect the more developed and stable nations far beyond just the current massive migrations of those escaping the suffering.

In spite of all the media PR, 21 UN / IPCC international climate conferences, endless warnings from credible scientists over the last 30 years, and national reduction pledges and treaties, things are worsening in a nearly exponential progression (2,4,8,16, etc.). There is no way to deny we are not only losing the escalating global warming battle. Unfortunately, we are also losing it at a progressively faster rate so now global warming is close to being out of our meaningful control for the next 30-50 years. (For the precise definition of out-of-control global warming and how and why this happened, click here.)

Instead of enacting the needed changes when they were far easier, more gradual, and far less costly, we must now take radical, painful, and costly tough medicine if we are going to save the future. The changes that would have been inconvenient 30 years ago will now become nearly unbearable.

 

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Some of today’s most disturbing global heating and climate change emergency facts

1. We are not receiving adequate accurate facts about how bad escalating global warming is now, or how bad it will become. The heavy fossil fuel lobbied major media conglomerates politely decline to alarm us about the real dangers of our out-of-control climate change emergency in order to allow the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual.

2. Current atmospheric fossil fuel burning-related carbon ppm values are now at about 415. This is higher than at any other time in the last 1 million years (possibly higher than at any time in the last 25 million years). This new carbon pollution record represents an increase of 88 carbon ppm in the 55 years since David Keeling began making his revolutionary atmospheric carbon pollution measurements at Mauna Loa. (See graphs in this document.)

3. Carbon pollution accumulating in the atmosphere has been increasing even faster over the last few decades. It is now nearly certain that if we refuse to take immediate, effective measures to resolve global warming, future increases will happen at even faster rates.

4. Global average temperatures have the potential to rise far faster than what we normally experience. For example, about 9600 BC, in the Boreal climatic phase, global temperatures rose 7° C (12.6° F) in less than a decade, pushing the ice sheets into rapid collapse and sending sea levels soaring. (Ice sheets are already beginning to collapse 

Our 40-year inability to control the climate change emergency and global heating emergency are due in part to:

1. The lack of national and international verifiable and enforceable international laws that would make continued large-scale carbon and methane pollution of the atmosphere a strongly punished activity or crime.

2. The physical time lags in developing and deploying the infrastructure needed for the new green energy technologies. As we are progressing now, it will likely take another 30-50 years. 

3. Click here to see more key reasons for what has caused our current out-of-control global warming and climate change emergency.

If everyone and every government simultaneously agreed to scale up green energy generation immediately and there were no budgetary or resource restrictions in completing this life-critical project, it would still take hundreds of years to put that infrastructure in place. (See this MIT stud for the details in this 400-year estimate.)

If escalating global warming and its consequent climate destabilization proceed to the levels currently being predicted, it will eventually cost the global society hundreds of trillions of dollars in disaster recovery, as well as soaring insurance rates, massive real estate losses and depreciation, and massive coastal and other infrastructure losses, in addition to the vast amount of human suffering and death.

Right now, most nations are struggling with debt and their economies are in trouble with anemic annual growth. How will many of these nations, particularly the weakest ones, remain politically or financially viable, stable, or even continue to exist if another 5% or more of their total GDP (the Stern Review) is drained off each year into the continually escalating costs of global warming-caused climate destabilization? Current estimates from a book called Climate Shock project all global warming consequences will cost 10 percent and maybe far more of the world’s total GDP by 2100. In the latter phases of out of control or irreversible global warming described in Climageddon, the book estimates it will require 30% of the world's GDP to stay up with the re-building and other costs.

The climate change emergency is already here! Its superstorms, flooding, seasonal disruptions, wildfires, heat waves, migrating insect infestations, and droughts will continue increasing in magnitude, frequency, and scale. According to a recent analysis from scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR),  "[t]he worst-case projections for global warming may be the most likely.”

The next battle now lies in keeping our near out of control global warming from rising to an extinction-level event where human-caused carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere push the global temperature increases to 4°-6° Celsius (7.2°-10.8° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels and beyond.

An already “baked-in” future of higher temperatures no matter what we do

A 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) increase in global average temperature by the year 2100 has been the official estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). But it is way too low and overly optimistic. This 2° Celsius IPCC estimate is based on the operating premise that everything happening in the very complex and highly interconnected climate system will always work perfectly as predicted, in our favor, and no more known or unknown climate tipping points will be crossed.

Planning for everything to go perfectly is the perfect plan for failure, and there's a dangerous global warming shocker hidden within these low-temperature estimates. The first wave of escalating global warming superstorms or "millennial storms" (storm severity levels that have not been seen for thousands or tens of thousands of years) will be coming much sooner than we are planning for. When you include crossing more of the critical global warming tipping points and adjust projections in evaluating the current climate data, it suggests all types of extreme weather such as millennial superstorms, super droughts, super floods, and super wildfires could begin replacing our current waves of extreme weather in as little as 15 to 30 years.

 

Unfortunately, there's more bad news. Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases today, we face considerably more global warming than the IPCC has publicly stated. According to Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at the University of Pennsylvania State, we are already on track for a total rise in temperature of 1.7° Celsius (about 3° Fahrenheit) in the northern hemisphere, no matter what we now do to slow or stop global warming. In part, this is because there is future global warming already “baked into” the warming pipeline.

This is what it is called “committed warming.” Committed warming is inevitable, delayed only by the lag time for the oceans to heat up, owing to the slow ocean warming response to greenhouse gases.

The temperature increase of 1.7° Celsius (3° Fahrenheit) is already committed. This is baked-in global warming and it is really bad news.

Worse yet, the computer modeling used to create the 1.7° Celsius prediction also does not include the possibility that we have unconsciously already crossed or could very soon cross more global warming tipping points. If that has happened or will happen soon, the calculation for already committed global warming could be significantly above 1.7° Celsius. We could rapidly move through an increase of 2° or 3° Celsius (3.6° to 5.4° Fahrenheit) and beyond.   

Additionally, after all of the atmospheric fossil fuel-related soot is gone, global temperatures are estimated to go up an additional .2 to .5° Celsius (0.36°-1° Fahrenheit), depending upon the atmospheric soot levels in your area of the world. 

This additional calculation for how the average global temperature will go up as we rapidly shut down the aerosol soot created by fossil fuel burning is significant. This implies that planning your personal or business future using only 1.7° Celsius (3° Fahrenheit) of already committed and “baked-in” average global warming is also a faulty and dangerous future planning assumption.

It would be far wiser to assume an increase in average global temperature of 1.9° to 2.2° Celsius (about 3.4° to 4° Fahrenheit) as a long-term planning starting point. While 1.9° to 2.2° Celsius is more realistic, it is still not as good as the most realistic 2.7° Celsius increase for longer-term planning. This is because the 1.7° to 2.2° Celsius (3° to 4° Fahrenheit) previous temperature planning starting point also does not include any calculations regarding crossing more global warming and climate system or subsystem tipping points, which is highly likely to happen.

To put this already committed, non-tipping point inclusive temperature range increase of 1.7° to 2.2° Celsius into another comparative perspective, the IPCC at the last Paris conference in December 2015 still pushed hard promoting that global warming should not rise above 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit). This is because they already know a 1.5° Celsius increase heralds an unending chain of horrific disasters for many of the world’s poorest countries. Why the IPPC promoted a global temperature target that was below the already known baked-in increase is hard to comprehend, and it will be indirectly explained here.

According to Professor Mann, when we hit 405 parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere, we have now committed ourselves to a 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) increase in global temperature. Now add in the fact that none of the above already committed global warming calculations except the 2.7°C (4.9° Fahrenheit) projection include any possibility that we have already unknowingly crossed or will cross more global warming tipping points. We are in deep trouble already!

From the preceding, it would be unrealistic to keep promoting that we can realistically keep the average global temperature increase below 2° Celsius. Yet, that is exactly what the IPCC promoted to world’s nations at its 2015 Paris conference in addition to promoting its lower 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) target.

It is time to face bitter facts. The battle to keep warming from rising less than 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) has been lost!

In reality, if we include crossing more tipping points we face a baked-in 2.7° degrees Celsius (4.9° Fahrenheit) average global temperature rise as we approach carbon 425 to 450 ppm. We need to immediately begin preparing for these severe temperature increases while we still have time!

It is also important to be aware that even though the 2.7° degrees Celsius temperature is already baked in and committed also because of previously mentioned momentum and inertia issues, it does not mean these higher temperatures will occur immediately. It could take a decade or more for these baked-in temperature rises to be fully realized.

 

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Additionally, when we extrapolate from the IPCC’s own current worst-case projections using what you have learned so far, a 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) increase occurring much sooner than 2100 becomes a real probability. This eventual 6° Celsius temperature increase prediction is based on these highly probable assumptions:

1. We continue business as usual, increasing the carbon pollution of the atmosphere at our current exponentially rising levels of carbon 3-4+ ppm per year,

2. Methane continues rising as it has over the last several decades because of the fracking boom, big agribusiness, and other factors, and

3. We have unknowingly already crossed or will soon cross more known or unknown global warming tipping points within any of the critical systems or subsystems of the climate system. For example, in May of 2014, we crossed another dangerous climate tipping point when scientists discovered that the West Antarctic Ice Shelf has gone into an irreversible and escalating melt.

According to the climate author Mark Lynas, if we let our planet’s temperature increase by 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit), “it would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.” 

In order for humanity to endure, we now have no other prudent choice but to do whatever we can to try to lessen and slow the long-term pain of this emergency so that global warming does not make us extinct. We may still have enough time to prepare families, businesses, nations, and ourselves for the tremendous stress that escalating global warming will cause—but only if we begin preparing for it now!

Putting only a 2° Celsius temperature rise in perspective using carbon levels and temperature fluctuations from Earth’s past

Seeing the climate change emergency from as many perspectives as possible will help you better grasp the depth and seriousness of the emergency we are in. For example, the Earth’s geologic past not only verifies that specific outcomes of global warming have occurred, but also gives us vital information about what similar consequences will likely occur as we duplicate the carbon dioxide levels, atmospheric temperatures, and other conditions of our distant and not-so-distant past. 

According to a 2015 paper in Science, about three million years ago:

1. The average global temperature was about 1.7°-2.7° Celsius (3°-5° Fahrenheit) warmer than today.

2. The Arctic regions of the planet were about 7° Celsius (12.6° Fahrenheit) warmer. 

3. Carbon dioxide levels were about as high as today.

4. Sea levels stood at least 20 feet (6-7 meters) above today’s level.

In our more recent geological past, around 400,000 and 125,000 years ago, average global temperatures were respectively about 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) and about 1° Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial times. During those two separate time periods, the upper bounds for sea-level rise were estimated to be up to 42 feet higher (13 meters) than the present. As you can imagine, at those temperatures either of the sea level rises (20-foot or 42-foot) would be a nightmare for world shorelines and their populations if they were to occur today.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what we are racing toward—and beyond. According to the same Science article, even if we managed to limit average global warming to just 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit), sea levels may still eventually rise at least 20 feet (6 meters) above their current levels. 

The illustration below will be useful for mid-range planning (the next 10-15 years) for any industry, individual, or nation whose future plans will be affected by the previously discussed consequences of escalating global warming. Keep in mind, this illustration with its estimated time frames does not include crossing any additional tipping points.

 

Why this climate change and global heating State of Emergency isn’t being discussed by our political leaders

To help you see where and why we are currently in a losing battle to end global warming, we have provided the following Keeling-styled graphs for the atmospheric carbon level data in different parts of this document.     

                                                                                                                           

Image via Robert A. Rohdes, Wikimedia commons.

 

The above graph shows variations in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the last 400 thousand years. It also helps to illustrate the carbon pollution data progressing from the Industrial Revolution of the 1880s to the present day. Other data also show the carbon ppm levels for the last several hundred thousand to millions of years. This way, you can see the modern spike in today's carbon pollution emergency in a historical, and especially post-Industrial, context.

More carbon in the atmosphere equals more heat

It is important to notice in the graph above that the long-term average carbon parts per million (ppm) never rose much above 270 ppm until the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, carbon ppm stayed in a general range significantly below where it is today. Only hundreds of millions of years ago were carbon ppm levels much higher, during Earth's turbulent developmental and volcanic periods.

Something has radically changed in carbon ppm atmospheric levels since the beginning of the fossil fuel-powered Industrial Revolution of the 1880s. For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, we have now crossed the unprecedented carbon 400 ppm level. Today's carbon ppm 413+ level is now nearly double the carbon 200-270 ppm range it held consistently for hundreds of thousands of years. This radical change in such a short period of geological time can and will have serious consequences!

Even if we do not cross any other global warming tipping points, which avoidance is highly unlikely, just by extrapolation using the current exponential rise per year and cumulative carbon levels, we could be at carbon 550 ppm in 30-40 years...or sooner. If we hit carbon 550 ppm, which translates to a temperature increase range of about 3° to 4°+ Celsius increase (5.4° to 7.2°+ Fahrenheit), as it appears we will, this "seals the deal" on destructive changes for most life on Earth (as described in Phase 3 of the Climageddon Scenario).

Extrapolating from the carbon ppm and average global temperature graph shown below, it appears that in spite of everything that we are doing now to slow escalating global warming, the current global average temperature is increasing by approximately 1/2 degree for about every 25 additional parts per million of carbon going into the atmosphere.

 

Image via Stephen Stoft at zfacts.com

 

The above graph provides evidence that CO2 is a contributing cause of global warming. This ongoing or increasing fossil fuel use will increase carbon ppm, which then increases the average global temperature. This increased or decreased carbon ppm in the atmosphere appears to have a direct or near direct relationship to rising and falling temperature all the way back to

Earth's earliest times.

Image via Robert A. Rhodes, Wikimedia Commons.

 

In the next graph below, one can see carbon pollution levels hundreds of millions of years into our past. As you can extrapolate from the carbon ppm range disclosed near the bottom of the far lower left of the graph, modern life forms as we know them today appear to exist and function best when atmospheric carbon levels are quite low in about the 200-270 ppm range.  Life on Earth was much different from the higher carbon levels seen hundreds of millions of years ago.

How human systems contribute to the climate change and global heating State of Emergency

It would not be fair to discuss over 30 years of continuous global warming warnings without also describing some of the problems of inertia within our human systems. Inertia is defined as the resistance of any physical object to any change in its current state of motion (including changes to its speed, direction, or state of rest or motion).

Our current global society is locked into the grip of almost a century and a half of change resistance (inertia) that favors using more and more fossil fuel. Part of the reason for this resistance is that fossil fuel use directly or indirectly is also responsible for about one-third of the world's gross domestic product (GDP).

The fossil fuel industry engenders a powerful human system resistance to change that we will have to overcome in order to successfully change over to green energy generation systems. The fossil fuel industry is constantly fighting the needed evolution of our energy generation systems. But even if we ended all fossil fuel use today, it is estimated that it would take 30 to 50 years to replace all of the current fossil fuel generation and distribution infrastructure.

Unfortunately, there is nothing close to unanimous agreement to act now, and we don't have another 30 to 50 years to fight the resistance of various fossil-fueled nations and fossil fuel-related corporations. Therefore, it is completely fair to say that the fossil fuel industry resistance and inertia are significant factors explaining why after 30 years of warnings, global warming is actually getting worse and not better!

In addition to the inertia and resistance of the fossil fuel industry working against efforts to end the use of polluting fossil fuels, there are other significant human system resistance (inertia) factors for why global warming is escalating faster than ever before in spite of all previous warnings:

1) Human evolutionary psychology: We are designed to react to immediate and obvious threats with the flight or fight response. Escalating global warming is slow, almost invisible, and it is generally believed to be far off in the future. Also, for many individuals, it is so complex that it can't be comprehended as the single most serious international security threat of the 21st century. 

2) Human political evolution: Human society has not yet evolved a global government with transnational enforcement and verification powers over all the member nations of our world. Global warming is a transnational problem that has to have a transnational solution.

3) Human legal evolution: Humanity has not evolved viable global courts to work out the inherent international justice issues relating to the developed countries that caused the pollution and will likely benefit from it in the short term. We really have no international justice process for dealing with the fact that undeveloped countries that didn't cause the pollution are expected to suffer nearly equally in the costs and efforts of resolving it.

4) Global political evolution: The designated world authority, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), failing to properly educate global leaders on all critical global warming risks, along with providing significantly underestimated timetables, has dangerously diminished a global sense of collective urgency and public awareness. This has significantly reduced the demand for change even though strong warnings were initiated over 30 years ago.

There are other reasons why we have failed for 30 years and still face a daunting challenge to end the climate change emergency, which will be covered in detail here. 

 

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A difficult climate change truth

Before facing a difficult truth, it is important to review the definitions of climate and weather. Climate is the statistics of weather, usually over a 30-year interval. It is measured by assessing the patterns of variation in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count, and other meteorological variables in a given region over long periods of time. Climate differs from weather, in that weather only describes the short-term conditions of these variables in a given region. (From Wikipedia.)

Fossil fuel lobbyists like to intentionally confuse us by directing our attention to the far shorter time cycles of climate and weather, whereas global warming cycles occur over far longer time cycles (as seen in the graphs depicting hundreds, thousands, and millions of years.) When we compare the current global warming cycle and temperature range to past global warming cycles and temperature ranges rather than tiny 30-year climate cycles, we can see what's really happening and how dangerous global warming is to our future.

From the preceding, it is not difficult for any rational person to see that we are dealing with far more than garden-variety seasonal changes in the weather or the normal 30-year climate cycle. We are dealing with a full-blown and yet undeclared climate change emergency.

In truth, we have wasted over 30 years of valid warnings, and now there is no time left to make the gradual changes that we should have begun over 30 years ago. Immediate, radical, and painful changes must happen now. Our global warming emergency is not off in the future 25, 50, or 100 years from now as you have been deceived into believing. Our global warming emergency is now.

Here are the critical additional links to review to understand more about our current mass extinction event threat, its solutions, climate, and global warming's soon-arriving four extinction-provoking tipping points.

Once you have read the following critical additional materials to this article, you will understand the full spectrum of extinction dangers we are facing and you will be one of the most informed individuals concerning the honest nature and scope of our global warming extinction emergency.

First, click here for what you will need to know about our last practical and realistic chance to control our global warming futures and prevent extinction by achieving the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. These global targets are not at all what you have been told by our fossil fuel-influenced media. This article will also give you detailed information about what happens when we cross the three extinction-evoking tipping points of carbon 425 ppm, carbon 500 ppm, and carbon 600 ppm.

Click here for a quick overview of how the currently unavoidable global warming mass extinction threat has now been eclipsed by the very real threat of total extinction as we quickly pass through the three major global warming tipping points within the next 30-30 years. 

And finally, click here to overview and select from the solution action options available to you to prepare for, adapt to, and manage this emergency in the Job One for Humanity Plan. This way you will be able to prepare and adapt wisely so that you survive and thrive through what is now unavoidable in global warming consequences.

If you understand enough about this emergency, please sign the petition to declare a Climate Change and Global Warming Extinction Emergency and then start the Job One Plan to resolve this mess as best we can. 

Climate Change and Global Heating Emergency Summary:

• In the above graphs of this document, the predictions for increased carbon ppm levels and temperature, unfortunately, does not also include: the continued likelihood that more carbon ppm (about 3-4 ppm per year,) will enter the atmosphere each year due to increasing population and fossil fuel use, causing an ever-faster rate of average global temperature increase, or the effects of the additional methane going into the atmosphere because of existing and new natural gas fracking, all of the existing leaks in methane storage and transportation systems, and big agribusiness, or calculations for more climate tipping points that will be crossed as the atmosphere heats up in a vicious self-reinforcing cycle and a positive feedback loop. 

• Despite 35 years of warnings from credible scientists and compelling scientific evidence, atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane pollution have only worsened.

• We are already in an unacknowledged global warming State of Emergency.

• • Do not be fooled by what you read about global warming reduction progress or fossil fuel reduction commitments in fossil fuel-lobbied and influenced mainstream media. The fossil fuel industry wants to keep making money and polluting our atmosphere without charge.

  • In a nutshell, the climate change emergency is due to:

    • today’s carbon ppm level of about 413 ppm doubling from the carbon 200-270 range it held consistently for hundreds of thousands of years,
    • carbon ppm levels rising exponentially at the greatest levels since the Industrial Revolution, and
    • we are poised to cross more global warming tipping points, moving us ever closer to the extinction phases of the Climageddon Scenario. In effect, our climate change emergency should really be called our climate change extinction emergency or the global warming extinction emergency.

  • According to James Hansen, even a carbon 450 ppm level (which will occur in about 10-15 years at present carbon pollution rates) would eventually correspond to an average global temperature increase of 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) in this century and the end of human civilization as we’ve come to know it.

  • Our current global warming extinction emergency marks the end of the climate stability that has allowed humanity and humanity’s ancestors to flourish for hundreds of thousands of years.

  • We need to get busy reaching the last chance  2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.
  • If we do not reach or come very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, we not only will suffer a global warming-caused mass extinction event within the next 30-50 years, we also will trigger a total extinction event within the next 50-70 years.
  • To reach or come close to the life-critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, we must prepare and adapt in order to survive and thrive. The most effective way to do that is to begin the Job One for Humanity Plan to manage the climate change emergency.
  • Click here to see where we are today on the Climate Change and Global Warming Doomsday Clock.

The essential positive perspective on the above disruptive global heating and climate change news

Despite the many types of challenging global warming consequences and past fossil fuel reduction mistakes that we now face, we can still learn from their feedback, and we can adapt and evolve to make life as good and as happy as is possible. No matter how severe the coming global warming consequences might become, if we wisely play the remaining cards that we have been dealt with, we can still achieve the best remaining possible outcomes. 

We can yet make a significant difference to reduce global fossil fuel use to stabilize and save the future of humanity by executing a comprehensive reduction and survival plan like the Job One for Humanity global warming action plan. 

We can still maintain the perseverance needed to succeed in this monumental task by regularly reviewing the many benefits which will occur as we work successfully on this project together. Although we are now in what could be called a Great Global Collapse process triggered by accelerating global warming, this collapse process will eventually offer equal to (or even greater than) long-term benefits in the form of a potential Great Rebirth beyond the coming suffering and loss.

First on this page (that has been read almost 2 million times,) and then this other critical global warming benefit page, you will find the many often hidden surprise benefits of the global warming challenge. You also will find a framework and the possibilities for what could be called a post-collapse Great Rebirth, no matter how bad the collapse process gets.

We can persevere through this time of emergency. We just need to remember that our greatest challenges are also the seeds of our greatest opportunities.

We are engaged in nothing less than the most critical and meaningful evolutionary opportunity, challenge, and adventure in human history! It is our last opportunity to slow down the mass human extinction threat by getting close to these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. Only reaching these targets will fully remove the total extinction threat. In reaching these targets, we also significantly improve many of the world's other 12 major challenges.

Get started today on the Job One for Humanity global warming reduction and survival plan. Help save and salvage as much of humanity and our beautiful civilization as is possible.

 

Key Recommended Additional Reading

1. Today's 10 most important climate change and global warming facts.

2. What are the 10 most dangerous things most people do not understand about the climate change emergency?

Are You Still Feeling Sad, Angry, or Anxious About Climate Change and Global Heating? Here is what to do.

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Start feeling better with the tips that keep us from feeling overwhelmed.

It is totally appropriate to feel sad or angry about what you have just read and what it means for your future!

A still deeper dive into the science

This is optional reading.

• • 1. In order to help you better visualize the global warming tipping point risks, as well as why we are not effectively acting to end the extreme risks of the global warming State of Emergency, we strongly recommend you view The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See 2. It has been watched almost 7 million times. Click here to watch that video now.

    2. If you are still not yet convinced we are really in a global warming state of emergency, or you want to see more detailed science on this issue, please click here.

Ask them why they are not adequately managing the greatest threat multiplier and global problem amplifier of the 21st century by enacting the governmental steps described here!

 

(This page is derived substantially from the 2016 book, Climageddon, The Global Warming Emergency and How to Survive It. It has been updated with new climate research since 2016 as applicable. Climageddon is Available on Amazon.)

 

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(Please Note: This page defines the climate change emergency and global warming emergency (aka climate emergency, climate extinction emergency, global warming extinction emergency, Holocene extinction, sixth mass extinction event, and the climate crisis. 

 

 

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