What are the most dangerous things people do not understand about the climate change emergency?
Last Updated 11.30.23
Overview
Unfortunately, some of the most dangerous facts of global warming are also the least understood by most of humanity. In this case, what we do not understand, if left unmanaged, will eventually kill almost everything!
The documentation for the following misunderstood facts is in their full explanations further down this article. Here is a quick overview of the most misunderstood and dangerous facts about climate change:
1. Whenever you hear national politicians promise net-zero by 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, or 2070, know that it equals mass human extinction occurring by mid-century or sooner,
2. We are already in a state of runaway global warming because we have wasted four decades when we could have prevented this. Climate tipping points and climate feedback loops are "stacking up" on each other, multiplying our climate risks and peril levels.
3. The severity, frequency, and scale of global warming consequences occurring within 3-9 years will start rising exponentially,
4. Survival-critical climate and global warming tipping points are already being crossed,
5. Crossed climate tipping points can have both linear predictable cause-and-effect relationships and dangerous and currently unpredictable nonlinear cause-and-effect relationships.
6. If we do not come close to the life-critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets in time to slow down our climate change emergency, without fail, Mother Nature will do it for us by painfully taking us beyond mass human extinction into total extinction!
7. In regards to fixing the climate extinction emergency, we are currently acting much like the experimental frogs who boil themselves to death floating in a slowly heating pot that they could easily escape.
8. We are long past the point of individual actions alone, saving us. Only worldwide governmental action and mass mobilization to enforce immediate, radical, and painful fossil fuel cuts can save us from extinction.
9. The current global warming emergency and its future are far worse than the government, the media or the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] are telling us. The world's leading authority on climate change, the IPCC, is not telling the governments or us what we need to know to save ourselves from total extinction because of the many political, prediction modeling, and summary report problems within the IPCC itself. Among the IPCC's many and most serious climate prediction problems is the climate computer modeling "Perfect Day" problem.
10. The climate change momentum and human inertia paradoxes and dilemmas. Anything we do now to reduce fossil fuel use will not show much of a benefit for 20-30 years, and people are impatient for results. Because the climate system has so much accumulated momentum and inertia within it already (about 20-30 years worth), we are rapidly running out of the little remaining time we have left to save ourselves.
Two bonus misunderstood facts:
11. How accelerating climate change consequences will affect worldwide democracies and progressive nations.
12. The most significant and most dangerous climate tipping point and global catastrophe is the Thwaites "doomsday glacier" collapse. It is just about to happen. When it does happen, it changes everything for humanity's future in an instant.
Here is the full explanation and documentation for why these highly misunderstood facts are true and vital for your future climate change planning
Fact 1: Whenever you hear national politicians promise carbon net-zero by 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, or 2070, know that it equals mass human extinction occurring over the next several decades
Net-zero carbon emissions means that we are not adding any more carbon to the atmosphere than we are taking out of it. However, it does not mean that we are reducing our current global levels of carbon emissions beyond where they are today.
Net-zero carbon dioxide emissions theoretically can be achieved by balancing the local, regional, national, or global carbon dioxide emissions with its removal. This net-zero process is conducted in two ways:
a. by directly eliminating and removing those carbon emissions from society (the most successful and proven method) or,
b. by what is called carbon offsetting. (Carbon offsetting can be done in numerous ways, but as you will read below, it is currently the least effective way to resolve the global warming emergency. It is the method most often proposed by politicians because it is so vague, difficult to verify, and can be falsely manipulated in many ways to produce little to nothing. It is a colossal understatement is to say that using carbon offsetting as the primary focus to achieve net-zero carbon emissions is a massive danger for society.)
Honest, independent, and non-politicized climate researchers have been trying to tell the world for over 50 years humanity is facing extinction. These researchers have been begging us to begin immediate global fossil fuel use reductions to come as close as possible to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets to survive the coming extinction threat.
The 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets are not anything like or close to the fossil fuel industry-sponsored national net-zero carbon neutral targets, which nations are saying they will reach by 2070, 2060, 2050, 2040, or even 2030! For instance, India has pledged it will be net-zero by 2070, and China promised it will be net-zero by 2060. With much theatrical media coverage, Saudi Arabia also announced it will become net-zero emission by 2060. (Including the US at net zero by 2050, India and China make up the world's three largest carbon emitters.)
But, there are big secrets concerning the net-zero carbon-neutral pledges. They, too, are feel-good illusions that do not produce anything even close to what is being promised.
These net-zero pledges are based predominantly on carbon offsetting. A carbon offset is supposed to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions or other greenhouse gases by compensating for emissions produced elsewhere. Unfortunately, carbon offsets are very difficult to verify, have considerable incentives for fraud, and are easy to fake by both purchasers and the suppliers of such carbon offsets. Additionally, carbon offsets have either no penalties or weak penalties for fraud.
James Hansen, the first climate scientist who warned us unchecked global warming would lead to our extinction, has described carbon offsets as "modern-day indulgences, sold to an increasingly carbon-conscious public to absolve their climate sins." Carbon offsets may also be interpreted as greenwashing. This is especially true in the case of most corporate commitments, which do not include actionable goals and schedules that implicate that their 'net-zero' emission goals are anything more than good publicity.
Theoretically, carbon offsets were meant to support projects that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in the short or long term. A common offset project type is renewable energy, such as wind farms, biomass energy, biogas digesters, or hydroelectric dams. Other offsets include:
- Energy efficiency projects like efficient cookstoves.
- The destruction of industrial pollutants or agricultural byproducts.
- The destruction of landfill methane.
- Forestry projects.
But that is not what is really happening. Instead, carbon offsets have become another clever way for nations to make fabulous public net-zero pledges, which facilitate hiding their lack of actual fossil fuel reduction from their citizens and the world.
In addition to the fraud-friendly carbon offset issue, most net-zero carbon-neutral pledges are back-end loaded, meaning most of the cuts are to come well after 2025. (Our last chance fossil fuel reduction target for keeping global warming under our control.)
Most of these "emperors' new clothes" pledges also assume steady major technological advances in currently non-existent or unproven technologies or outright revolutionary tech breakthroughs that will somehow reach the required levels of development and scale to save us at the last moment. These net-zero carbon-neutral pledges are just another form of illusion keeping us from making the real and hard choices. These pledges also specifically exclude all fossil fuel exports from figuring into the national accounting and calculations for the net-zero pledge goals. As you can see, net-zero carbon-neutral pledges have more loopholes than a Swiss cheese has holes.
Unfortunately, there is yet more to the net-zero carbon-neutral illusion:
a. Tracing the history of illusions in climate policy from 1988 to 2021, climate scientists James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr "[arrive] at the painful realization that the idea of net-zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier "burn now, pay later" approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar!
b. In his 16-page report, Dangerous Distractions, economist Marc Lee states that "'Net-zero" has the potential to be a dangerous distraction that reduces the political pressure to achieve actual emission reduction." "A net-zero target means less incentive to get to 'real zero' emissions from fossil fuels, an escape hatch that perpetuates business as usual and delays more meaningful climate action."
c. Current net-zero policies will not keep warming within the UN's 1.5°C temperature rise target because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe, then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. The time for wishful thinking is over.
d. In March 2021, Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, argued that the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty would be a more genuine and realistic way to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement than the "Net-zero" approach. She claimed the net-zero approach is "delusional and based on bad science."
(The above four statements were found on Wikipedia.)
The current net-zero pledges by the world's top fossil fuel users and producers are telling and sadly funny. If we keep going as we are now, by 2050 - 2070, there will be few, if any, of us left to see if any nation even fulfilled its ridiculously "far too little, far too late" net-zero pledges.
The toothless, unenforceable, and vague net-zero pledges should be seen as nothing more than media bla, bla, bla. They are great theatrics for the pledging nations on the world stage.
The nations loudly promoting their net-zero pledges also helps hide the truth that the world's top 20 carbon emitters have made no commitments to directly and immediately cut their national fossil fuel use!
The correct 2025 targets now need to be enacted to compensate for 50 years of inaction. They will require tremendous sacrifice, suffering, and hardship for all the world's people, industries, and nations.
These 2025 global targets require that the world's developed nations enforce and come close to a 75% total reduction in ALL global fossil fuel use by 2025. In addition, these 2025 targets include lesser climate justice-adjusted targets for undeveloped countries, which did not play a major role in creating the global warming emergency. These 2025 national fossil fuel reductions of 75% include China and India.
To understand more about why government-driven and corporate-driven carbon net-zero programs are so dangerous to your near-term future survival, first read about what happens as we cross the first global warming extinction tipping point in the next 3-9 years, then read about the primary and secondary consequences of crossing this extinction-evoking tipping point.
If you want to review additional climate science on why about half of humanity will go extinct by mid-century, click here. We want you to have all of the science and analysis behind our half of humanity going extinct by mid-century statements. Hence, you will know that the many painful and difficult changes you will soon need to make are genuinely warranted.
If you learn best through videos
Here are two funny and informative net-zero and climate conference failure videos that are entertaining and powerful yet, still underestimate the rapidly approaching extinction dangers we all now face:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FqXTCvDLeo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyKmqEdgR4&t=57s
Aiming for net-zero carbon using carbon offsets is also much like the funny, powerful, and massively shared article by an Australian drinker who promises to get to net-zero alcohol intake by 2050. Click here to see this five short paragraph, highly relevant article that also ties together much of what is being said above.
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Fact 2. Because we have wasted decades in ineffective climate actions, we are now in a state of runaway global heating and it is now too late to prevent the extinction of half of humanity by 2050. But we can still prevent our total extinction.
Climate tipping points and climate feedback loops are "stacking up" on each other, multiplying our climate risks and peril levels.
Click here to see the science to understand why the term runaway global heating is painfully accurate.
If you want to review additional climate science on why about half of humanity will go extinct by mid-century, click here. We want you to have all of the science and analysis behind our half of humanity going extinct by mid-century statements. Hence, you will know that the many painful and difficult changes you will soon need to make are genuinely warranted.
Fact 3: The severity, frequency, and scale of global warming consequences occurring will soon start rising exponentially starting in about 3-9 years (2025-2031.)
Click here to see the science to understand why we only have 3 to 9 years left to control global heating, but only if we are very, very lucky.
Fact 4: Now that critical global warming tipping points are already being crossed, many climate-related systems (like the Arctic sea ice, melting glaciers, oxygen-producing plankton, etc.) will also collapse quickly (usually completely or near completely!)
Click here to see all 11 of the major climate tipping points.
Fact 5: Crossed tipping points can have both linear cause-and-effect relationships as well as dangerous and currently unpredictable nonlinear cause-and-effect relationships.
These nonlinear relationships can occur between global warming tipping points and human and biological system tipping points (economy, politics, mass species die-offs, war, and conflict) as well as within and between any other part of the climate system and its subsystems. The presence of counter-intuitive, nonlinear tipping point and system relationships mean that causes and effects within the climate systems and subsystems are sometimes not logically connected, clear, or predictable.
This means that within a complex adaptive system like the climate, an area that happens to be a part of its system or its subsystems can create an effect in some other completely different climate system or subsystem where there seems to be no apparent cause and effect relationship between the two climate systems or subsystems. The huge danger here is that if a global warming tipping point triggers a nonlinear reaction in another climate or human system or subsystem, we could quickly find ourselves caught in a gigantic and uncontrollable catastrophic situation without ever being able to predict or prepare for it.
Never forget that a complex adaptive system such as the climate reacts with its subsystems in both predictable and unpredictable ways. In the illustration below, an action X in climate system A causes the obvious linear effect Y in climate system B, but it can also cause a seemingly unconnected nonlinear XY reaction in climate system C. It is this nonlinear unpredictability in other interconnected and interdependent climate systems which also should cause us great concern as we add more fossil fuel carbon to the atmosphere.
Fact 6: If we do not make the required 2025 global fossil fuel reductions in time to fix the global warming extinction emergency, without fail, Mother Nature will painfully do it for us!
Right now, no matter what we do, much of humanity (51% or more) will die by mid-century because currently, we are ridiculously far from meeting the critical 2025 global targets. (This has been explained on this page and this page.)
Worse yet, if we do not get close to the 2025 targets, Mother Nature will take over and keep raising the global temperature until most or all of humanity (50 to 90+ percent) goes extinct and the Earth is back to its optimal human carrying capacity.
Please keep in mind that if we miss the last-chance 2025 fossil fuel reduction opportunity, Mother Nature will execute her immutable physics and mathematics climate laws to take the dominant control of our global warming future. Humanity will then be thrown into the back seat of a planetary "car," rapidly accelerating towards the cliff to Climageddon.
If we fail to get close to the 2025 global reduction targets, and Mother Nature is forced to create a painful global warming solution for our unconscionable failures; hopefully, she will leave a few of us alive so that we can learn the harsh lessons needed to rebuild a new world more in balance with nature. (Click here to read the interesting way how Mother Nature will save us from ourselves and prevent total human extinction.)
(Click here to see the four extinction-triggering climate tipping points that will be the main tools used by Mother Nature to solve global warming for us if we do not do it for ourselves.)
Fact 7: We are much like the experimental frogs who boil to death floating in a slowly heating pot that they could easily escape.
Our ape ancestors have left us with mental and emotional hardwiring that does not recognize or respond well to distant, complex, or slow-moving threats. Will enough of us understand the heating pot we have put ourselves into, in time to still do something about it? We will know soon; either by 2025 or soon after we have passed the atmospheric carbon level of 425-450 parts per million.
To help illustrate how dangerous our current climate situation is, please review the atmospheric carbon CO2 graph in parts per million below. We also are currently adding an additional 3 carbon parts per million to our atmosphere each year. So, you do not have to be Albert Einstein to do the simple math to see how bad things are right now for us soon crossing the carbon 425-450 tipping point!
At this point, we strongly recommend that you watch this video by a respected climate researcher on runaway climate change. It will help illustrate how everything above fits together. This video has many clear and helpful slides.
Fact 8: We are long past the point of individual actions alone saving us. Only worldwide governmental action and mass mobilization to enforce immediate, radical, and painful fossil fuel cuts can save us from extinction.
(Click here to see what our governments need to do. What limited actions we can take as individuals or businesses is found at the bottom of this page.)
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Fact 9: The world's leading authority on climate change, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC,] is not accurately telling our governments what they need to know to save us from total extinction because of the IPCC's "Perfect Day" problem.
Our governments are in serious climate risk analysis trouble because they rely upon the IPCC's "authoritative" climate consequence scenario projections and remedies. Moreover, the world's military, intelligence agencies, hedge funds, investment banks (like Goldman Sachs,) stock and commodity markets, foundations, think tanks, national and international reserve banks, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum all use the same IPCC climate research, predictions, and remedies for their climate risk analysis.
All of the previously mentioned entities are being dangerously weakened by what is known as the IPCC's climate computer modeling "Perfect Day" problem.
The Perfect Day problem and how it works
The IPCC uses computer modeling to predict future climate consequences and calculate how much fossil fuel we must reduce globally to keep ourselves safe. Every 3 to 5 years, the IPCC creates 4-7 updated best to worst climate prediction scenarios and what we must do to prevent them from occurring.
The governments, organizations, corporations, and individuals that rely upon these IPCC climate scenarios to create their internal climate risk analyses are being told by the IPCC and their governments these climate scenarios are reasonably accurate projections of probable future climate conditions. But, unfortunately, the truth is they are far from it.
The IPCC's climate computer models actually reflect "Perfect Day" climate scenarios far more than they reflect more probable climate scenarios. The IPCC's climate computer models are plagued with this "Perfect Day" problem because they seldom include most of the following critical climate modeling factors. These are the critical climate-related but missing factors that regularly and routinely occur both within and between the complex adaptive systems within our climate's multiple systems and subsystems.
The IPPC's climate computer models and multiple predictive scenarios still fail to capture:
a. almost all of the primary and secondary tipping points within and between the climate system and its subsystems.
b. most of the powerful self-reinforcing feedback loops within and between the climate systems and their subsystems.
c. most of the non-linear cause and effect relationships within and between the climate systems and their subsystems. (Non-linear cause and effect relationships are a regular aspect of the behavior of complex adaptive systems.)
d. many of the cause and effect interconnections and critical interdependencies within and between the climate system and its subsystems. And,
e. many critical points of no return within and between the climate systems and their subsystems. (These crucial points of no return help signal and predict coming tipping points, and most often, dangerous system crashes and collapses that occur after a tipping point is crossed.)
The result of omitting the essential a-e factors above from climate computer models is what you get is more like a Perfect Day prediction scenario, where either none or far too few of the a-e factors are accounted for within the computer-modeled climate predictions.
The crucial thing to know about items a - e above is that they embrace thousands of essential and utterly unaccounted-for climate factors that are also at play in creating reliable and probable climate predictions and risk assessments. Moreover, many of the climate factors listed in a-e above are so powerful that just omitting a single one can radically alter the trajectory and usefulness of any of the IPCC's current climate prediction scenarios or suggested remedies.
For example, suppose the IPCC has predicted that the average global temperature will rise to 2 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels by 2040 in one of their multiple prediction scenarios. Now factor in that they did not add to that computer model essential tipping points, feedback loops, or other non-linear cause and effect factors within the climate system and its subsystems. In that case, this a-e omission could quickly move their predicted average global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius by 2040 (with all of its associated risks and consequences) to far more than 2 degrees Celsius far sooner than 2040!
Worse yet, the world's political, corporate, and the leaders of the other organizations mentioned earlier do not know about the Perfect day issue, which is that the IPCC predictions and their remedial climate recommendations do not reliably computer model the contexts, relationships, processes, and many ongoing transformations within the interacting climate, human and biological systems, and subsystems.
This "Perfect Day" problem means that the REAL climate risk and threat probabilities for humanity's climate future are being grossly underestimated! Unfortunately, this also means that our governments, largest corporations, and the leaders of the other organizations mentioned earlier are ALL currently operating on grossly inadequate climate risk assessments. As a result, within these organizations, our current climate condition's actual risk and threat levels and its fundamental uncertainties are far higher than what they understand and what we are being told. Consequently, we are currently not managing or preparing for our actual climate risks and uncertainties.
At Job One, we estimate that if you take all of the factors in a-e above (and all the IPCC's many other political, prediction modeling, and summary report problems described in the additional links at the end of this page), we should treat the IPCC's current predictions and climate remedies as being underestimated on the average by about 30-60%. This means we are underestimating both the severity and frequency of climate consequences and when these climate consequences will arrive by about 30-60%.
If one makes these 30-60% reasonable allowances for non-perfect day climate items in a-e above and the other IPPC problems linked at the end of this page, the world's governments and corporations should be panicking.
On the other hand, if they were making appropriate allowances for the many a-e missing climate factors and risks, the corporations listed previously would demand our governments immediately declare an international climate extinction emergency. They would also demand that our governments cooperate globally to enforce the fossil fuel reductions needed to at least save some small portion of humanity. (If you would like to see the horrific chain of climate consequences with adjusted timelines when making allowances for the IPPC's problems, click here.)
But, here is the really bad news about the climate system factors listed in a-e above. As the climate continues to heat, the climate and its subsystems will become more interactive, agitated, and unstable, and you will see many more of the a-e climate system factors occurring, causing greater and greater climate disruption.
Imagine these a-e climate system factors interacting within the climate and churning and boiling like the water in a pressure cooker as you turn up the heat. Unfortunately, as our temperatures continue to rise, the a-e climate factors above will also occur at ever faster rates. This escalating rise in temperature will also create significantly more future climate predictive uncertainty. This will then lessen our ability to develop helpful risk analysis as the climate worsens.
Knowing about this inherent dilemma of diminishing predictive power as temperatures rise helps let us know that we must prevent the climate system from EVER crossing this first extinction-triggering tipping point. If we cross this extinction-triggering tipping point, global warming will move into a runaway mode where reliable climate consequence predictions and timeframes will be all but impossible to construct.
Because of the Perfect Day problem and so much missing from the IPCC's computer climate modeling, any organization that uses the IPCC's data must immediately reevaluate their climate risks and adjust them at least 30-60% to the negative. With this new modeling problem information, these organizations will then be able to create a far more realistic climate risk analysis for their specific operations and conditions.
The biggest danger of the IPCC Perfect Day problem
The real climate change risk and threat level to all entities listed above is far beyond what they believe and are telling themselves, their citizens, or their clients. This serious risk analysis problem is not just dangerous. It will not only be very costly over time, but it also will likely turn into a serious legal liability for those entities as their citizens and clients discover the climate risk levels they were advised about were grossly underestimated.
The Perfect Day problem is also crippling our ability to find and use the correct collective climate change management strategies needed to save humanity itself. Because of the IPCC's Perfect Day problem, we are not dealing with the actual climate change risks appropriately and rationally.
As a result, we are operating on incorrect climate change risk and threat assessments far below what they genuinely are. And that will be the final recipe for a soon-arriving collective mass extinction.
The climate change risk analysis the world is operating on from the IPCC makes the world think it still has many decades left to fix the climate change emergency and prevent extinction when at best, it only has about another 3-9 years. Yet, the IPCC continues to sell the world their grossly incomplete "Perfect Day" climate change prediction and remedy computer models and scenarios as reliable and probable representations of our climate future when they are grossly inadequate and underestimated!
We believe that when the entities listed above redo their climate risk analysis using the information on this website and other websites critical of IPCC climate work, and which also includes the climate factors listed in a -e above, they will discover the following:
- We are currently at a level of extreme climate change risk. We passed high climate risk decades ago.
- When we cross the atmospheric carbon threshold of carbon 425 to 450 parts per million (ppm), we have entered the climate risk zone of unavoidable extinction for much of humanity by 2050.
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When we cross the atmospheric carbon threshold of carbon 450 to 500 ppm, we have entered the climate risk zone of near-total to total human extinction beginning as soon as 2070 or sooner. (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.)
As you can see from the illustration above, for the last 65 years, atmospheric carbon levels have been getting worse even faster. As a result, we are about 3-9 years away from moving into the climate risk zone of unavoidable extinction for much of humanity by 2050.
Building a plan, a risk analysis, or a climate scenario on everything going perfectly has always been the perfect plan for failure. Unfortunately, because of the above, our world is in a far deeper climate change extinction emergency than it believes it is in.
And finally, there is another way to grasp the dire danger of the IPCC's Perfect Day problem. Ask yourself, when was the last time everything went perfectly according to your projected perfect plan?
What can you do about the Perfect Day problem which is drastically impeding our progress on executing effective climate solutions?
1. If you have any contacts with power at any of the organizations listed on this page, you can email them a copy of this article. It would help if you also referred them to this page. This page makes considerably better (but still not perfect) allowances for the IPCC's Perfect Day problem by more realistically adjusting climate consequence scenarios and timeframes to include and make allowances for more of the above a-e factors.
Here are the key organizations to reach out to so they can update their internal critical climate risk analysis, so they become a better reflection of today's actual climate reality. You will be doing them a favor! Unfortunately, operating on the IPCC's flawed climate prediction scenarios for their internal climate risk analysis will eventually embarrass them. It could also expose them to severe legal liability for incorrect actions or incorrect advice.
This risk updating process may also assist them in doing what is logical and necessary to help better manage our climate extinction emergency. There may be other entities you will think of as well:
World governments, the world's military, intelligence agencies, hedge funds, investment banks (like Goldman Sachs,) stock and commodity markets, foundations, think tanks, national and international reserve banks, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum and corporations dealing with essential commodities and infrastructure needed for the future.
2. Get started with the Job One for Humanity Climate and Global Crises Resilience Plan.
Other critical IPCC consequence prediction and timetable problems that rapidly need to be adjusted for in future government and corporate climate risk analysis
1. Click here to see the four most crucial extinction-triggering tipping points that must be factored into every adjusted future climate risk analysis.
2. Click here to see how the accelerating primary and secondary consequences of climate change interact with and worsen humanity's 11 other major global crises.
3. Click here to see the risk analysis adjusted 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and why we must get close to a 75% reduction in total global fossil fuel use (oil, natural gas, coal, etc.) by 2025, not the far, far less net-zero emission levels they have pledged by 2050 or 2040! (In the technical notes at the bottom of the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction specification page, you will see each calculation and compensation for the various factors that make up the required correct global fossil fuel reduction numbers.)
4. In addition to the "Perfect Day" problem previously described, you will find additional essential links on the checkered history of the IPCC climate consequence predictions and research problems below. These links will provide a valuable context for the relationships, processes, and climate research transformations going on within the IPPC.
You will learn precisely how the IPCC constructs and calculates its climate consequence risk scenarios and recommended climate change remedies. Unfortunately, you will also discover that there are many other serious calculation and process problems within the IPCC in addition to the Perfect Day problem. The additional problems below further call into question the reliability and risk analysis usefulness of the IPCC's current prediction scenarios and climate remedies.
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 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.
The global warming emergency and its future are far worse than the government, the media, or the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] are telling us.
(Click here to see just how much worse things will become and how fast.)
Fact 10: The climate change momentum and human inertia paradoxes and dilemmas. Anything we do now to reduce fossil fuel use will not show much of a benefit for 20-30 years, and people are impatient for results.
Because the climate system has so much of both intrinsic heat-building momentum and human inertial (resistance to getting off fossil fuels) within it already (about 20-30 years worth), we are stuck with the current global heating level that was created 20-30 years ago. This is equally true for those who live 20-30 years from now. They will experience the global heating we have caused because of the levels of greenhouse gasses we have added to the atmosphere.
This long time lag for seeing results makes it even more challenging to convince people why they have to make painful, radical sacrifices today to reduce our global fossil fuel levels to get as close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets as is possible to prevent a mass human extinction 20-30 years from now.
Most people do not understand the tremendous heat and cooling inertia already locked into the climate system because they also do not understand the physics of inertia.
They do not understand that because of climate inertia, whatever fossil fuel reductions we make today, the positive consequences of those reductions will not show up for 20-30 years. The same holds true for any radical increase in fossil fuel use we make today. Those negative consequences will also take 20-30 years to manifest.
There is a 20-30-year buffer of powerful climate inertia that will continue to act as a slowing brake on the accelerating climate change consequences until that breaking effect of this climate inertia is finally overwhelmed by the increasing temperatures, crossed climate tipping points, and feedbacks. From 2024 onward, the consequences of climate change will unfold steadily and then increase dramatically, even near exponentially, in speed, intensity, and frequency as the next 2-3 decades pass.
When someone tells you that global climate collapse will happen in the next few years, they are boldly telling you that they do not understand climate change inertia.
As you can see from the illustration above, we are already in deep trouble. We need to reduce global fossil fuel use and greenhouse gases now and radically.
Measuring the most dangerous greenhouse gases of atmospheric carbon [CO2,] methane [C4,] and nitrous dioxide [No2] are the best ways to measure the increasing threat level of global heating consequences. These measurements are also one of the best ways to predict future global heating and temperature levels.
In the illustration below, on the left vertical axis are atmospheric measuring levels for both carbon and nitrous dioxide in parts per million [ppm.] On the right vertical axis, you see the measuring level for atmospheric methane in parts per billion [ppb.] Across the bottom of the illustration is the last 2,000+ years.
The red, blue, and black lines moving from left to right across the illustration tell the painful story of human history and the pollution of our atmosphere. The illustration clearly shows what happened when humanity began the fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution in the late 1700s to early 1800s.
For more information on the processes of climate change and global heating, click here.
Fact 11. What our accelerating climate consequences will do to democracies and progressive nations
Most people are not prepared for how our many intensifying global warming consequences will devolve our political systems to more primitive forms.
As the climate consequences and the climate emergency continues to worsen, almost all governments worldwide will eventually have to declare martial law. The human rights many of us take for granted will have to be rescinded because of what the swift action of the accelerating emergency will demand and require.
Our democracies will declare martial law and become more autocratic (dictatorial) because their population will be stressed out and in fear as more climate consequences shatter and scatter their lives. This regression has happened many times before in history. Fearful people (as in pre-Nazi Germany) will accept and even demand dictatorial strong-man leaders, solutions, and behaviors they would never accept under normal -non-emergency living conditions.
This devolution can occur because the core nature of progressive democracy requires:
a. abundant and adequate resources for a large portion of their population and
b. a high degree of relative economic, social and political stability for a democracy to even exist.
Under the continuing stresses from escalating climate consequences, democracies will rapidly be forced to devolve into authoritarian nations. As global warming consequences worsen, critical resources will dwindle, and you will not have anything like previous normal social, economic, or political stability.
The constantly worsening climate disasters, mass migrations, and many other climate consequences will also intensify or cause new conflicts and destroy anything that looks like current normal democratic stability. (Because of escalating climate consequences, many current non-democratic states may devolve even further into warring clans or gangs.)
How can we expect democracies not to devolve into authoritarian nations? When survival is at stake in an emergency, drastic immediate action must be taken. We must sacrifice our individual rights and freedoms for the practicalities needed for the survival of the collective.
You can trust that our global democracies, just like existing dictatorships, will also take all the extreme measures needed to preserve their power and do whatever is necessary to maintain law and order in the coming climate chaos.
A terrifying part of this climate devolution is that existing right-wing nationalist and conservative political movements (as well as existing dictatorships) may intentionally ignore fixing the climate emergency for as long as possible. They will ignore fixing the climate to help create the deteriorating conditions within the nation that will eventually propel their rise to more power and influence.
Eventually, a fearful population will call upon almost anyone the believe to be a leader for their particular brand of simplistic quick solutions to the climate emergency. Those people will then willingly surrender their human rights and freedoms just in the hope they can feel safe again.
The harsh reality of the probable climate emergency-driven devolution of democracies means that to maintain the world's democracies, we must find a way to resolve the runaway global warming extinction emergency. And, we must do it before it creates more authoritarian dictatorships where centuries of hard-won human rights will be lost.
So, if you want to eventually live in a police state under emergency draconian martial law, do little or nothing to fix our current runaway global heating extinction emergency. You will eventually get your police state in the next phase of global climate destabilization and collapse.
Worse yet, as more authoritarian governments are created from climate devolution, it is doubtful they will ever be able to affect the minimal international cooperation required to prevent humanity's near-total extinction from runaway global heating consequences. Click here to see how this climate destabilization and collapse will take place.
Click here for how to get busy to protect your democracy and progressive government from devolving into an emergency-driven authoritarian government and police state because of the runaway global heating extinction emergency.
Fact 12. The most significant and most dangerous climate tipping point and global catastrophe is the Thwaites "doomsday glacier" collapse. It is just about to happen. When it does happen, it changes everything for humanity's future in an instant.
Click here to read how the Thwaites "doomsday glacier" collapse will change the world instantly.
In Summary of the Most Misunderstood Climate Facts
Because global warming is already in a runaway state and primarily out of our control, it is good to be clear about the two things that we can still control:
1. We can slow down some unavoidable global warming consequences for you and others by getting our governments to execute Part 3 of the Job One Climate and Global Crises Resilience Plan (aka Plan B.)
2. We can prepare to survive accelerating global warming consequences for as long and as comfortably as possible. At the same time, we can hope that this crisis does not turn into total extinction and that our wise preparation helps us make it through the now unavoidable death of half of humanity by mid-century.
What you can do today about the climate change and global warming emergency because we are running out of time!
1. We do need your help in getting this post to everywhere it needs to go!
a. Would you please help email this post to more politicians worldwide before the COP26 International climate change conference. Particularly these US politicians because it is doubtful they and their climate staff also understand these issues. Please forward it to US politicians like John Kerry (the Climate Czar,) Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, and other members of the US progressive Squad. Please also send it to all other global politicians you think should see it as well.
b. Kindly email this post to the delegates, officials, and sponsors of the United Nations' next international climate conference (COP26), November 1-12, 2021. It is time the next climate conference stops watering down the correct global fossil fuel reduction targets needed to prevent our mass extinction.
Furthermore, it is time for COP26 to stop setting any global warming reduction targets based on carbon removal technology that does not exist. It is time for COP26 to tell the people of the world exactly how unlivable our global warming future will be because if they fail to mobilize government action again, there will be no time left to reach the correct global fossil fuel reductions. (Click here to learn how the IPCC is distorting carbon capture technology calculations to allow fossil fuel-producing nations and the fossil fuel industry to maintain production and profits and keep global fossil fuel reduction targets far below where they should be.
c. Please email this post to the ecological and global warming educational groups and their staff mentioned in this post, such as 350.org, Climate Central, Climate Mobilization, Climate Emergency Fund, the Sunrise Movement, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, etc. Please also send it to ALL other environmental and global warming educational groups you think should see it as well.
2. Sign this global warming emergency petition to our politicians.
3. Get started with your personal and business Plan B for Climate Change Resilience today. It also contains information on how to live within our carrying capacity limits, prepare for what is coming, and how to adapt and simplify both your lifestyle and livelihood, so you become part of the energy solution to this emergency.
Please note that at this late stage, individual actions alone will not reverse the global warming extinction emergency. Only government actions will do that.
Please help support the research and candid, comprehensive climate change analysis done by the Job One for Humanity organization. Make a tax-deductible donation here.
More documentation
1. To now learn about the most critical current facts on climate change, click here.
2. To learn how difficult it will be to get close to the extinction-preventing 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, click here.
3. Please note that this older 2 C limit calculation by the United Nations IPCC did not include adequate tipping point calculations. But, it did wrongly include magical compensatory carbon capture calculations for technology that might not exist for thirty years. It also did not include many other critical calculation factors described here.
4. If you want to understand the climate science and analysis procedures we used to present the above information, click here for a technical explanation of our climate research process.
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For answers to all of your remaining questions about climate change and global warming, click here for our new climate change FAQ. It has over one hundred of the most asked questions and answers about climate change.
The 4 Extinction Accelerating Climate Change & Global Warming Tipping Points
Last Updated 9.16.24.
Prologue
The following page helps explain why about half of humanity will perish by about 2050. When you read it, please remember that the climate change consequences described below are not only destructive by themselves.
Most climate change consequences described below will also interact with and amplify other interconnected climate change consequence areas. Then, these interacting secondary climate change areas will also experience amplification of their related climate change consequences. This is the scary escalating feedback cycle of climate change consequences interacting and amplifying each other. This interaction and amplification feedback cycle is one of the most unseen, unrecognized, and dangerous parts of our climate change nightmare and emergency.
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Overview
This article and its links discuss:
1. How and why half of humanity will go extinct if it passes beyond the critical carbon 450 ppm (parts per million) level and threshold?
2. How to prevent crossing the atmospheric carbon level of 450 ppm. (This carbon ppm level is our last genuine chance to avoid a climate change mass extinction threshold that, once crossed, will lead to the near-certain extinction of about half of humanity by about 2050.
3. The four global warming extinction-accelerating tipping points and the five phases of runaway global heating, most of which are irreversible for centuries to thousands of years. (This article contains dense, complex climate science and analysis on why half of humanity will perish by about 2050 if we keep doing "business as usual." When you finish it, you will understand the unconscionable climate change nightmare humanity is now subjected to because of the greed of the global fossil fuel cartel.)
4. How numerous greater and lesser climate change tipping points and feedbacks will cross and interact with each other. These crossed tipping points and feedbacks will cause even more climate change tipping points and feedbacks to be crossed and interact. Each new cycle of crossed climate tipping points and feedback WILL raise average global temperatures even faster and further intensify climate change consequences until little is left of humanity.
If we act soon and get close to the challenging 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, crossing the carbon 450 ppm threshold doesn't have to be humanity's fate.
Introduction
Irreversible climate change specifically means that we will not be able to get the dangerous levels of excess greenhouse gases (like carbon) out of our atmosphere and back down to a normal and human-safe pre-industrial level for hundreds to thousands of years. This will cause many of the worst consequences of climate change to last long after we have stopped burning fossil fuels.
As of July 2023, We are currently at the atmospheric carbon level of 420 ppm. We will soon enter the generally considered irreversible second phase of runaway global heating sometime between 2025-2031. This is when we enter into the carbon 425-450 ppm range.
This page explains why most people who hear our governments talking about global fossil fuel reduction targets for 2030-2060 have no idea if we fail to make the 2025 critical reductions over the next 3 to 8 years. We are royally screwed!
If we miss the correct 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets by a lot, we will not only suffer the unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century, but we also will bring about a:
a. widespread great global collapse of our critical social, economic, and political systems and
b. a rapidly worsening runaway global heating resulting in our near-total human extinction by about 2070-2080.
Unfortunately, many climate activists and environmental organizations still do not understand the following:
a. the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets,
b. where runaway global heating becomes fully beyond our control or
c. where the climate change survival threshold and its final deadline exist.
Consequently, they develop climate change education and remedial climate change programs that do not match or fit the true urgency of this emergency or the real deadlines necessary to save the lives of most of humanity.
Hopefully, this article will help those individuals, organizations, and governments re-adjust their climate change programs accordingly before it is too late!
This article explains in great climate chage detail why we must act within this 3-8 year last window of opportunity to fix the climate change emergency. It also contains an important section near its end on why all is not hopeless yet!
This article will also help explain why worsening climate change consequences interacting with multiplying and amplifying humanity's other 11 major crises will cause a highly likely, and almost certain, globally widespread "Great Collapse" of our economic, political, ecological, and social systems, which can be partial, transitional, and temporary if we act in time.
When you finish reading this article, you will know if we have already entered into a runaway global heating extinction emergency.
In many places on our website, we have warned that about half of humanity will unavoidably go extinct by mid-century. After reading this entire page, you will conclusively understand why this will occur. It will become more than apparent as you watch the carbon and methane in our atmosphere rise and as higher global temperatures lock in with each new tipping point crossed.
Below, the cumulative primary and secondary effects of increasing climate change consequences and crossed climate change tipping points and feedbacks will painfully illuminate how the unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity is already occurring by about mid-century. (The how of a runaway global heating-driven mass extinction is found on this page.)
Only when you understand both why and how mass extinction will happen will you genuinely grasp the accuracy of our climate change think tank's additional warning and that; unfortunately, we also face near-total, but NOT total, extinction.
When you finish both the why and how pages, you will not doubt the reasonableness of our strong warnings about mass and near-total extinction. (Near-total extinction is defined as about 50 to 90+ percent of what remains of humanity going extinct post-2050.
We know this news is frightening, but a bit of good news is that it is also highly improbable that all of humanity will go extinct. (For why it is highly improbable that we will go totally extinct from climate change and global heating, click here.)
While reading this article, please remember that many of the climate tipping point risks and feedback below are yet avoidable and unnecessary. We can still slow and fix climate change if we work together to get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel targets.
Finally, to help you process the following uncomfortable news, we have provided realistic, good climate news at the end of this challenging article! You will even find a plan for what you can do to help slow and fix the runaway global heating extinction emergency.
A quick overview of the four extinction-accelerating tipping points
There are just four critical atmospheric carbon-based global warming accelerating tipping points and deadlines to never forget.
Atmospheric carbon (CO2) is measured in parts per million (ppm.) If you look a bit farther down the page, you will see an atmospheric carbon CO2 graph that will give you an initial idea of our current danger level.
Here is a quick overview of the atmospheric carbon danger levels:
1. The carbon 386 tipping point, which we passed in 2015. At this point, we entered into the beginning of the first phase of runaway global heating. (This was discovered by James Hansen, the NASA scientist who was one of the first to warn the world of the extinction threat.)
2. The 2025-2031 carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point and last chance to prevent mass extinction threshold. This is the second phase of runaway global heating, contributing to an unavoidable extinction process for half of humanity by mid-century. (This second phase is generally seen as irreversible for centuries to millennia.)
3. The 2042-2067 or earlier carbon 500 ppm tipping point begins the runaway global ice melt. This is the third phase of irreversible runaway global heating, which accelerates the unavoidable extinction process for half of humanity by mid-century and can lead to the extinction of a far greater portion of humanity from 2050-2070. (This third phase is also irreversible for centuries to millennia.)
4. The 2063-2072 or earlier, the carbon 600 ppm near-total human extinction tipping point due to massive methane releases from the permafrost and the oceans. This climate change tipping point creates the fourth phase of runaway global heating. (This fourth phase is also irreversible for centuries to millennia.)
5. The post-2072, the carbon 750 ppm final and fifth phase of irreversible runaway global heating. (This crossed threshold leads to certain total human and biological extinction.) This fifth phase may be irreversible forever or for many millennia.
Of these four still yet-to-be-crossed tipping points, the 2025-2031 carbon 450 ppm tipping point is the most important. Once we cross the 2025-2031 tipping point, any realistic or practical control of our global warming future to prevent, mass extinction is all but over for centuries to possibly thousands of years.
If we pass all four yet-to-be-crossed tipping points, we will experience human, animal, and biological extinction. We also will experience complete economic, social, and political collapse and chaos beginning at the second phase and long before the fifth phase of runaway global heating.
That is a powerful statement, but we can prove it in the materials and links on this page.
The current global warming consequences will be like a day at the beach compared to what is coming if we trigger the four global warming tipping points described below. (Those current consequences are massive and escalating wildfires, heat waves, droughts, flooding, rain bombs, extreme and record-breaking weather, bomb cyclones, sea-level rise, etc. Click here for all 20 of those consequences.)
Once you understand the four tipping points and deadlines, you can plan for your future safety or your smartest business moves in a rapidly deteriorating environment. The following sections will discuss most aspects of these global warming tipping points in detail.
But, before you can fully grasp the insane danger of crossing any of the four key tipping points below, you will need to understand how we measure carbon in the atmosphere. (Much of today's atmospheric carbon is caused by burning fossil fuels.)
First some basics: How we measure global warming and what increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tells us about future global warming and our extinction
Before you can fully grasp the danger of crossing the four key extinction-accelerating tipping points below, you will need to understand how we measure carbon in the atmosphere. (Carbon is the main greenhouse gas that we are creating by our fossil fuel use that is causing global warming.)
Atmospheric carbon from fossil fuel burning is the main human-caused factor in the escalating global warming we are experiencing now. The current level of carbon in our atmosphere is tracked using what is called the Keeling curve.
Each year, many measurements are taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii to determine the parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere at that time. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1), around 1880, before we began fossil fuel burning, our atmospheric carbon ppm level was at about 270. Here is the Keeling curve graph in January of 2022.
Keeling Curve Monthly CO2 graph, via Show.earth (2)
As you can see, we are not doing very well. No matter what you hear in the media, if the total carbon ppm level is not going down or carbon’s average ppm level per year is not falling or at least slowing its steep increase, (3) we are not making any significant progress on resolving the escalating global warming emergency. Total atmospheric carbon and carbon’s average ppm level per year are the most dependable measurements of our progress and a predictor of what will happen with global warming and its many consequences.
How do we know if we're making honest progress in reducing carbon dioxide to reduce escalating global warming?
There are at least two ways we will be able to tell that we are making honest progress in reducing global warming:
1. When we see our average annual increase in carbon ppm levels (currently at about 3 ppm per year) begin dropping, remaining at the current level, or at least rising at a slower rate.
2. When we start seeing the above Keeling graph levels dropping from the current carbon ppm level (approximately 420 ppm) to carbon 350-325 ppm. (How we do this is in the free Job One Plan.)
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A quick look at the historic rise of carbon in the atmosphere
On average, over the last 60 years, for every additional 25 parts per million (ppm) of carbon that goes into the atmosphere, our average global temperature goes up .5 degrees Fahrenheit or about .25 degrees C. On average, over the last 6 decades, we have been adding about an increase of 3 + additional carbon ppm into the atmosphere each year.
If you look at the trendline on the graph above, you can clearly see we are in serious trouble! In spite of everything you are hearing about all we have done to reduce global warming over the past 30+ years, 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.
It is also critical to understand that the ever-increasing damage that we are doing to our life-critical environment is primarily because of our carbon pollution of the atmosphere and its consequent global warming. Worse yet, this warming will not reverse itself for hundreds to thousands of years from now!
What you will find below is the how, when, and why the next wave of crossed global warming tipping points will not only severely worsen our lives but also bring about the extinction of most of humanity. Before that extinction occurs, we will experience escalating economic, political, and social chaos within our lifetimes.
When reading the four tipping points described below, keep in mind that:
1. we are almost out of time to do something about them (unless we get close to these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets) and
2. the following four tipping points both define and highlight the key elements and essence of what makes up our current global warming extinction emergency.
3. the first three tipping points trigger an unavoidable mass extinction by mid-century. The last tipping point triggers near-total extinction not long after that.
To set the final stage for your discovery of the four critical tipping points and deadlines, it is also advantageous to review what is happening in our climate right now:
1. At our current atmospheric carbon levels, we are already experiencing more and worsening extreme droughts and storms, wildfires, rain bombs, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, and other wild and unseasonable weather.
2. At our current atmospheric carbon level of about 420 ppm, the stability of the bellwether West Antarctic ice sheet has already been breached, and this ice loss is now irreversible. (This ice sheet plays a critical role in rising sea levels. This ice sheet is also an excellent example of one of many critical global warming tipping points the world has hurdled past far faster than anyone had predicted or foreseen.)
3. The Earth's temperature has risen radically (exponentially) since the industrial revolution from the previous stable range it held for thousands of years. It will continue to rise radically as we fail to reduce our global fossil fuel use. Please notice how the average global temperature is rising faster and faster over shorter and shorter periods of time.
Since 1970 alone average global temperature rose from preindustrial levels from .7 degrees Celcius to 1.4 degrees Celcius. That is a faster average global temperature rise than has occurred in over one million years! At our current increasing fossil fuel use rates, we will soon be committed to crossing the 2.0 - 2.7 Celcius degree increase from the preindustrial levels mark sometime after 2025.
(The red line is rising temperature and the blue line rising atmospheric carbon measured in ppm.)
Based upon the foundational global warming measurement and other information from above, you are ready for what will happen over the next few decades if we go over what we call the 2025 carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point and do not come very close to meeting these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.
Here are the four critical levels of global warming extinction triggering and accelerating tipping points we will cross in the near future if we fail to act effectively
Below, please find the four most important global warming tipping point levels within our complex climate system, which will involve interacting climate, biological and human systems, and subsystems.
The four critical atmospheric carbon-based global warming accelerating tipping points and deadlines to never forget are:
1. The 2025 carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point level. (This tipping point significantly accelerates and initiates the complete runaway global warming process of triggering more and more critical global warming tipping points at faster and faster rates. Once we cross this carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point, the average global temperature will continue to rise out of our control. It will continue rising, powered by the laws of climate physics and the natural forces of the climate system.
This tipping point, if avoided, will allow us to at least slow down the currently unavoidable extinction of half of humanity by mid-century so that more of us can live longer. On the other hand, this tipping point, if crossed, will lead us within a few additional decades beyond the unavoidable extinction of half of humanity into total human extinction.)
2. The extinction-accelerating, runaway global ice melting carbon 500 ppm tipping point level. (ALL ice and ALL glaciers on Earth will enter a near-unstoppable process of a complete meltdown! (Sea levels could rise up to 10 feet over decades and up to 220 feet over several centuries.)
3. The carbon 600 ppm total human extinction, runaway massive methane release tipping point level. (Carbon 600 ppm is where massive amounts of methane gas start being released from coastal ocean shelves and the world's permafrost, and all of humanity will perish.) And,
4. The above carbon 750 ppm runaway greenhouse gas effect and atmosphere removal tipping point level. (This is the final global warming tipping point level of carbon 750 and beyond. It leads to the near-total extinction of all biological life on Earth, needing oxygen to survive. This is because our average global temperature is rising so high that Earth's oxygen atmosphere is stripped off into space and everything dies.)
It is important to note that every advanced national intelligence agency around the world with adequate long-term climate research funding already knows about the above four tipping points and precisely what will happen when we cross them. (Just like they knew that we had to be prepared for the next pandemic.) Yet, they chose to keep this information a carefully guarded national secret and not urge their politicians to adequately and publically prepare or act.
The reason for this secrecy may be simple. If you knew your governments were secretly preparing to save themselves and their key personnel from what you are about to read, you probably would be angry, fearful, and in panic. Widespread public anger and fear would substantially interfere with or delay governmental efforts to secretly prepare their survival plans. To think that the best-resourced national intelligence agencies do not have this information as well as the big data meta-systemic analysis skills to review current climate research studies and see the coming extinction emergency is naive.
We know the previous is a lot to take in. After you read about the detailed consequences of crossing these four critical global warming consequences below, we think you, too will understand why governments have chosen to keep this information secret and are trying to protect themselves first. This secrecy and public denial of the global warming extinction emergency is not only logical for their survival but also necessary if anything is going to survive!
After you finish this article, you will also know the most probable cause of an inevitable World War III if we let this extinction emergency get out of control. That inevitability will be a massive nuclear, biological and/or chemical war for the last global warming safer zones where a tiny desperate portion of humanity may be able to survive if we do not cross the fourth and final tipping point.
Your preparedness, survival, and the speed of crossing more extinction-accelerating global warming tipping points
When you cross a global warming tipping point, things generally get a lot worse faster. Therefore, as you read the four levels of extinction-accelerating tipping points below, it is important to remember that as we cross more global warming tipping points, the global warming consequences will also get worse and worse, faster and faster!
They will not grow gradually and linearly. They will grow steeply to exponentially over time. (In the graph below, the red line is an example of a linear gradual growth trajectory, the blue line is a significantly steeper curve, and the green line is an example of an exponential growth curve and trajectory.)
This much steeper to an exponential growth of global warming consequences will begin about 2025-2031 when we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point threshold). It will continue worsening from there.
This very steep to exponential growth in the severity, frequency, and scale of global warming consequences also means that few, if any, NGOs, corporations, or governments will ever be able to either manage or recover from these accelerating consequences for long. A climate consequence steep to exponential growth curve also means that unless you have made emergency preparations long before these consequences occur, you won't have enough time to do so later.
This rising danger of getting caught unprepared exists because our social, economic, and political systems also will become radically more unpredictable, unstable, and chaotic. This system instability will happen sometime after global warming consequences enter their steeper to exponential curves (the green line above.)
If you have not prepared for this next step of a radical to exponentially rising global warming consequence growth long before it is needed (2025-2031), you will find yourself in a living hell! (See our Plan B for Climate Change Resilience for ideas on how to get well-prepared for what is coming and what is now unavoidable because of climate momentum and human inertia. Unfortunately, preparing correctly will take most people and organizations several years!)
The next section will discuss the four most dangerous tipping point levels in detail. In these four levels of tipping points, it also contains the four most critical reasons why we have only about six years left (until about 2025) to slow down an unavoidable mass extinction process as well as our crossing the other near-total extinction-accelerating global warming tipping points described below. As you read about these four major global warming tipping point levels, our current extreme extinction threat will become vividly real to you.
"There can be no margin for error whenever there is a real and imminent threat of total human extinction." Lawrence Wollersheim
The first extinction-triggering tipping point and the second phase of runaway global heating will be crossed sometime between 2025-2031. It is the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point
Overview of the first extinction-triggering tipping point
At this threshold of atmospheric carbon, we will cross many new climate tipping points and trigger climate feedback loops. These occurrences will significantly accelerate and ensure the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. It is the last chance threshold we must not cross to prevent mass extinction.
Beginning about 2025-2031, the severity, frequency, and scale of current climate change consequences will rise steeply to exponentially. These rising consequences include heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, rain bombs, extreme wind, dust, wildfire smoke storms, unseasonable cold spells, and abnormal seasonal changes.
This increase in climate consequence severity, frequency, and scale is because we have already crossed the beginning of the first stage of runaway global heating and are about to cross into the second. If you imagined runaway global heating like a train without brakes rolling down a mountain that is getting steeper and steeper, you would have a good idea about the seriousness of our climate consequences soon rising steeply to exponentially.
Because climate change consequences will soon begin rising steeply to exponentially, you may have only a few more years of relative climate change stability, depending upon where you live. (Beginning around 2025, if you are in a high-risk climate change area, the global heating consequences you are already experiencing will start to become far worse than you are currently experiencing.)
Saying we have only three to, at best, nine more years left to control climate change and global heating does not mean that humanity will go totally extinct in 3-8 years! It only means that if we do not do what is necessary to radically reduce global fossil fuel use over the several years to meet the 2025 global targets:
1. many more climate change consequences will begin at vastly higher levels of severity, frequency, and scale. (They will quickly increase steeply to exponentially.) And,
2. humanity will face many more unavoidable cataclysmic climate change consequences (such as about half of humanity going extinct by mid-century.)
3. we also will face near-total extinction because we will keep moving into the danger levels of the second and third extinction-accelerating tipping point levels. (If you are curious about what near-total extinction is, why we will not go totally extinct, and why near-total extinction is good news when compared to as opposed to total extinction, click here.)
To put the danger of this first near-total extinction-triggering tipping point in the proper perspective, it is vital to remember that atmospheric carbon was at about 270 ppm for hundreds of thousands of years. At carbon 270 ppm, there was climate stability.
Our best climate scientists have now calculated that if we kept atmospheric carbon below the carbon 350 ppm level, we would avoid the worse consequences of climate change, global warming.
The most important thing to remember is that crossing the first extinction-triggering tipping point and passing the carbon 450 ppm threshold will bring about an unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. We will experience the unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity because we will trigger far too many of the primary and secondary runaway global heating consequences, many occurring simultaneously.
Climate Inertial and Momentum
What follows in this section are the technical details on how and why not crossing this first climate change extinction-accelerating tipping point is so critical to our future survival. The following will also help you learn about climate system momentum factors and human inertia factors.
Most people, unfortunately, do not understand the extinction-preventing 2025 global fossil fuel reduction deadline. Moreover, they do not understand the physics and mechanics behind the laws of climate momentum and human inertia.
Our current climate momentum factors mean that even if we stopped ALL global burning of fossil fuels today, global temperatures would continue rising for the next 2-3 (or more) decades. Furthermore, it also means that the radical 2025 global fossil fuel reductions we must make immediately will not deliver significant and observable benefits to the average citizen for about 2-3 decades. Finally, if we ever make the needed fossil fuel reductions, this climate momentum time lag will challenge the patience and understanding of almost everyone, not just our politicians.
The graph above illustrates a true exponential rise in the three critical atmospheric greenhouse gases expressed in parts per billion. Since the mid-1700s and the start of the Industrial Revolution, these gases have been mostly human-made from burning fossil fuels. As a result, each of these greenhouse gases has built up considerable atmospheric heat-increasing momentum! (Click here to learn more about our 60 years of failed global fossil fuel reductions.)
We only have until about 2025 to 2031 to maintain control of our global warming future. This short time is because we will cross new dangerous climate tipping points as we pass through the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold.
The old and new climate cliff: The beginning runaway global warming and moving quickly toward irreversible runaway global warming
For a bit, we must talk about the concept of the climate cliff and what it is before we detail the first extinction-producing tipping point, which is when we cross the carbon 425-450 threshold. For years, our organization had previously called this carbon 425-450 ppm level the climate cliff. (In this article, you will also hear us call the carbon 425-450 ppm level our first extinction-triggering or producing tipping point.)
The original climate cliff 425-450 ppm level was based on the United Nations' decades-long-held target of keeping the average global temperature rising no more than 2°C above preindustrial levels. Recently, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lowered its temperature target level to 1.5 C based on realizing the consequences of a 2°C temperature increase above preindustrial levels would be far worse than the original research indicated.
The UN's new climate cliff level of 2020 is now to stay below an average global temperature increase of 1.5C. This target level has changed because global warming consequences above this temperature are now known to be much worse than previously believed.
One of the other significant reasons now being acknowledged among recognized climate scientists for the new UN 1.5 C climate cliff temperature target level is that there are already considerably more atmospheric carbon emissions than was previously predicted. These additional carbon emissions come from other amplifying carbon feedback loops and carbon sink failures.
Many of these further amplifying carbon feedback loops and carbon sink issues will show up just beyond a 1.5C average global temperature increase as soon as 2025. (These amplifying carbon feedbacks and carbon sink failures will be described further below.)
Newer research also shows that staying at or near a 1.5 C of average global temperature increase may be the temperature level that entirely excludes the latter levels of runaway global warming and continues to cross additional extinction-triggering global warming tipping points and amplifying carbon feedback loops.
At this point, it is also essential to understand what is meant by the term runaway global warming. Runaway global warming means that global warming will continue to increase on a runaway course. Imagine a train going down a steep hill with no functional brakes. Once the runaway global warming "train" gets started, in most cases, it will continue to roll on by itself with no practical way to stop or control it.
There are several levels of runaway global warming: beginning, extinction, and the Venus effect.
The beginning level of runaway global warming is defined as the point where numerous climate change and global warming consequences become catastrophic and unavoidable! For example, the UN's new 1.5 C climate cliff temperature threshold now means that because of what just the beginning level of runaway global warming can do, going above 1.5 C level will eventually lead to the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. (This link will show you how this mass extinction event will happen.)
Extinction level runaway global warming is the level of runaway global warming that will ensure humanity's near-total extinction. Venus-level runaway global warming will be so bad that it rips the atmosphere off our planet. As a result, the Earth will lose all human and biological life. This level of runaway global warming is believed to have happened to the planet Venus.
In our own internal 2016-17 climate analysis, using existing fossil fuel infrastructure, we calculated the first climate cliff for triggering beginning level runaway global warming (an unstoppable crossing of more amplifying global warming tipping points and climate feedback loops) would occur between the carbon 425 to carbon 450 ppm levels. These levels of atmospheric carbon would eventually create at least, a global 2C - 2.7C temperature increase over preindustrial levels.
Because of the UN IPCC threshold level of 1.5C, the beginning temperature and carbon limits for our former carbon climate cliff level now needed to be updated from its previous carbon level (425-450 ppm) and previous temperature level of about 2 -2.7° C above preindustrial levels to the new 1.5 C climate cliff starting point (about carbon 386.)
The new climate cliff shocker
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has previously calculated that reaching the carbon 420 ppm level is equivalent to a 1.6 C average global temperature increase from preindustrial levels. They made this very low-temperature rise calculation without including crossing any of the many climate tipping points or amplifying carbon feedback loops.
But, as you will soon discover, we have already crossed important climate tipping points and amplifying carbon feedback loops and will quickly cross many more. (Our calculations making reasonable allowances and adjustments for crossed tipping points and omitted amplifying carbon feedback loops show the temperatures will rise much higher than the UN's temperature calculations.)
To have stayed below a 1.5 C target temperature increase, we would have had to have kept our atmospheric carbon level below 386 ppm. But, according to James Hansen the world-renowned climate scientist, around 2015, we already had crossed over 386 carbon ppm level and ensured that we would hit the 1.5 C level.
The good news is we can still slow down the extinction of half of humanity by mid-century if we come close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. (It is perfectly normal to reject or doubt the possibility of such large-scale extinction occurring so soon. Therefore, we strongly recommend at some point clicking here to see the detailed sequences of some 80 primary and secondary consequences that will bring about the extinction of about half of humanity.)
All we can do now is slow and delay our partial extinction. But, it will take a government-driven mass mobilization to do it. This government-driven mass mobilization would have to radically reduce global fossil fuel use and get very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets as its first action.
If the world governments act immediately and get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, more people will live longer and more comfortably. And, maybe we can still save humanity from the only thing worse than the extinction of half or more of humanity by mid-century, humanity's near-total extinction occurring from about 2050-2080 or sooner.
And there is a bit more bad news. Acting only to minimize the current global warming extinction threat is insane! It is insane because any temperature increase of 1.5 C will also trigger the crossing of three more extinction-accelerating global warming tipping points and amplifying carbon feedback loops.
If nothing is done by our governments to radically slow and then reverse the average global temperature increase above the 1.5 C level, near-total extinction will be our eventual future. Supporting this 1.5 C danger is the Siberia permafrost field research (rather than the currently less accurate computer modeling) by Anton Vaks. (Reversing climate change means we need to get back down to at least carbon 350 ppm for some stability and hopefully eventually back down to carbon 270 ppm, where both humans and nature flourished.)
This Siberian research puts a global permafrost "thaw-down" also beginning at 1.5 C. This Siberian research means that when the world's permafrost crosses this 1.5 C average global temperature increase tipping point, the world's permafrost begins a near-continuous meltdown. Furthermore, this research indicates that after we reach this 1.5 C average global temperature increase, all permafrost stored carbon and methane will eventually be released from the permafrost.
This 1.5C permafrost release point, plus other human-made carbon and methane releases, put us squarely on the fast track for the worst global warming prediction scenarios. (Click here for more documentation on the permafrost meltdown.)
Our ticking permafrost methane time bomb is further illuminated by the rising atmospheric methane CH4 graph below. When viewing this methane graph, consider that atmospheric methane is about 80 times more effective over 20 years and about 24 times more effective over 100 years than atmospheric carbon in increasing global warming. (The atmospheric methane graph below is in parts per billion [ppb].)
It is vital to know how having already crossed the carbon 386 ppm new UN 1.5 C climate cliff will further accelerate the crossing of more global warming tipping points and amplify carbon feedback loops
The new carbon 386 ppm tipping point level was our last chance climate cliff because it was our last window of opportunity to keep from crossing the next critical atmospheric carbon threshold, which, when crossed, will significantly accelerate crossing more global warming tipping points and amplifying carbon feedback loops. Once we go over this 386 ppm climate cliff, our average global temperature will inevitably rise considerably above 1.5C - 2°C (eventually possibly as much as 3.2 C in eventual equilibrium warming.
Equilibrium warming is known as equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS.). It is the long-term temperature rise (equilibrium global mean near-surface air temperature) that is expected to result from a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.)
Moreover, this temperature rise will be far faster than has ever occurred over previous human-friendly geologically-scaled periods. This means that what used to happen over millennia or centuries within our climate systems will now occur over decades!
Unfortunately, rapidly rising global temperatures are not the worst effect of crossing the carbon 386 ppm level and climate cliff. These fast temperature rises will also create a decisive additional climate momentum factor in addition to the already existing atmospheric carbon momentum. This further climate-related momentum will not only push our global temperature even higher even faster, but it will also force many of the 11 climate tipping points below and more tipping points within the climate's subsystems to be crossed much faster!
(The illustration below lists the 11 major global warming tipping points. The arrows between the tipping points indicate that these tipping points interact and can also trigger each other's system or subsystem tipping points. Global warming temperatures will soar faster and faster as we cross more climate tipping points, which will cross even more climate and human system tipping points in an endless feedback loop.)
At some point, we strongly recommend that you click here to learn more details about each tipping point above and how they will unfold to bring us closer to near-total extinction. This tipping point meltdown detail page covers what happens when you cross each of the above global warming tipping points, how they accelerate global warming temperature rise, how they accelerate global warming consequences, and how they cause sudden and complete climate, biological and human system collapses. Crossing these climate tipping points will also make any possible recovery from crossing these tipping points impossible or much slower, harder, and more expensive. This expanded tipping point reading will help you "see" the tremendous and dangerous impact that the many additional and soon-arriving crossed global warming tipping points will have on your future.
(At some point, to learn more about tipping point effects, we strongly recommend that you click here to learn more details about each tipping point above and how they will unfold to bring us closer to near-total extinction. (This additional tipping point meltdown page covers what happens when you cross the above tipping points, how they accelerate the global warming temperature rise, consequences, and how they will cause sudden and complete climate, biological, and human system collapses if left unchecked.)
Crossing these climate tipping points will also make any possible recovery from crossing these tipping points either impossible or much slower, more complicated, and more expensive. (This expanded tipping point reading will help you "see" the tremendous and dangerous impact that the many additional and soon-arriving crossed global warming tipping points will have on your future.)
What to expect in rising temperatures now that we have crossed the carbon 386 climate cliff into runaway global warming
Since we have already passed the carbon 386 ppm level back around 2015, within about five years (around 2025 or less), we can expect to lock in an eventual total minimal increase in average global temperature of about 1.5 C.
Next, we cross the carbon 425 ppm level by or before about 2025; we can expect to lock in an additional eventual total increase in average global temperature of about 2 -2.7° Celsius (4° - 4.9° Fahrenheit) from preindustrial levels. (In March of 2022, we were at about carbon 420 ppm.)
The distinguished Professor of Meteorology Michael Mann from the University of Pennsylvania recently stated that once we reach the atmospheric carbon 405 ppm level, a 2 degrees C average global temperature increase is already baked in! And once that happens, the terrible news is that we can do nothing effective at this point to stop those temperature levels from rising for many more decades. (Again, this is why we correctly call our current climate emergency the runaway global heating emergency.)
At only this 1.5 -2.7° Celsius increased average global temperature range, hundreds of millions will eventually starve, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide will eventually be forced to migrate or die.
Furthermore, we are also condemned by the total heat-producing momentum of all of the previous carbon and other greenhouse gases that we have ever put into the atmosphere, along with the other factors mentioned further down this page. All of these will inevitably and quickly not only push our global temperature even higher but also trigger the crossing of ever more tipping points at an accelerating rate!
Because we have already gone over the carbon 386 ppm climate cliff and triggered this next level of accelerating climate tipping point crossings and climate feedbacks, we are now locked into continually increasing temperatures for as much as the next 30+ years and crossing even more dangerous tipping points and climate feedbacks.
We will reach our next even more dangerous transitional carbon and temperature threshold when we eventually do cross the carbon 425-450 carbon ppm tipping point level. This is the extinction-triggering threshold where, because of crossing even more future global warming tipping points and amplifying climate feedback loops at an accelerating rate, we will be unable to stop ourselves from proceeding uncontrollably to average global temperature increases of 3°, 4°, 5°, and 6° Celsius (5.4°, 7.2°, 9°, and 10.8° Fahrenheit respectively.)
Once we cross the 2° Celsius (the carbon 425-450 ppm level,) the higher mass extinction accelerating temperature levels of 3°, 4°, 5°, and even 6° Celsius will be all but locked in! According to James Hansen, one of the world's most influential climate researchers, a carbon 450 ppm level would eventually develop into an average global temperature increase of 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) in this century and be the end of human civilization as we've come to know it.
In many places on this website, Job One for Humanity has said that because we have wasted 60 years of scientific warnings and did little to fix global heating, we now face the unavoidable extinction of about half of Humanity by mid-century. We hope you can see how, with global temperatures reaching just 2-3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, this horrendous mass human extinction is not only possible, it is inevitable. When we reach a temperature increase of only 3° C a billion lives could be lost.
Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to change the 60 years of our past climate inaction that will stop the mid-century extinction of about half of Humanity. But, we can still prevent our near-total extinction after mid-century by getting close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and with the help of Mother Nature and some human counteractions once we are finally motivated enough to make the harsh changes needed. (At some point, please click here to read how the counteractions of Mother Nature and our human systems will eventually kick in to save us from total extinction.)
At this point, because of the many increased temperatures being discussed, it is crucial to explain a bit further the global warming temperature-fed feedback loop. The hotter it gets, the more it amplifies and drives more intense global warming consequences, crossing more climate change tipping points and triggering more amplifying climate feedback loops.
Then, these more intense global warming consequences, additional crossed climate tipping points, and additional triggered amplifying climate feedback loops cause the temperature to rise even higher, which starts the cycle all over again. The bad news is that once this cycle gets going, it goes faster and faster like a train with no breaks running down a hill. That's more details about why they call it runaway global warming.
The uncontrollable continuous rise in average global temperature, which will cause mass starvation, death, and migration, will be due primarily to:
1. the major global warming consequences will continue to intensify and cross-react as heat rises.
The following illustration will help you visualize how future global warming consequences will intensify separately and together as we cross more tipping points and global temperatures rise. Imagine all of these global warming consequences whirling around, colliding with, and amplifying each other because of the agitation and "boiling effect" of ever-rising heat. This motion is similar to how the rising heat under a steam cooker churns, whirls, and collides the boiling water inside the steam cooker faster and more violently.
As increasing heat boils our planet, just like boiling water in a pot, the above global warming consequences will intensify and increase in severity, frequency, and scale! (To learn about exactly how the escalating 20 worst global warming consequences will cause mass starvation, death, and migration as well as social, economic, and political chaos, click here.)
2. more global warming consequences (listed above) will go into positive feedback loops as temperatures rise. Think of a positive feedback loop as a small stimulus that then amplifies a specific effect or consequence, causing it to get bigger and bigger. For example, if you hold a microphone too close to a music amplifier, there will be an irritating scratchy distortion of sound that "feeds back" to the amplifier getting louder and louder the longer the microphone is held closer and closer to the amplifier source.
3. our being unable to stop ourselves from crossing more global warming tipping points. Crossing more tipping points will again trigger other positive feedback loops and points of no return within the systems and subsystems of the global climate. It will also cause global warming tipping points to interact with each other cumulatively.
4. our continuing to cross "points of no return" within the global warming tipping points processes. Tipping point processes have within them definite points of no return. Once a tipping point's point of no return is crossed, crossing that tipping point is all but inevitable. Once that occurs, things usually collapse quickly, and recovery is typically slow, complex, costly, or downright impossible.
5. the accelerating heat-producing carbon and other greenhouse gas momentum (we will continue to add more fossil fuel-burning carbon to the atmosphere every additional year (currently at the rate of about three carbon ppm per year.)
6. profound human system inertia and numerous other human system maladaptation factors will make it difficult to fix this extinction emergency or recover from it. (Described in detail on this page.)
Because of the preceding, we have no other rational alternative than to prevent crossing into the hazardous transitional carbon 425-450 ppm threshold range and tipping point. At our current carbon and other greenhouse gas atmospheric pollution rate, entering this range will, unfortunately, begin sometime around 2025 if we do not get very close to the correct and honest 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets.
There is something we can always be sure of in this horrible emergency. No matter what and despite all of the challenges and painful tipping point outcomes that are coming, the single constant truth for the best possible climate outcome for humanity in this emergency is that the faster and more we reduce global fossil fuel use:
a. the more people we will survive to carry on humanity, life, and our beautiful civilization, and
b. future generations will suffer less from an ever-increasing sequence of escalating global warming consequences.
In the illustration below, you will see a red vertical line the "Must never pass, last chance battle line and range of carbon 425 to 450 ppm." As you can see, going over the carbon 425 ppm leads us to a very steep downward, darker red slope toward our rapid extinction. (The illustration below also shows at what carbon ppm levels the six distinct phases of a Climageddon extinction scenario and countdown will occur (i.e., CS Phases 1-6 below.) After you complete the rest of this document, we strongly recommend that you review the detailed year-by-year global warming consequence timetables found in the Climageddon extinction scenario and countdown. (As a reminder, the Climageddon extinction scenario and countdown will be linked again at the bottom of this page.)
In summary of the first extinction-triggering tipping point, here is what is most important to remember about a failure to get close to our 2025 reduction targets and going over the carbon 425-450 ppm extinction-triggering tipping point:
1. Once we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold, global warming consequences' frequency, severity, and scale will go from gradual linear increases to very steep to exponential consequence increases! This steep to exponential consequence explosion will begin within 3-9 years (2025-2031) as we cross this critical extinction-triggering tipping point. (As of April of 2022, we are at carbon 421 ppm.)
Please, for effect, once again, see the most current blue Atmospheric CO2 carbon graph (on this page) to see how dangerously close we are to this critical carbon 425 - 450 ppm tipping point already.
2. After we also cross the carbon 425-450 ppm range, the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century is assured and unavoidable. The mathematics and physics of atmospheric carbon and other greenhouse gases raising our temperature will climb steeply to exponentially after going over the carbon 425-450 ppm level. This additional greenhouse gas rise will drive our temperatures ever higher even faster up to and through at least two more extinction-accelerating tipping points and into the many other global warming consequences described both further below and in these primary and these secondary runaway global heating consequences.
3. After we cross the 425-450 ppm threshold, stopping this ever-increasing global warming temperature momentum will be like trying to stop a gigantic boulder from rolling faster and faster down a hill that keeps getting steeper and steeper.
4. We are in an unacknowledged climate change extinction emergency, and so far, our governments are not even close to reaching the critical 2025 targets.
5. If we do not come close to the 2025 targets, we lose our last chance to stop ourselves from going over additional and far worse global warming tipping points. These extra tipping points will cause near-total to total human extinction and economic, political, and social chaos within our lifetimes!
If we do not come close to the 2025 targets, our final window of opportunity to effectively control our destiny regarding preventing the other two near-total extinction-accelerating tipping points from being crossed closes. This unthinkable outcome is also why the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point level is our most crucial next tipping point to understand and respect. (More about what causes this near-complete loss of control of our global warming future will be explained in the following even worse climate tipping point sections below.)
6. The beginning of runaway global warming was initiated when we went over the climate cliff and crossed carbon 386 ppm in 2015. We will fully enter the unavoidable mass extinction level of climate change when we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold. This is the carbon level where we can no longer stop ourselves from crossing a cascade of more significant climate tipping points.
7. Mass human extinction will accelerate as we cross the 3° C level and pass beyond it. Once we cross the 2° Celsius (the carbon 425-450 ppm level,) the inevitable mass extinction accelerating temperature levels of 3°, 4°, 5°, and even 6° Celsius all will be all but locked in!
At 4° C, life will be a living hell for unlucky survivors. Crossing the carbon 450 ppm level will eventually develop into an average global temperature increase of 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) well before the end of this century and be the end of human civilization as we've come to know it. At or near a temperature increase of 4° C, the lives of half of humanity are in severe peril if not gone.
8. In case you have been tricked by massive fossil fuel industry propaganda campaigns and still believe some "new technology" will save us just in time. Get over that fairy tale.
We have only 3-8 years left to get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets or lose control of our climate change future. But, unfortunately, no new carbon removal technologies (or what we at Job One for Humanity call the magical carbon-sucking unicorns) will be able to save us in time.
Once we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold, we will cross so many additional climate tipping points and trigger so many climate change feedback loops that carbon and methane levels in the atmosphere will start to skyrocket far, far beyond where they are now. Carbon and methane released from the tundra, permafrost, and forests are growing fast. Soon the oceans and soils will also start releasing massive amounts of carbon at levels no "new technology" will be able to keep up with or reverse for centuries.
The highly-touted fossil fuel industry's heavily-lobbied carbon removal technology fails because even those who believe this technology might save us are projecting that it will not be scaled up enough to make a significant difference until sometime after 2050. Unfortunately, this 2050 date is long after irreversible climate damage has been done, and long after, anything can be done for billions who will suffer and die!
(Please click here if you still have any illusions about new and heavily promoted carbon removal technology miraculously saving us at the last minute. The science and math there will help you understand that the only way out of this imminent extinction catastrophe is to radically reduce global fossil fuel use globally to come very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.)
Click here if you are a victim of climate change damage or loss and you want to get financial and other forms of restitution for the damages you have suffered.
Additionally, it is not just carbon capture "new technologies" that are unworkable when one confronts the honest global fossil fuel reduction deadlines we now face and their many primary and secondary consequences. No miracle "new technology" (like solar screening, geo-engineering, etc.) currently exists at the needed scale or cost efficiency capable of saving humanity from our accelerating global heating nightmare before about half of humanity is dead. No "new technology will magically get us to close to painful 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets in time.
The widely promised miracle "new technologies" that will save us from climate extinction are fossil fuel industry-supported illusions and false solutions. They intentionally act to hide the absolute urgency of the runaway global heating emergency and the fossil fuel profit-killing reality that we must radically reduce global fossil fuels use now!
Worse yet:
1. None of the current miracle "new technology" climate solutions can come even close to globally scaling up in time to compensate for our significantly missing the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.
2. Most have not yet been proven to work (even at a small scale.)
3. All have not been adequately tested at a sufficiently large enough scale for unintended side effects. Any unknown and unintended side effects could create even more significant problems than the problems they were designed to solve.
4. They all appear to be prohibitively costly and financially unsustainable.
5. Many burn so much fossil fuel trying to remove atmospheric carbon or geo-engineer the planet or atmosphere that their massive fossil fuel use eliminates their benefits. Additionally, massive amounts of energy will be needed to process the required raw materials and fabricate the solutions to implement the new technologies. To do this quickly, existing methods must provide the energy, which would further delay reaching global fossil fuel reduction goals. And finally. And worst of all,
6. These miracle "new technologies" falsely promise that we can continue our lives of over-consuming, overpopulating, polluting, and burning fossil fuels exactly as we are now or with little painless change. Nothing could be further from the truth if we want to survive.
Furthermore, society is ignoring that we are reaching limits to the availability of many natural resources. To build these proposed new technologies, vital materials will be required in such tremendous amounts that routine daily needs would be severely impacted.
Possibly after 2050, some new technology will be tested, safe and deployable at scale and reasonable costs to contribute in some minor way to restoring our climate stability. But none of these new technologies can replace the urgent, immediate requirement to radically reduce all global fossil fuel use to get close to the correct and honest 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.
Hoping for some "new technology" to be discovered at the last minute to miraculously save us is a horrible personal, corporate, or national strategy dooming us to fail ourselves into extinction and chaos.
9. The only effective way to prevent our near-total extinction from the primary and secondary consequences of climate change is to get as close to the correct and honest 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.
10. James Hansen, a former NASA climate scientist, and leading climate researcher, said that we should be safe if we stayed below an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million (ppm). However, he also said that if we go beyond an atmospheric carbon level of about 386 ppm, we will enter into a state of runaway global heating. As of March of 2022, we were at carbon 421 ppm. We are already deep into runaway global warming and racing towards mass extinction.
Additional thoughts on the critical importance of the carbon 425-450 ppm first extinction-triggering tipping point and the probable sequences of cataclysmic climate events as we approach and cross it
Because we have ignored decades of climate warming, we are already deep into the climate change trajectory toward extinction and 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 climatic state of the planet have already been activated.
In alignment with the above illustration, please take the time to read about one very hazardous glacier collapse in particular. It is genuinely critical to your immediate future well-being. Click here to read about the 2-3 foot quick and severe global sea level rise consequences of the Thwaites "doomsday glacier." It will describe our first truly global climate catastrophe. This soon-collapsing massive glacier will give you a glimpse into the global economic, social, and political turmoil this single glacier will create.
Here is an recent update on the Atlantic ocean current tipping point. Current Earth system computer models (ESMs) project a dramatic slowing (28–42% by 2100) of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and Southern Meridional Overturning Circulation (SMOC) across a range of climate scenarios, with a complete shutdown of SMOC possible by the year 2300. These newest predictions for ocean current slowdown are decades ahead of previous climate-related forecasts. Maintaining this critical ocean current at the same pre-climate change speed it has held for thousands of years is essential to humanity's future survival. This ocean current slowdown is a massive climate change tipping point with many impacts; see this article.
Most of the above-activated tipping points can and will 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 the above 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 the above 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" lock into their falling cascade, we are already at a point of global and societal no return.
It is not just us saying this:
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 and, a 4° C increase would also spell the end of a tolerable human civilization.
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".
Many other climate scientists have warned that once the climate warms 4 degrees C over our preindustrial average global temperature, 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. The rapid loss of biodiversity is another likely and already occurring 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.)
Many climate researchers also believe that we entered into extinction-level runaway global warming long before we will hit carbon 425 ppm and even before we hit carbon 386 ppm. Like the NASA scientist James Hansen, who warned 40+ years ago about climate extinction, many climate researchers hold that global warming tipping points and amplifying positive climate feedback loops act to "stack up" on each other and magnify their combined adverse effects. They maintain that we entered into runaway global warming (because of the stacking effect) as soon as we crossed carbon 350 ppm, just as James Hansen predicted.
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 any dubious and unenforceable global national net-zero emissions pledges.
There is an additional and crucial way to think about the race to reach the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets before we cross more of the extinction-accelerating 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 away from the iceberg, he needs at least 3 miles, but he is only 1 mile away from the iceberg. In this example, the titanic is already doomed when the captain notices the iceberg.
This Titanic example is not much different than our current situation. We have already gone over the carbon 386 ppm climate cliff. We are doing very poorly toward reaching the last chance 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. We have wasted so much time over the previous decades ignoring valid scientific warnings; we have very little time remaining to "steer" away from extinction.
We already have a baked-in minimal 1.5 - 2 degrees C in average global temperature increase. We also have initiated the global climate tipping point cascade effect, which will quickly get us to 4°C and the collapse of a civilization in which no one would want to exist. This 4°C alone will rapidly take us to a far less habitable planet and climate regardless of any additional global fossil fuel reductions we might now make.
In the image above, the unillustrated Planetary Threshold dividing line is the climate cliff previously mentioned of carbon 386 ppm. As one can see, once we crossed that carbon 386 ppm Planetary Threshold line, the stability of our climate rapidly collapses into an over-heating, uninhabitable Earth!
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Here are the most probable carbon feedback loops, carbon sink losses, points of no return, and tipping points accelerating after we crossed the carbon 386 ppm climate cliff in 2015
1. Decreased albedo from reduced snow cover and melting Arctic ice increasing the earth's average global temperature,
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, resulting in more heat, disease epidemics, and possible pandemics. This tundra heating speeds up the process of more positive feedback loops and crossing more points of no return and tipping points.
(Please note that rapidly melting tundra permafrost is also because the northernmost areas are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.) This permafrost melting also can cause local and global pandemics caused by ancient viruses and bacteria being released from the permafrost. They have already had localized anthrax and smallpox outbreaks in Siberia because of the bacteria and viruses released from the decomposition of ancient frozen animals from the melting permafrost and tundra. Unfortunately, the Siberian residents had no existing immunity to these diseases and were not prepared to deal with these outbreaks due to a 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 just before overheated over-stressed forests next begin to release carbon back into the atmosphere!
(Click here to learn more about each item listed above.)
Here are the most likely keystone tipping points to be crossed after we crossed the carbon 386 climate cliff in 2015
There is an extinction tipping point area that is the most likely first candidate to 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 genuinely have profound effects not only on worldwide weather stability but, more importantly, on significantly lowering global crop yields and significantly increasing global crop failures. Eventually, this will cause accelerating and massive global starvation, which will then also destabilize national economics, politics, and society.
In the summer, when the Arctic ice melts, there is less cooling of all growing season areas affected anywhere by arctic weather. Therefore, the more polar ice melts each year, the less cooling and the more heat and drought during the critical growing season in arctic-affected areas.
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 vital food crops. As a result, we are losing stable growing seasons.
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 ten days during their growing season over 100° Fahrenheit. This is particularly true 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 constantly 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. (We estimate within a decade or so, we could have as many as 30 days of 100-degree heat during the growing season in many critical crop-growing areas.)
Because melting Arctic ice also affects and disrupts the jet stream and ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, you will also have extreme and unseasonable cold spells appearing during the prime crop growing seasons worldwide. These cold spells will also further reduce food yields and produce more crop failures during the fragile growing season.
This again means that the world will continue to experience more and larger crop reductions and failures as more polar ice melts and stays melted longer. Corn is one of the most significant 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, we can expect that an Arctic 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 and glaring warning sign of increasing global warming and future severe reductions in future crop yields, as well as dangerous increases in future crop failures. These crop failures will also mean higher prices and ever-increasing food scarcity, and increasing global starvation.
This Arctic crop stability problem is not something far-off in the future. On the contrary, it is already happening in many world areas.
It is also already causing large human migrations. The expanding and increasing polar ice melting is a primary "canary in the coal mine" for increasing future mass starvation not way off in 2100 as we have been told, but now and in years the decade to follow.
Already in the growing belt of the United States, we are seeing increased and record-breaking heat, droughts, rain bombs, Derechos, and other extreme unseasonal weather that directly affects 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 expand and continue, mass starvation will begin to destabilize all of our other economic, social, and political systems.
Reduced polar ice also reduces the albedo effect because white snow or ice reflects heat away from the earth and into the atmosphere, keeping the world cooler. However, 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.
As global 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 the melting of Arctic ice due to global warming. Paradoxically, according to new studies, we will also have more extreme cold and heavier snows during the US winters because of melting Arctic ice.
In general, you can count on that increased crop yield reductions and crop failures will increasingly occur because of arctic ice melt, increased heat, increased droughts, increased cold spells, increased rain bombs, and extreme weather storms. This 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 Fahrenheit that the average global temperature rises. This will continue until the planet becomes so warm that too many days of the growing season will be at 100° or more. This will make successfully growing the world's five major grains all but impossible.
The carbon 386 ppm climate cliff and its 1.5 C temperature increase threshold was the last threshold for excluding humanity's mass extinction threat by mid-century. Staying below 1.5 C was also the final threshold where we could have prevented a significant acceleration in crossing other more dangerous global warming tipping points.
One can see from the preceding that while we all do our best to encourage our governments to meet the 2025 targets, it is also now wise to start a personal global warming emergency backup plan and "Plan B!"
New technology will not be able to save us in time!
Many people falsely believe that geoengineering, carbon capture, or some other new miracle technology will ride in like a knight on a white horse at the last minute to save humanity from the natural consequences of its decades of previous bad climate decisions, actions, inactions, and mistakes.
In the media, we regularly hear about these new technologies that will save for climate change. Directly or indirectly, these new technologies promise that somehow we can still continue living our lives over-consuming, polluting, and burning fossil fuels exactly as we are now.
The bad news is that these promised new technologies are false solutions that suffer from one or more of the following deadly problems:
1. Most have not yet been proven to work even at a small scale.
2. They have not been adequately tested at a sufficient scale for any unintended side effects, which could create greater problems than the problems they are designed to solve.
3. They are prohibitively costly.
4. They burn so much fossil fuel trying to remove atmospheric carbon or geo-engineer the atmosphere that they realistically cancel out their benefit. And finally,
5. None of the current "new technology" solutions can come even close to globally scaling up in time (over the required next three years) to get close to, or compensate for missing the 2025 global targets, to prevent humanity's mass to near-total extinction.
(Click here to read more about why this fairy tale carbon capture technology is not going to happen or will be "too little too late" to save us.)
We are cautionary and warn people about the pitfalls of techno-optimism and the engineer's limited and mechanistic view of complex adaptive systems (the climate, biological and social systems, etc.). But, it does not mean we are anti-technology.
Our position on the use of technology is best described by the term Appropriate Technology. Appropriate technology is a movement encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, affordable by locals, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable, and locally autonomous. Unfortunately, the miracle "new technology" solutions proposed for climate change are far from the best appropriate technology principles.
Allowing an atmospheric carbon 425-450 ppm level ever to be reached is humanity playing with fire and betting the house (its survival) on both being insanely lucky and on nonexistent or insufficient new remedial technologies
"Unfortunately, most people do not realize it is not just the ever-increasing global warming heat that is so dangerous to our future; it is also all of the other primary and secondary climate-related consequences that will make the future a nightmare if we do not fix this mess immediately!" Lawrence Wollersheim
Humanity thrived for almost 1,000,000 years when the historical interglacial high atmospheric carbon levels remained within the carbon range of 270-280 ppm.
Decades ago, climate scientists warned us that when we crossed the atmospheric carbon 350 ppm level, humanity would be unsafe from horrible consequences and even extinction, and we were on the way to runaway global warming.
Measuring the most dangerous greenhouse gases of atmospheric carbon [CO2,] methane [C4,] and nitrous dioxide [No2] are the best ways to measure the increasing threat level of global heating consequences. These measurements are also one of the best ways to predict future global heating and temperature levels.
In the illustration below, on the left vertical axis are atmospheric measuring levels for both carbon and nitrous dioxide in parts per million [ppm.] On the right vertical axis, you see the measuring level for atmospheric methane in parts per billion [ppb.] Across the bottom of the illustration is the last 2,000+ years.
The red, blue, and black lines moving from left to right across the illustration tell the painful story of human history and the pollution of our atmosphere. The illustration clearly shows what happened when humanity began the fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution in the late 1700s to early 1800s.
Here is a bit more about our atmospheric carbon history and its meaning. Many climate researchers believe we are already in the beginning stages of runaway global warming and have been so for quite a while. (Think of runaway global warming like a train rolling down a steep hill with no brakes.)
What most people do not understand about what helps cause runaway global warming within the climate's systems and subsystems is that crossed climate tipping points will create a higher new global temperature that also will trigger more climate tipping points and more amplifying climate feedback loops. By themselves alone, more triggered climate tipping points and climate feedback loops will increase heating within the climate system, producing more severe consequences. Each add-on new tipping point and feedback loop helps create a growing "stack" of overlapping temperature-increasing mechanisms fueling runaway global warming!
At some point, triggering the next climate tipping point or feedback loop will initiate an unstoppable domino effect, which will trigger even more tipping points and amplify more feedback loops at faster and faster rates. Once this level is reached, the tipping point and feedback loop "stacking" effect ensure that a self-sustaining cycle of feedback loops that will repeatedly create the next higher level of temperatures and more severe consequences.
The stacking effect was predicted decades ago by one of the world's most respected NASA climate scientists, James Hansen. Hansen said that if the atmospheric CO2 level reached and stayed at only the carbon 385 ppm level and was allowed to sit there for many years, it alone could kick off a climate tipping point and feedback loop stacking effect. He warned that this stacking effect would lead to an unstoppable chain reaction to higher and higher temperatures (hence runaway global warming.)
So here is the tough love. Humanity thrived successfully for millennia when atmospheric carbon was at the 270 to 280 ppm-level. We went over the climate cliff in 2015 when we hit carbon 386 ppm level. Within the next 2-3 years, we will pass the carbon 425 ppm level.
We would have stayed safe from runaway global warming if we ONLY had stayed below the carbon 350 ppm level. According to James Hansen, since we passed the carbon 386 ppm in 2015, we have already triggered the stacking effect. We already have activated the crossing of ever more climate tipping points and feedback loops.
Brace yourself. As of April of 2022, we were at carbon 421 ppm. From the preceding, one can see that this carbon 421 level is far, far beyond any reasonable and safe atmospheric carbon level and far into the stacking effect of runaway global warming.
(If you still have any doubts about what the stacking effect of amplifying climate feedback loops means or what climate tipping points are, why they will help cause a sudden steep to exponential rise in climate consequences, or their importance to your future, a new video has come out called Earth Emergency. It takes you through the most dangerous climate feedbacks and tipping points in an easy-to-understand way. This public broadcasting (PBS) video also makes many of the key points that we are making on this website. Click here to see this "don't miss it" super simple video.)
At the carbon 421 ppm level, our atmospheric carbon level is about 155% greater than the humanity-thriving level of carbon 270 ppm. One has to wonder, how much higher does this percentage of atmospheric carbon have to rise beyond the last safe level of carbon 350 ppm, before we collectively finally realize we are in a grave extinction danger?
Allowing an atmospheric carbon level of 425-450 ppm ever to be reached is humanity playing with fire and betting the house (near-total extinction) on being both insanely lucky and on nonexistent or insufficient new greenhouse gas remedial technologies.
No matter how you look at it, we are at a completely immoral and insane risk level to the survivability of humanity. We are already living beyond the highest possible danger zone.
If we are very, very fortunate, and it is not already too late, we may have another 3 to 9 years before crossing over the 425-450 ppm threshold and into the full-on runaway global warming where global heating and the extinction emergency goes out of our control for centuries, but we indeed do not have any more time than that.
We are at our absolute last chance, 3 to 9-year warning!
Either we make the necessary and radical 2025 global fossil fuel reductions, or we face near-total extinction that survivors may never be able to reverse for centuries to thousands of years.
On the other hand, if we miss this last three to nine-year opportunity to prevent our extinction, we can at least hope to slow it down to have more time to get ourselves ready for near-total extinction.
"We have delayed facing and fixing the climate change emergency for decades, and it has now reached an insane climate change extinction risk level. This extinction risk level is so high that it is comparable to humanity playing Russian roulette with a gun where every chamber of the revolver has a bullet in it, and every bullet is an extinction-accelerating tipping point or catastrophic amplifying climate feedback loop." Lawrence Wollersheim
What we do in the next three to nine years in getting close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets will determine the survival and future of much of humanity. And, if we do not fix this, it will also be many of the lives of Earth's plants, and animals that will suffer our same horrible fate.
If our governments fail to act, few, if any, will survive. Even fewer individuals would want to exist in the over-heated world we would leave them.
If you have any doubts about what amplifying climate feedback loops or climate tipping points are, or their importance to your future, a new video has come out called Earth Emergency. It takes you through the most dangerous climate feedbacks and tipping points in an easy-to-understand way. This public broadcasting (PBS) video also makes the key points that we are making on this website. Click here to see this "don't miss it" super simple video.
(Special note 4.22.2022: There is a lively ongoing conflict between various climate change researchers. Some believe we are already in a state of runaway global warming, and there is nothing we can do about it at our current greenhouse gas levels. This group believes we are already headed to near-total to total human extinction.
Another group of climate researchers believes that we still may be able to prevent near-total extinction (but not avoid mass extinction) if we can do the nearly impossible task of cutting global fossil fuel use by 75% to at least get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets discussed here.
Other climate researchers using grossly underestimated and distorted IPCC calculations believe we have until about 2030- 2040 to make much smaller global fossil fuel reductions and still save humanity.
Our website reflects the ongoing conflicts within researcher positional differences. As an organization, we currently believe that the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century is unavoidable. However, we still may be able to prevent near-total extinction if we can do the near-impossible task of cutting global fossil fuel use by close to 75% to get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets discussed here. (Please note we may have as long as 2031 to get close to these 2025 targets before we cross the far side of this carbon 425-450 ppm threshold level when we finally reach carbon 450 ppm.)
Because we believe the probability of getting close to the 2025 reduction targets even by 2031 will be very, very challenging, we also have created an action program that compensates for this probable failure to prevent climate change from reaching severe extinction levels. We hope that this clarification helps our readers better understand our current position and our Job One action plan.
Please click here for a special update on the fact that on Feb 3, 2024, for the first time ever, atmospheric carbon rose above the carbon 425 ppm threshold.
Please help share these ten critical climate facts everywhere! Unfortunately, at best, we have only 3 to 9 more years to fix this climate nightmare.)
Reviewing the most misunderstood climate change dangers because it means our survival or extinction
What not coming close to the critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets means, and what is at stake:
1. If we fail, we will not be able to slow down the unavoidable extinction of half or more of humanity by mid-century. (Mass extinction is most associated with having already crossed the carbon 386 ppm threshold.)
2. Only by 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 beginning as soon as 2070.
3. Because near-total extinction is now associated with crossing the atmospheric carbon threshold of carbon 425 - 450 ppm and the eventual higher temperatures produced when we cross that threshold, we only have about 3 to about 9 more years to be able to prevent our near-total extinction. (Carbon is currently accumulating in the atmosphere at about three carbon ppm per year.)
4. Unfortunately, we also have two additional super-dangerous extinction-accelerating tipping points after the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point threshold.
5. After crossing the carbon 425-450 level, the following three extinction-producing tipping points are FAR worse than what you have read above! they will create both extinction level and Venus affect level runaway global warming.
6. Crossing the Carbon 425-450 ppm threshold means that it is virtually impossible to save about half of humanity from extinction by about mid-century.
Continue reading to learn about those two even worse climate extinction-triggering tipping points.
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The second global warming extinction-accelerating tipping point and the third phase of runaway global heating will be crossed as soon as 2042-2067 or earlier: It creates a runaway global ice melt
Failing to reach the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets is simply not a rational option! But, if we fail, here is more on how mass human extinction and economic, political, and social chaos will become our shared future from crossing the next 2 critical global warming tipping points within the next few decades.
As the current carbon rises, we will cross the carbon 500 ppm near-extinction level as we 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 go over the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point, we will inevitably cross the carbon 500 ppm level as soon as 2042-2067 or earlier. (Which tipping points we cross and how much and how fast we add additional carbon to our atmosphere will determine when in that 2042-2067 time range we will hit carbon 500 ppm.)
When we cross the carbon 500 ppm level, ALL ice and ALL glaciers on Earth will enter a near-unstoppable process of a complete meltdown! Yes, you read that right! At carbon 500 ppm we begin the melting of all global ice.
Crossing the carbon 500 ppm threshold has, in fact, repeatedly happened in Earth's geological history. When it 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 in just 20-25 more years. Worse yet, this global melting tipping point may not reverse itself for centuries to thousands of years once we stop carbonizing our atmosphere.
If we cross that critical tipping point passing the atmospheric carbon level of 500 parts per million (ppm), our average global temperature will eventually soar to 4°C (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). At 4°C, a large portion of humanity (hundreds of millions to billions) will die of starvation (or die and suffer from increased heat or the other runaway global heating-related consequences.) Governments and society will collapse in most areas of the world between the 35th parallel north and the 35th parallel south.
Even though it will take many centuries for the seas to rise the full 230 feet, there still will be shocking spurts of sea-level rise within those centuries where the sea level rise up to 10 feet or more in just a few decades as it also has done repeatedly in Earth's past. The sudden multi-decade spurts of sea level rise will displace billions of people from their coastal or close to a waterway homes, and hundreds of millions or more will die in the ensuing displacement turmoil.
Take a moment to visualize the seas eventually but steadily and in sudden spurts rising 230 feet and what this will mean to our coastal cities, our national borders, and the generations that follow us. Take a moment to visualize the ever-increasing massive worldwide crop failures because of the ever-increasing heat and the consequent mass suffering of slow starvation as we approach and pass the carbon 500 ppm level.
Take a moment to let the following really sink in. Anything at or above a 4°Celcius increase in average global temperature would be incompatible with an organized global society and would be beyond adaptation! This temperature and carbon level would also virtually guarantee we eventually could hit carbon 600 ppm. When we cross the carbon 500 ppm tipping point, we cross a steeper, even more, slippery slope, and we could quickly reach the carbon 600 ppm extinction level tipping point within another 25-30 years (as soon as 2063-2072 or earlier.)
When this happens, we will greatly accelerate the process of crossing even more global warming tipping points. As a type of positive feedback loop, this will once again further spike the average global temperature.
It will also help you to understand how fast future global warming will intensify using the illustration below if you imagine all of the global warming tipping points whirling around and colliding into each other because of the "boiling effect" or agitation of ever-increasing heat. This is much like how the rising heat under a steam cooker whirls and churns the water inside faster and faster. (To learn more about how crossing critical global warming tipping points like those in the illustration below accelerate consequences, causes sudden and complete system collapses, makes recovery much slower, harder, and more expensive, and function, click here.)
If we pass this second tipping point, global warming consequences will continue accelerating exponentially in frequency, severity, and scale.
But please also realize that it is currently unlikely that humanity will allow itself to reach this carbon 500 ppm level and go beyond the already unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity into the beginning phases of a near-total extinction process. Humanity's likely inability to reach or go much beyond the carbon 500 ppm level will be due to the many natural and human counteractions of the Great Die-off taking over.
On Earth, nothing takes place in a vacuum. For every action, there is a counteraction. If you have not done so already, please click here to take the time to read about the good news of many powerful natural and human simultaneous counteractions to the above global runaway heating consequences.
These crucial counteractions should occur with sufficient impact, power, and timing to prevent humanity from reaching the carbon 500 ppm level or much beyond it, but about half of humanity will be unable to avoid extinction because of our 60 years of recklessly ignoring the warnings of our best climate scientists.
Why about half of humanity will go extinct by about mid-century?
At this point, you should begin to be able to see why about half of humanity will unavoidably start into their extinction process once we pass the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold (starting in about 2030) and as we approach the carbon 500 ppm level (around about 2050-2060.) The extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century will not come about only because of:
a. soaring temperatures,
b. failed or low-yield crops and mass starvation,
c. growing climate mass migration,
d. climate-related resource and distribution shortages, and
e. intensifying climate-related land and resource conflicts.
In addition to the climate consequences already occurring in a-e above, the extinction of about half of humanity will continue moving forward and accelerating because of the many other climate-related or climate-triggered primary and secondary consequences listed on this critical page. These additional climate consequences will intensify, randomly (or periodically,) growing more frequent, or covering larger areas, which cumulatively and collectively, and in total effect will create the many causes for the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century.
Cumulatively and collectively, the combined effect of many of the primary and secondary climate consequences listed on this page could just as easily cause humanity's near-total or even total extinction if we let our atmospheric carbon level go much beyond carbon 500 ppm.
After one comes to fully understand the many accumulating and intensifying primary and secondary climate consequences, the only rational option is to get as close to the 2025 global fossil fuel targets as possible to limit humanity's damages to the extinction of only about half of humanity by mid-century.
(If you have not done so already, we strongly recommend reading the primary and secondary climate consequences listed on this page after you have completed this article. Once you have done that additional reading, the painful reality and probability of half of humanity going extinct by mid-century will also become more accurate and probable.
Never forget that crossing the carbon 500 ppm threshold means that it also may no longer be possible to save about three-fourths of humanity from extinction by about 2060-2080.
The third global heating extinction-expanding tipping point (and the fourth phase of runaway global heating) will probably be crossed as soon as 2063-2072 or earlier. It creates runaway methane releases and the beginning of a total human extinction scenario.
If we cross the carbon 600 ppm final extinction level, it will result in raising the average global temperature to 5°C (9 degrees Fahrenheit) and bring about massive methane clathrate releases from coastal ocean shelves as it has done before in the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 million years ago, and most notably the Permian–Triassic extinction event, when up to 96% of all marine species became extinct, 252 million years ago. (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 new methane release process once we reach 5°C, and by 6°C, it is in full bloom. Also, methane releases from the permafrost will also increase at significantly faster rates at these higher temperatures.)
Because methane, when released as a gas from permafrost or fracking or as gas from methane clathrate, is 86 times more potent than carbon as a temperature-increasing greenhouse gas, it will once again rapidly spike up the average global temperatures.
The following is a methane graph (found at https://www.methanelevels.org) in which you can see how total atmospheric methane levels from all sources have exponentially skyrocketed, particularly during the last 50 years.
If it continues to rise from there toward the carbon 600 ppm final tipping point and an average global temperature of 5°C, it will eventually bring about the near-total extinction of most if not all of humanity and the end of civilization as we know it in the final phases of the Climageddon Scenario.
(Please note: Unless we get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets by 2031 at the latest, there is no mathematical way for us to prevent crossing the carbon 500 ppm tipping point where all ice on earth will melt! Beyond its mathematical certainty, there are numerous climate scientists who believe that crossing the carbon 500 ppm is ALREADY inevitable because we will soon cross other climate, biological and human system tipping points covered at the top of this page. This does not even include the other accelerating global warming positive feedback loops already occurring throughout our climate system. (Positive feedback loops enhance or amplify changes; this also (like tipping points) tends to move a system away from its equilibrium state and make it more unstable.)
The same climate scientists who believe that we cannot prevent crossing carbon 500 also believe that no matter what we do, we have already missed our window of opportunity and control to prevent carbon 600 ppm. Furthermore, they believe 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.) (Reaching carbon 800 ppm would once again be because of continuing to add more carbon into the atmosphere and because of the total accumulating effects of crossing more and more global warming tipping points that will continue occurring even more rapidly after we cross the carbon 500 ppm threshold.)
Our reading of the current science indicates that if we do not immediately get close to the previously described 2025 radical fossil fuel reductions, we will cross the carbon 600 ppm level. But, if we do enact the necessary radical 2025 fossil fuel cuts immediately, there is still an acceptable yet small possibility that we can still slow down our crossing of the carbon 600 ppm final tipping point or, at least long enough so that we can save some small portion of humanity and transfer needed infrastructure into the global warming safer zones. (We may be able to save humanity from near-total extinction by also immediately enacting ALL of the actions described in part three of the Job One Plan.)
At worst, even if we can not still prevent crossing the carbon 600 ppm level, we can at least slow it down as well as some of the other worst coming global warming consequences. While even slowing down our crossing the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point will be a Herculean task of massive global governmental cooperation and mobilization, the probability that we can at least temporarily slow and delay some of the other of the 20 worst global warming consequences by getting close to our 2025 targets by 2031 at the lettest is still reasonable, but more importantly, this will allow us more time to get prepared for the many global warming consequences we can no longer avoid no matter what we do.)
It is important to be realistic in your future planning. As you can see, the probability that we will cross the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point is far too high. Additionally, the final window of opportunity to prevent crossing the carbon 600 ppm extinction tipping point will close by 2025-2031 if we have not made the radical and immediate radical fossil fuel cuts necessary. This is because of the:
a. temperature momentum already "baked" into the climate system (the existing carbon 413 ppm level already in the atmosphere,)
b. 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,) and
c. The additional global warming tipping points we will continue to cross I didn't even faster rate we will continue to cross I didn't even faster rate if we miss our 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets. And finally,
d. If we fail to reach or come close to the 2025 reduction targets, we are not just facing the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century, we are facing near-total extinction! This is because we could possibly cross the carbon 600 ppm-level. This is the level where we will also enter the last phases of run-away global heating! (If you are not sure about how much worse it can possibly get if we enter a run-away global heating near-total extinction phase, click its link in the previous sentence.)
Never also forget that at 5°C, which will occur once we hit carbon 600 ppm and above, more than half of humanity will already be dead by mid-century because of:
a. starvation because of the devastating effect that increased heat will have on crop failure or,
b. from global warming's other 19 worst consequences or 11 key tipping points.
Economies, governments, and societies will collapse in many areas of the world between the 45th parallel north and the 45th parallel south.
As we reach the carbon 500 ppm and carbon 600 ppm tipping point levels, we will also cross into the later and most dangerous later phases (4 and 5) of the 6-phase of what we call the Climageddon Extinction Scenario and Countdown model or Climageddon Scenario. Review the following Climageddon Extinction Scenario illustration starting from the bottom up! The top of the illustration below shows you the later Climageddon Scenario consequences the bottom shows you the earlier consequences.
The largest illustration on this page below, the Global Warming and the Climageddon Scenario Cascading Meltdown reflect the unfolding natural progression of ever-worsening consequences, tipping points, and human system processes that will accelerate as global warming continues. These consequences, tipping points, and human systems will also synergetically and cumulatively collide with each other and adversely interact. It is these ever-increasing interactions among and between worsening global warming consequences, tipping points, and human systems that will make each of these things worse faster and faster.
This illustration reflects the core of the final processes that will lead to our mass extinction as well as into global economic, political, and social chaos. Its three levels of global warming interactions (consequences, tipping points, and human systems,) highlight the continuous onslaught of emergencies, crises, and catastrophes that we are already experiencing and which foretell our eventual extinction.
Starting reading this large illustration only from the bottom up because that is how it will unfold.
Take a moment and think about the bitter reality that when we reach the carbon 600 ppm tipping point (which can occur as soon as 2063-2072, or possibly earlier,) we trigger the final processes that will bring about the extinction of most of humanity by mid-century. (Which tipping points we cross and how much and how fast we add additional carbon to our atmosphere will determine when in that 2063-2072 time range we will hit carbon 600 ppm.)
But, long before we have reached the carbon 600 ppm level tipping point, humanity will be in a massive die-off, and global civilization will have begun collapsing. But please also realize that it is highly unlikely that humanity will allow itself to reach this carbon 600 ppm level. Humanity's likely inability to reach carbon 600 ppm will be due to the Great Die-off's many natural and human counteractions.
On Earth, nothing takes place in a vacuum. For every action, there is a counteraction. If you have not done so already, please click here to read about the many powerful natural and significant human simultaneous counteractions to the above global runaway heating consequences. Most importantly, these crucial counteractions should occur with sufficient impact and power to prevent humanity from ever reaching the carbon 600 ppm level.
If we do reach carbon 600 ppm
At or near carbon 600 ppm, the unlucky survivors will enter into an ecological and climate hell and a new dark age that will make those survivors of the following centuries curse us and wish they were dead. Please also remember that as we pass this third tipping point, global warming consequences will continue to accelerate exponentially in frequency, severity, and scale.
(The global warming consequences, tipping points, and human system factors (shown above) will interact and collide in 6 distinct phases and waves. At some point, after you finish this document, we strongly recommend that you read about the 6 phases and waves of the Climageddon Extinction Scenario and countdown here. In detail, it describes the timetables and consequences of our global warming future if we miss the 2025 targets.)
How the three previous extinction-producing tipping points of carbon 425, 500, and 600 ppm create a no-win condition where global warming 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 global warming catastrophes or mass extinction. After we cross the carbon 425 ppm tipping point, our loss of control is because we will begin triggering:
- evermore natural climate system tipping points.
- much larger naturally occurring methane releases from the tundra, permafrost, and ocean shelves.
- additional natural carbon releases from our deep oceans, trees, and soils and our own failure to reduce our global fossil fuel use.
Eventually, these natural systems will also 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 the average global temperature in an endless cycle. Unfortunately, these increasing temperatures will go on and on until after we are gone, when the Earth can finally correct 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 global warming becomes a runaway train of ever-increasing average global temperature lasting for centuries or longer.
Humanity's total 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 global warming 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 tipping point and losing all meaningful control of our global warming future.
This extinction emergency creates a series of compelling 600 trillion dollar questions hanging in the air: (600 trillion dollars plus is the minimum estimate for the total global warming damage costs that will occur if some of us manage to 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 threat level? (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 escalating global warming 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 global warming extinction emergency will wreak its havoc on almost everyone.
The current global warming threat is extreme because:
- Its consequences are already intensifying in severity, frequency, and scale and will soon begin doing so suddenly, radically more intensely, and finally, exponentially.
- Its tipping points will continue to be crossed at faster and faster rates. These crossed tipping points will produce more heat increases even faster, as well as massive climate, biological, and human system instability, chaos, and 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 that 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 425-450 ppm tipping point, the extinction threat becomes near-certain. Passing the carbon 500 and 600 ppm tipping points 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. Over the coming decades, the accumulated destruction caused by global warming 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 threatens their nation and citizens and 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 global warming extinction. Our global warming 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 global warming extinction emergency is not just the greatest disruptor of the 21st century, it is also the ultimate no-win game!
If you are still confused about how crossing global warming 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.)
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The fourth and most dangerous near-total climate extinction tipping point and the fifth phase of runaway global heating could be crossed sometime after 2070.
Welcome to humanity's ultimate near-total extinction vs. total extinction dilemma. In many places on our website, we have laid out the global warming science, which indicates that we are already facing an unavoidable global warming-caused extinction of about half of humanity within our lifetimes.
This extinction event will unavoidably cause the deaths of most of humanity by mid-century. Such a massive die-off will be due to crossing critical global warming tipping points, climate feedback loops, and the combined future consequences of global warming, particularly mass starvation due to global crop failures of the most climate-sensitive crops.
But it can get much worse. If we do not make or come reasonably close to the 2025 global reduction targets for our global fossil fuel use, we will also face the beginning stages of a possible total extinction event.
A total extinction event could begin as early as 50-70 years in the form of very high average global temperature and very high atmospheric carbon levels of about carbon 750 ppm, which will support initiating the final stages of the runaway-global heating process.
The final stage, runaway global heating, describes the circumstances in which the global climate destabilizes catastrophically and permanently from its original state—similar to what happened on Venus when the planet lost its atmosphere out into outer space. Runaway global warming is thought to have occurred on Venus 4 billion years ago because of a very high carbon-rich atmosphere and exceptionally high average surface temperatures.
The final stage of runaway global warming will create a literal Climageddon meltdown where nothing will survive because there will be no atmosphere. This total extinction event will enter its first phase as soon as our average global temperature rises at or above 5- 6 degrees Celcius.
Somewhere at a 5-6 degree Celcius increase in average global temperature, added to the massive additional tipping point of releases of methane from coastal deposits and permafrost, will quickly further skyrocket atmospheric carbon levels and average global temperatures to new levels faster than at any previous time in humanity's history. This will also trigger, initiate and accelerate the final phases of runaway global warming.
Here is how this happens. At a 5-6 degree Celcius temperature increase, the coastal deposits and permafrost begin releasing methane at exponentially higher rates, or in other words, the "methane timed bomb" goes off.
This will take us from the 5-6 degree Celcius atmospheric carbon level of 500-600 parts per million (ppm) far too quickly to the atmospheric carbon levels of carbon 800 ppm, carbon 1,000 ppm, carbon 1,200 ppm, and even to carbon 1,600 ppm and beyond. (Our climate was stable for hundreds of thousands of years at about carbon 270 ppm.) We are currently at about carbon 420 ppm. (The recent carbon 270 to 415 ppm increase occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which was powered by burning fossil fuels.)
In addition to the methane time bomb there is a permafrost and carbon time bomb which also is going to make things a lot worse a lot faster than we have previously predicted. Click here to watch a short Public Broadcasting Service video that explains the permafrost and carbon time bomb.
The Final Lose/Lose Shocker: We may not survive even the first 2 tipping points if our politicians and governments do not immediately work together and mass mobilize to achieve the 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets
There are other hyper-critical factors to be carefully planned for in the nightmare carbon 500 and 600 ppm global warming scenarios we are already facing in our not-too-distant future. As if the proceeding was not enough to convince any rational individual that they need to do everything within their power to get their governments to come as close to the 2025 reduction targets as is possible to slow and lessen global warming so they can survive a bit longer, there is yet more terrible news.
As global warming worsens toward passing more of the above levels of tipping points, we will also have to deal with ever-escalating humanity and civilization-ending chaos, instabilities, and realities such as the following scenarios:
Scenario 1: Nuclear Reactor Meltdown. Once temperatures rise 4 degrees Celcius (in about 22-42 years and at about the carbon 500 ppm level), nuclear reactors found within global warming unsafe zones between the 45th parallel north and south will no longer be safe. They will no longer be able to be kept secure or maintained by functioning governments as global warming worsens.
If these nuclear reactors go critical and meltdown without stable and secure maintenance, it will not matter where you migrate to in the world. At 4 degrees Celcius, the combined consequences of global warming will cause most of the world's weakest governments to collapse as well as many stronger governments.
If nuclear reactors are melting down in many areas of the world where there are collapsed governments is far-fetched, consider that we have had the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in Russia and the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan. These were both stable governments with extensive precautions, security, and maintenance people to ensure this would never happen.
Worse yet, once temperatures rise to 5 degrees Celcius (in about 43-53 years and at about the carbon 600 ppm level), nuclear reactors will be melting down everywhere because even the strongest countries will now be collapsing. This means that no location or deep bunker will be safe from the continuous massive radiation fallout from hundreds of Chernoby-like nuclear reactors melting down. Once these reactors go critical, they will spew deadly radiation for centuries to thousands of years! (Currently, there are about 420 nuclear reactors used to generate power in the world today. There are also about 200 research reactors.)
Unfortunately, this same kind of nightmare holds true for all biological or chemical weapons or toxic chemicals stored in any areas with collapsing or collapsed governments. Once those areas are abandoned, lawless, or in chaos, these toxic commodities will either be seized for weaponization or will slowly leak out and poison areas far beyond their original locations. Scenario 1 is a no-win everyone dies eventually scenario because there are no bunkers existing that can keep people safe for centuries to thousands of years from these threats!
Scenario 2: Welcome to World War III. We could easily enter into a global warming-caused neat-total extinction event without the final runaway global heating near-total extinction tipping point being crossed. This can easily occur as global average temperatures reach anywhere from a 2+ to 4 degrees Celcius increase.
At those increased temperature levels, there will be increasing mass starvation and a mass migration of desperate climagees (climate refugees.) To survive, countries in the many unsafe zones between the 45th parallel north and the 45th parallel south will demand land and resources from those countries in the safer zones. Regional and international conflicts and wars will break out over the safer land areas and remaining food and other resources.
These wars will be of ultimate desperation between the nations in safe and unsafe areas. They will undoubtedly include chemical, biological, and even tactical nuclear weapons. Any weapons available by the desperate nations or groups will be used to force those governments in the global warming safer zones to open their borders to the billions of "migrate or die" desperate climagees.
Because there will not be enough resources available in the safer zones to support the billions of climagees, the most vicious wars the world has ever seen will likely be fought over the safest remaining areas on Earth in what will likely be humanity's desperate last fight for survival! If this occurs, as it is likely it would, it is doubtful anyone will survive this hellish new nuclear, biological, and chemical World War III.
Scenario 3: Migration Lotteries that Won't Work Well Enough. Critical large-scale food production above the global warming safer 45th parallel north or below the 45th parallel south will be highly limited. This food crisis will be because of the soil quality, and the lower seasonal sunlight levels will be grossly inadequate for using traditional or existing food production methods.
We will not be able to grow enough food for the desperate billions of climagees migrating to these safer areas. Somehow the governments of the world will try to find a way to cooperate and fairly and wisely limit how many people can occupy the limited safer zones and still be fed. Trying to limit the number of desperate climagees who can inhabit the few remaining global warming safer zones by force or special lottery will be beyond difficult.
Any such action will in itself, create unimaginable social chaos, panic, and conflict that will keep those living in the global warming safer zones under continuous threat. At best, because of the nuclear reactors, toxic weapons, and the coming border wars, anyone living in those limited, safer zones will only have temporary relief.
Scenario 4: Lack of Genetic Diversity. If you do not allow enough genetically diverse individuals from the global warming unsafe zones to migrate, there will not be enough genetic diversity to survive the waves of new diseases that will burn through the far north or far south. These new diseases will emerge because of thousands-of-year-old unknown and known pathogens being increasingly released from the melting permafrost (which humanity has never seen before and has no immunity to.) Additionally, these safer global warming zones will also be under threat from new pathogens or existing pathogens that are always mutating or spreading because of the breakdown of health services as the world tumbles toward global warming mass extinction. Only adequate genetic diversity will guarantee that at least someone will survive. And,
Scenario 5: Our Inability to Move Infrastructure Fast Enough. For any of us to survive similarly to what we are used to, the world's critical infrastructure needed for a functioning modern civilization must be moved to the safer far north or far south zones within the next 5-15 years. To do this, we must wisely use whatever relative political, economic, and social stability that remains. (These safer zones most generally exist above the 45th to 55th parallels north or below the 45th to 55th parallels south.)
This means that to save even a small percentage of humanity, we should already be moving critical industries like medical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, etc. The bad news is that this is not happening as well. This infrastructure move also involves moving administrative, policing, and other social structures into the limited "Goldilocks" global warming safe zones.
From the above additional five scenarios, even the most optimistic person will recognize nothing will save them other than only temporarily. From the totality of everything they are facing, they will also realize that it has come down to this final simple truth --- we either cooperate and work together to meet the 2025 targets or we die together.
We are no longer in only an emergency to prevent global warming from getting worse. We are no longer in only an emergency to prevent global warming mass extinction.
We are in an all-out war to prevent total human, animal, and biological extinction and economic, social, and political chaos and collapse. As long as we keep thinking about gradually managing the vague threat of "climate change," we are focusing on the wrong target.
We will fail in preventing our own extinction. Our governments need to shift their focus to meeting the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets at all costs! This new focus is the only way to slow global warming mass within our lifetimes and prevent near-total extinction. (The specific action steps needed to get our governments to meet the 2025 targets are found within Part 3 of the Job One Plan.)
If we fail, no wealthy individual, corporation, or nation will be able to use its wealth to escape the instability, chaos, collapse, and extinction!
From what you have read so far, you can see that we are in a no/win game if we do not get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, but there are always those wealthy and arrogant individuals, corporations, and nations who will believe their wealth will insulate and save them from what is coming. Here is what they will face in the future that should convince them that this is a no-win game for them as well.
In spite of wealthy individuals and corporations already buying land and facilities in safer northern countries, they will not be safe there either. The mass migrations of desperate, aggressive, and armed climagees (climate refugees) and national armies will eventually overrun any and all border security measures. These locked-out climagees will angrily take their fair share of what's left and severely punish anyone who they even remotely believe had any significant part in letting this horrific global warming meltdown and catastrophe occur either by commission or omission.
Eventually, even the private security companies of the ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations hired to protect their compounds in the safer zones will eventually turn against their affluent bosses, realizing that they now live in a late-phase Climageddon Scenario world, where only firepower and military-style training determine temporary ongoing survival, final ownership, and safety. Worse yet, and worth repeating, the climagee survivors of the most painful and devastating catastrophe in human history who breakthrough into the safer zones will be so angry and traumatized they will seek a horrible vengeance on everyone and anyone they hold responsible for either causing or contributing to the catastrophe, or for failing to act when they reasonably could have slowed or prevented the worst of it.
In their unimaginable anger and pain, some of the remaining climagee survivors who desperately fight their way into the remaining temporarily safe zones and, like some survivors of the Holocaust, will relentlessly hunt down anyone who they believe knew about the escalating global warming extinction emergency and had the influence or resources to address it, but did not. Those individuals and corporations of great wealth will most certainly lose all of their power and their resources in the massive globalized backlash of anger and punishment that will be directed toward them.
There will be no place on earth or Swiss bank that will be able to save them and their assets from what will be viewed by the survivors as justifiable punishment for their gross global warming crimes of omission or commission against the survival of the whole of humanity.
Things will be even worse for wealthy corporations or individuals or nations who act in ways to profit from the escalating global warming catastrophes, real estate and market crashes, and the coming other 20 worst consequences as they are unfolding. When those wealthy individuals or corporations are identified by the enraged climagee survivors for their unconscionable commissions and omissions, it is highly likely that ALL of their wealth will be removed from them as well as from all of their trusts, secret bank accounts, businesses and all of their heirs for their crimes against humanity and the future. It is highly likely that such responsible individuals, corporate executives, and politicians will be put into hard labor camps for the rest of their natural lives.
Please do not mistake that the Job One organization is promoting any form of an illegal individual climagee survivor or group vengeance against wealthy corporations, individuals, or nations in any way whatsoever or at any time! All we are disclosing here is these are the most probable and natural human anger reactions by surviving individuals who have suffered unthinkable consequences and the pain of probably losing everyone and everything they have loved.
Our organization promotes and believes only in the peaceful execution of fair and equitable justice by impartial individuals, properly constructed courts, and the rule of law. As an organization, we hold that what is transpiring now (allowing global warming to worsen to near-extinction levels beyond recovery for all but a few in less than centuries) is ultimately a matter of ignorance.
Global warming is incredibly difficult to understand in the first place, but the ignorance of personal greed or excessive comforts being valued over the common well-being of society makes solving this challenge even worse. We only mention the highly probable outcomes for those ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations who act to make matters worse or fail to act when they should have acted to educate about the problem and in the hope that through this educational warning, the ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations will wake up that this is the ultimate no-win game even for them, and that we should never go down such a dark path.
As if the previous was not enough, the fate of those wealthy individuals and corporations who migrate to the temporarily safer global warming zones near the 45th parallel north or south will also have to deal with and solve the following devastating problems, some of which have been mentioned earlier.
At some point, even the world's 1% wealthiest individuals, corporations, and nations will recognize their money and power won't save them from the accelerating climate extinction monster. They will realize that we either cooperate and work together or die together. Click here to see our program to reach the 1% to get them to act by helping them realize the horror, suffering, financial loss, death, and the physical, emotional, and spiritual traumas that will be experienced and will continue to grow as global warming and climate change accelerate will be physically and emotionally wholly unbearable to the point that life will not be worth living!
They will eventually understand that the consequences of our current out-of-control global warming will last from centuries to thousands of years, and no one can survive all of the previously listed consequences even for one century with our existing technology.
The REAL crisis, challenge, and ultimate climate change question for our collective and individual future is...
"How do we prevent a global warming-caused near-total extinction event from occurring while we are simultaneously dealing with an unavoidable mass extinction event, which is already occurring?"
The above is the most important global warming question that no politician or global warming education organization is currently honestly addressing! Yet, there is no more critical question for the survival of humanity that must be faced and managed, or there will be no more humanity!!
This is the central question at Job One for Humanity which we are facing and managing in an honest, adult manner. In facing the global warming emergency over the last 11 years, we have been continually forced to create and update a science-based remedial plan that, if honestly executed, has a reasonable probability of preventing the neat-total extinction of humanity.
This new plan is ultimately practical in that it also helps individuals make the critical emergency preparations and adaptions needed to deal with our steadily unfolding mass extinction process while also still promoting all of the key actions that must be done by our governments to prevent the near-total extinction of humanity.
What is also essential to keep in mind when you are considering the four global warming tipping points, mass extinction or near-total extinction, is that a mass extinction event is already unfolding. And it is accelerating at a continually accelerating pace, which will come to full realization throughout the next 30-50 years.
The great news of the Job One Plan to better manage the global warming extinction emergency is that...
1. if we can get our governments to act effectively on this emergency and get close to the 2025 targets, those of you who start preparing and adapting now should be able to survive and thrive much longer through what most of humanity will not.
2. The only way to solve the dilemma of preventing a runaway global heating-caused near-total extinction event from occurring while we are also simultaneously dealing with an unavoidable mass extinction event that is already occurring, is to begin the Job One Plan action steps that fit with your current circumstances!
Click here to overview the 4 Parts of the Job One for Humanity Plan to resolve the global warming emergency and prevent near-total extinction. Here you can learn what you can do to protect your family, business, and nation during the unfolding mass extinction event while at the same time helping to execute the most effective governmental actions required to resolve our extinction emergency.
If you want to review additional climate science on why about half of humanity will go extinct by mid-century, click here. We want you to have all of the science and analysis behind our half of humanity going extinct by mid-century statements. Hence, you will know that the many painful and difficult changes you will soon need to make on the Job One Plan B are genuinely warranted.
Please keep reading. The next sections will help motivate you to take the best possible actions in spite of all the bad news...
The hard facts for why we must press on and meet or get as close to the 2025 targets as possible despite all the above challenges
If we do get close to the 2025 targets, as much as 50% of humanity will suffer and die due to starvation over a relatively short period (1-2 decades.) As horrible as much as 50% of humanity, as well as a lot of animals and biological life, suffering and dying is, this outcome is still far better than having most of humanity die by mid-century, or even all of humanity suffer and die if we fail to reach or come very close to the 2025 targets.
There are three things we can always be sure of during this global warming extinction emergency. In spite of all of the challenges and adverse global warming outcomes that are possible and discussed above, the single constant truth for the best possible outcome for humanity is that; the faster and more we reduce global fossil fuel use toward meeting or getting as close as possible to the 2025 targets:
a. the more people that will survive longer to carry on humanity, life, and our beautiful civilization into the future (See Parts 3 and 4 of the Job One Plan for how to do this.)
b. the surviving future generations will suffer far less from an ever-increasing sequence of escalating global warming consequences and catastrophes, and
c. we will "buy" ourselves more time to prepare and adapt to what we can no longer avoid (see the global warming Plan B and survival kit here.)
More people surviving longer and more people having time to get themselves, their families, and their businesses prepared for what is coming is an undeniable good, particularly when you weigh it against the unavoidable consequences of doing nothing or failing to make the needed sacrifices to get global warming under control.
Special Update of 3.5.24:
Well before we reach humanity's predicted climate change-driven mass extinction by about 2050, the likelihood that humanity will destroy itself near-totally in much larger multi-regional or global conflicts before 2050 is exceptionally high. Here's why.
After we have crossed our last chance atmospheric carbon 450 ppm threshold and tipping point, humanity's mass extinction by about 2050 will be driven mainly by starvation, mass migrations, and localized conflicts. But there is also an exceptionally high probability of much larger conflicts occurring due to climate change's many accelerating secondary consequences.
These secondary consequences include intensifying smaller-scale localized resource conflicts, which will also create much larger-scale national, international, and global conflicts.
The many extinction-accelerating secondary consequences of climate change are described fully about 1/2 way down this page. We strongly recommend reading the secondary consequences of climate change because it will help you to viscerally and intimately understand climate change's secondary consequence-driven coming suffering and death.
(Click here also to learn why human extinction by about 2050-2070 might be only near-total extinction, not the far worse total extinction, but only if we do not keep our atmospheric carbon levels below the carbon 450 parts per million. level.)
This update means that it is critical to get started immediately on the Job One Plan so you, your family, and your local community will survive and thrive through the many hardships we now face.
Why All is Not Yet Hopeless!
While a global heating consequence-driven near-total extinction is probable, a total extinction is not probable or realistic because of the combination of natural and human system counteractions.
If we stay below or very close to Carbon 450 ppm, we will be better able to keep near-total human extinction closer to its lower levels (saving 25-50% of humanity.)
If you have not done so already, please click here for this full explanation of why there is appropriate hope for as much as half of humanity.
Click here to see what we must do to save ourselves and the future.
We can't escape experiencing a Great Global Die-off followed by a Great Global Collapse of about half of humanity by mid-century. But post-2050, if we learn our climate (and other lessons), humanity's remaining survivors could experience the many positive possibilities of a Great Global Rebirth. While there will be much unavoidable suffering and death that we can no longer escape, there are still many possible benefits for the lucky and wise survivors who could create a world we ALL would want to live in.
At this point, you have read a lot of terrible climate and global heating news. It is now essential to balance all this bad news with more appropriate good news and the honest hope provided by the many positive possibilities of the Great Global Rebirth.
Click here to learn more about the many positive possibilities of fixing global heating and the Great Global Rebirth. This benefits link leads to the most read page on our website, viewed over 2 million times.
Please see these additional links for more good news and an appropriate and rational hope:
1. To see some additional interesting and important benefits and positive perspectives on the many challenges before us, told as a narrative, please click here. You will be glad you did!
2. For a powerful video that we highly recommend for emotional and spiritual support due to global warming or environmental, or emotional upset, click here.
3. Click here for everything you would like to know about the possibilities of a post-Great Die-off and post-Great Collapse --- Great Global Rebirth.
4. This critical page contains proven techniques for processing any difficult climate emotions.
Conclusion
(Read this if you are discouraged or you don't believe we can get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.)
As the research and analysis verification links in this document reveal, there is no longer such a thing as a program of gradual fossil fuel reduction being a viable alternative. We squandered that option with our last six decades of procrastination, denial, and delay in effectively reducing our global fossil fuel use.
Crossing the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold and tipping point brings about:
1. unavoidable rising temperatures for many decades,
2. crossing more dangerous global heating tipping points and feedback loops even faster, and
3. a recovery process that will take hundreds to thousands of years.
Letting atmospheric carbon go over the 425-450 ppm tipping point is not only insane, but it is also unconscionable under any rationalization!
Because of our lost six decades of denial and delay, what we need to do now will need to be radical, painful, and costly. That is now the price of our future if, we want to have as many people as possible survive.
Don't be fooled. This emergency is not far off in the future.
This emergency is not a "get to it later" problem for your children in their later life. It will directly affect both you and your children within your lifetimes.
From now until 2025, if we are not close to reaching our life-critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, we will know that we are locked in to the path of high probability of near-total extinction. If that happens, we will be forced to see if we can save and salvage any livable future for humanity for the second half of this 21st century and for the centuries to follow.
We do not often engage in conversations about the mass or near-total extinction of our species, but now is the time to do so. Failure to get close to the 2025 reduction targets means the destruction of far too much of humanity is on-the-line --- within our lifetimes! That is precisely what we at Job One mean when we say we are in a "runaway global heating extinction emergency."
Right now, this self-made suicidal tragedy is already affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world. Over the next 10 to 20+ years, it's just going to get worse even faster, affecting billions.
Most people do realize that mass human, animal, and biological extinction within their lifetime is unthinkably horrible. What they do not realize is that the global warming catastrophes and dying will start long before this extinction process runs its full course. Within the next decade or two, we will begin seeing a significant and massive acceleration of runaway global heating disasters, catastrophes, and deaths.
These disasters will continue to increase in frequency, severity, and scale in an oscillating pattern where the oscillation of these weather extremes becomes worse and worse and occurs at closer and closer intervals. Long before this global heating-fueled mass extinction reaches its peak, our economic, political, and social systems will experience widespread chaos and collapse.
The coming suffering is unimaginable and not comparable with anything in human history. If you can imagine the worst possible hell on Earth, you would be adequately envisioning our unsurvivable future if we fail to get close to the 2025 targets.
Yes, we know it is a BIG ask of you to work on getting our politicians to act, but what is the alternative? How else will we ever get our politicians to do the right thing to save the many beautiful creations of our civilization and much of our planet's life?
Isn't your life and the lives of everyone and everything you love worth the effort and sacrifice of doing this now rather than all of us suffering slowly until most of us are dead --- simply because we are too distracted or too busy and miss our last opportunity to act, (which is getting our governments doing the only thing that will save us in time, getting close to the radical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets?)
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More good climate and global heating news
1. At this point, we recommend that you click here and watch this 4 Minute Global Warming Video by Greta Thunberg given at the United Nations on September 23, 2019. It may help you to understand and feel the seriousness of the global warming-caused mass extinction emergency we now face.
2. To prevent mass human extinction within our lifetimes, we must all stay calm and carry on. We must also get the world's politicians to act because we are not safe or secure until they do!
In the priority order given below, we must come together in action to take the following three life-critical action steps before it is too late:
a. if you can directly influence any politicians, get them to understand this emergency and then execute the critical 2025 global fossil fuel reducing actions (found prioritized in Part 3 of the Job One Plan.)
b. if you have any direct or indirect connections to the world's elites (ultra-wealthy corporations, individuals, celebrities, philanthropies, etc.,) get these elites to recognize this emergency is a no-win game for them as well.
Help them realize that no amount of money, power, or fame will save them in the long run. Once they understand this, many of them will use their powerful direct influence on the world's politicians to get them to get the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets achieved on time. (Please see Part 4 of the Job One Plan for help with this step.)
c. while doing a and b above as individuals and as businesses as best as you can, meet the critical fossil fuel reduction targets listed above and as described in the fossil fuel reduction actions found in Part 2 of our Job One Plan.
No matter what and. in every circumstance we face, the following still holds true. The more and faster we reduce global fossil fuel use, the more individuals who will survive longer and the more individuals who will suffer less
The big remaining question is...
are you going to do your urgently needed part to make these last chance fossil fuel reductions happen?
Your and your children's immediate future depends upon the choices you make right now about how to deal with this life and death emergency.
Please stop being fooled by the fossil fuel lobbyist-funded illusion that there is ANY time left to make gradual or comfortable fossil fuel reductions! Only the radical 2025 fossil fuel reductions described in this document will slow down the coming global warming consequences enough to have any fair chance of preventing mass human extinction within our lifetimes.
And, we will either succeed together, or we will die together!
At this point, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed by what you have read and the enormity of the challenge of what we must do to survive. You may believe that the level of reductions required is impossible. You may also believe the task is so enormous with such a low probability of success, why even try.
The following story should help you to begin to deal with those ideas and emotions.
The wise general
A wise Chinese general was cornered at the banks of a large river by an opposing army at least 20 times larger than his own. His only means of escape was to get his army across the river before they were attacked. This general had also previously placed enough boats on the bank of the river for escape with his army should that need arise.
As the larger army approached, pushing the smaller army closer to the river, this general gave the order to his most trusted lieutenants to rush to the boats and burn them. When his army saw their only means of escape was being destroyed, they became wildly angry and charged toward the general. The army demanded to know why their trusted general had burned their escape boats and condemned all of them to certain death at the hands of a vastly superior army.
The general calmly said, “We will win this battle or we will die. There is no other alternative and no escape.”
His army now knew their only option was victory or death. Filled with such clarity and single-mindedness of purpose, they fought with such reckless intensity, they defeated the opposing army 20 times their size.
Now that you better understand the rapidly approaching extinction consequences of our global warming extinction emergency from the science and analysis in the links above, you too should no longer retain any illusion of any long-term escape for you or your family, business, or nation from immense suffering and likely extinction --- if we do not deal with the reality of this emergency.
What you also may not have realized yet, is that our 35-year failure to have previously started effective fossil fuel usage reductions means that we too, in effect, have already burned our escape boats! Because of this, like the Chinese army, we either win, or we die.
This is the perilous and sad point that we have come to because of our inaction and ineffectiveness in addressing global warming and the required fossil fuel reductions for almost 35 years.
The good news is if we act wisely cooperatively and immediately to radically cut fossil fuel use to the above targets, humanity and civilization will have a chance to continue.
So what do you have to lose? What rational alternative do you have than to act immediately to radically reduce your personal fossil fuel use? What legitimate excuse is there for you not to help us get our governments to enforce the required radical fossil fuel reductions by the necessary deadlines and that only governments can achieve?
The reality is, that failure is no longer a conscionable option.
There is a fifth tipping point that few are willing to talk about, 2025-2030 "migrate or die" tipping point
If we miss our last chance 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, and if you live in a global warming unsafe zone, you will need to migrate either before or near 2025 to about 2030 if we are lucky. The global warming safer areas are generally above the 45 parallel north or the 45 parallel south as shown above or below the orange lines in the illustration below.
If we miss the 2025 deadline by a considerable amount, near or around 2025-2030 real estate prices will also begin to drop significantly (or even crash) in some global warming higher-risk areas (from the red Equator line to each of the orange 45-degree lines.) They will also begin to soar in many global warming safer areas.
The reasons for this are:
1. A predictable mass extinction event will be unfolding at a continually accelerating pace and it will come to full realization throughout the next 30-50 years. It will also unfold faster and faster because more extinction-accelerating tipping points will be crossed faster and faster as the carbon ppm levels continue to climb in the atmosphere. This means that you will have less and less time to prepare, adapt, and migrate as the global warming extinction emergency gets worse at faster rates if you do not get started soon.
2. At some point by around 2030, there will have been so many global occurrences of extreme or record-breaking storms, droughts, heatwaves, floods, rain bombs, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, and unseasonable weather, which cause more severe disasters and catastrophes that no intelligent person will be able to continue to deny the evidence of their own eyes or their increasingly painful experiences. At that point, far more people will begin to migrate to the very limited global warming safer areas.
In response to the increased migration pressure, real estate prices will rise rapidly (even skyrocket) in more and more of the limited global warming lower-risk areas.
3. Like what has already happened in Europe with Middle Eastern and African climagees (climate migrants,) nations in the global warming safer areas will either be closing their borders or making immigration so restrictive that fewer and fewer climagees will still be able to migrate much after 2025-2030.
There will be a negative 2025-2030 tipping point for allowing the mass migration of individuals and businesses out of the global warming high-risk zones into the safer zones. Once this tipping point is reached, the safer zones will close down all migration!
It will be unwise to allow yourself to get caught on the wrong side of this perilous 2025-2030 tipping point.
Click here to learn more about the safer (lower risk) and unsafe (higher risk) global warming zones as well as wise global warming migration options.
The most important things to remember on this page!
1. There is only one real global warming deadline and tipping point that is necessary to burn into your mind at this time. Everything depends on what we do with the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets:
a. If we hit the 2025 targets, we could possibly still prevent the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century, but this is highly unlikely.
b. If we miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets by a lot, there will be the extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century.
c. If we do not get very close to the 2025 targets, most of us could go extinct in a near-total extinction event! And,
d. If we miss the 2025 targets by a significant amount, the best we can hope for is that we have cut global fossil fuel usage enough so that we slowed down the extinction processes sufficiently so more of us can live a little longer!
2. If we miss the 2025 targets, no new technology can scale up fast enough to save us! Our ability to maintain any real or meaningful control over this emergency ends just after we breach the carbon 425-450 ppm range in 2025.
3. It is the pure physics and mathematics of global warming temperature dynamics that will take over after we have gone over the carbon 386 ppm climate cliff.
4. If we do not make the 2025 targets, our last chance and the final window opportunity to effectively control our own destiny regarding preventing even worse extinction level tipping points from being crossed literally closes! If we go over the carbon 425-450 ppm tipping point, the worst consequences of global warming will not only increase in severity, frequency, and scale, they will also come at us faster and faster. Eventually, everything we depend upon in an organized society for our survival becomes so unstable that an organized society can no longer exist. At that not too distant point, we then starve to death, or die in resource scarcity collapses or conflicts or, in "migrate or die" chaos, or in national conflicts.
5. The largest illustration on this page above, the Global Warming and the Climageddon Scenario Cascading Meltdown reflects the unfolding natural progression of ever-worsening consequences, tipping points, and human system processes that will accelerate as global warming continues. These consequences, tipping points, and human systems will also synergetically and cumulatively collide with each other and adversely interact. It is these ever-increasing interactions among and between worsening global warming consequences, tipping points, and human systems that will make each of these things worse faster and faster.
This illustration reflects the core of the final processes that will lead to our mass extinction as well as into global economic, political, and social chaos. Its three levels of global warming interactions (consequences, tipping points, and human systems,) highlight the continuous onslaught of emergencies, crises, and catastrophes that we are already experiencing and which foretell our eventual extinction if we fail to reach the 2025 targets.
6. While you personally can do some things on your own to reduce global warming, there is nothing you can do individually (or even in large groups,) to effectively hit the 2025 targets. It is now the government's responsibility to save us. The 2025 targets can only be achieved by governments working together and immediately issuing new global warming reduction laws and then verifying and enforcing that they are followed to hit the 2025 targets.
7. Not getting very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets is the ultimate no-win game! It is near-total extinction.
8. Escalating global warming is the ultimate no/win game unless we come close to meeting the 2025 targets!
(Many key areas of this document were derived from the Climageddon extinction scenario and countdown document. It breaks down the complex global warming processes at the next level to help prove to you that the technical details above are accurate. If you have not yet read about the six phases of the Climageddon extinction scenario, which will take you level-by-level through the consequence and timetable details as humanity moves ever closer to extinction, we strongly recommend doing do so now by clicking here.)
9. What most people do not understand about global warming tipping points
Most systems like the global warming climate system cannot be easily fixed once you cross a crucial tipping point without a long recovery time and severely high costs. These long recovery periods and high costs are due to:
1. The whole or significant part of the system completely crashing. Some system tipping point crashes are entirely unrecoverable, and others will take hundreds to thousands of years. By the time this system recovers, it's too late, and the damage has already been done.
2. There is so much previous momentum in the system that what you did decades ago is now driving current and future consequences.
3. There is so much inertia in other parts of the system that you can't change in time; you will not be able to prevent the worst global warming consequences from occurring.
What most people have a hard time understanding about global warming is that:
a. there is a finite window of opportunity (realistically until 2025,) where we still have some control of our global warming future, and
b. when you cross critical global warming tipping points, that window of opportunity is gone, usually for centuries to millennia while you are suffering all of the consequences of a crashed system.
To learn more about the 11 key global warming tipping points click here.
10. If you only remember the following things from this page you will understand the core message of this page and our website:
11. The core message of our website is simple and straightforward. If you have not read it already, click here.
12. After reading this article, you definitely will want to read this page. It is the small-picture, detailed overview of the 40 primary and secondary global warming-related consequences that will occur as we cross the four major extinction-triggering climate tipping points below. It will help you get prepared for what is coming.
13. If the climate change emergency is allowed to continue as we are doing now, what you see above IS what will unfold step-by-step and layer by layer. The world's wealthiest individuals, corporations, and nations will lose their wealth and fall.
Eventually, millenniums of human civilization will be lost into a post-collapse new dark age. We will be lucky if there are any human survivors at all. (Click here to see what will happen with the world's wealthiest individuals and corporations if they fail to use their influence to get our governments to act before it is too late!)
14. This page helps explain why we have predicted that about half of humanity will perish from climate change-related primary and secondary consequences by mid-century.
15. It is critical to understand the five phases of runaway global heating and when we cross over into irreversible global heating, which could last for centuries before recovery. Each of the first three phases of runaway global heating pushes us farther into the mass human extinction process and makes recovery or control more unlikely. If we cannot get global heating under control by getting close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets before we get far into phase two of runaway global heating, very few of us will be left (if any.) This is particularly true if we enter phase three. If we enter phase four of runaway global heating, there is little hope left for any human survivors. Finally, phase five of runaway global heating will end all life on earth.
16. Many individual climate tipping points and feedback loops are getting worse considerably faster than predicted. This worsening is a double problem because not only are those climate systems getting worse faster than predicted, the climate systems interconnected to those systems will most likely also get worse faster than predicted because of that interconnection. It is not just one thing getting worse in this scenario. It's one thing making almost everything else it is connected to get worse as well. This linear and nonlinear amplification factor across intra-system and extra-system climate interconnections within the climate as a complex adaptive system is seldom compensated for in computer modeling.
It is not just Job One for Humanity saying these scary things anymore. Hundreds of climate scientists now feel we cannot keep global warming below a 2° C increase. This means that all we can do right now is prepare for and adapt to what's coming. (If needed, click here to review the many reasons why it is highly unlikely we will reach our 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and why we must begin preparing ourselves.)
The above is all you have to remember about global warming and your future. Most of the pages of our website are about showing you the exact science behind these simple statements so that you can always verify what we are saying is true. You can start or continue that verification process here.
Everything for a livable future for humanity depends upon simply not passing beyond the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold!!!
Most people who hear our governments talking about reaching fossil fuel reduction targets between 2040-2060 have no idea if we fail to make the required global fossil fuel reductions over the next 3 to 8 years (from 2025-2031); we are royally screwed!
If we miss the correct, uncensored, and up-politicized 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets by a lot, we will suffer:
1. The unavoidable extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. And,
2. We will bring about phase 2 of irreversible runaway global warming and near-total human extinction by about 2070-2080.
But why do we have to act within this 3-8 year last window of opportunity to fix the climate change emergency? Few understand this survival critical information.
The key reasons that we are almost out of time to prevent the mass and near-total human extinction are as follows:
1. James Hansen, a former NASA climate scientist, said that humanity should be safe if we stayed below an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million (ppm). However, he also said that if we go beyond an atmospheric carbon level of about 386 ppm, we will enter into a state of runaway global heating. If you imagined runaway global heating like a train without brakes rolling down a mountain, which is getting steeper and steeper, you would have a good idea about what we face with the runaway unstoppable and ever-rising temperatures of runaway global heating.
James Hansen also said that if we crossed the carbon 386 ppm threshold, critical climate change tipping points and climate feedback loops would start "stacking." These tipping points and feedback loops would rapidly be continually crossed like falling dominoes. Crossing additional climate tipping points or climate feedback loops is a self-feeding, self-reinforcing, and self-sustaining process! In other words, because of the climate tipping points and feedback loops, runaway global heating would become irreversible in the most practical meaning of the word.
2. Accordingly, we ensure an ever-continuing global temperatures rise if we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm level. Just the carbon 425-450 ppm level by itself would eventually lock in a total increase in average global temperature of about 2 -2.7° Celsius (4° - 4.9° Fahrenheit) from preindustrial levels.
Once we cross the 2° plus Celsius (the carbon 425-450 ppm level,) the widespread extinction-accelerating temperature levels of 3°, 4°, 5°, and even 6° Celsius will also be all but locked in! (According to James Hansen, a carbon 450 ppm level would eventually develop into an average global temperature increase of 6° Celsius (10.8° Fahrenheit) in this century and be the end of human civilization as we've come to know it and near-total human extinction.)
As you can see below, as of June 2022, we were at the hazardous carbon level of 421 ppm We are currently not far from entering the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold where climate change hell breaks loose and for all practical intents and purposes, we lose control of our climate future for many, many decades to centuries.
3. Once we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold level, we also begin triggering many additional climate tipping points and amplifying climate feedback loops at even faster rates! These tipping points and feedback loops will also cause the many primary and secondary consequences of climate change to increase in severity and frequency radically, and they will occur over larger and larger areas.
4. Unfortunately, we have passed phase one of runaway global heating. We are about to enter phase two of runaway global heating. When we enter phase three of runaway global heating (after about 2031,) the primary and secondary climate change consequences will continue to rise exponentially.
5. Once we cross the carbon 425-450 ppm threshold level, runaway global heating becomes all but irreversible for centuries. Only the proven processes of nature over vast amounts of time will be able to slowly reverse the atmospheric carbon pollution and the other consequences of runaway global heating after all of the other key sources of runaway global heating are eliminated.
We finished a spellbinding three-article series in January of 2023 on what happens when you add current climate research (like the above,) climate change extinction tipping point, and feedback loop information into five well-documented studies on the factors that are most likely to bring about global collapse. Those five areas are industrial output, food production, resource availability, population, and pollution. The previous five studies did not include recent climate change research.
The last article in this series has graphs that show how the updated prediction timeframes for the global collapse of these five critical factors have grown significantly shorter when you add climate change consequence factors and timeframes into the other five studies. Click here to go to the first of these three articles. It will also link you to the other two articles. We strongly recommend reading these articles to learn how humanity's global survival timeframes have grown much shorter!
The ultimate and still remaining global warming critical question for every person, business, religion, and the government on Earth
We were grossly unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic despite repeated warnings by our scientists. We are woefully unprepared for the coming global warming extinction emergency and we have once again have ignored the warnings of our scientists.
If we continue to fail to act effectively, we face unavoidable mass human extinction for most of humanity by mid-century and near-total extinction within as little as 50-70 years.
We have already all but lost the battle to avoid global warming mass extinction by our being so far away from hitting the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.
The ultimate remaining global warming question for every person, business, religion, and the government should be most concerned about at this time is:
"Will we, at least, come close enough to the critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets so that humanity can avoid near-total extinction?"
Click here to see where we are today on the Climate Change and Global Warming Doomsday Clock.
If you want to find out what you can do to prevent crossing the last chance 2025 deadline and tipping point, click here to learn more about the Job One for Humanity Plan.
To learn more about what you can do to prevent extinction click the image just above.
Help us get the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction goals met by signing the global warming extinction emergency petition now.
Created by the Job One Research Team
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 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.
Click here if you are a victim of climate change damage or loss and you want to get financial and other forms of restitution for the damages you have suffered.
Discover amazing information, tools, alerts, and promotional benefits for becoming a Job One for Humanity climate change think tank donor/supporter/member by clicking here!
Curious about the many major step-by-step consequences unfolding as we pass through the global warming tipping points described above?
All of the most critical consequences that we will face as individuals, businesses, and nations as we cross the tipping points described above were not listed above. It helps many people to see these critical tipping point consequences that will most affect them written in a simple list form. This simple list will help you know what is coming in what general sequence and, most importantly, for what you will need to be prepared.
If you click the 2025 Global Warming Doomsday clock image below, it will take you to a critical global warming tipping point consequence list and other vital information concerning how our other global problems will affect the global warming emergency and your lives.,
Once you click the image below, we strongly recommend reading the whole page, but if you only want to read the consequence lists, do as follows. First, about 1/2 way down the page, go to the section called, "How global warming will act as the key disruptor, threat amplifier, and multiplier accelerating global collapse."Next, a bit farther down the page, go to "How the Great Global Collapse will likely unfold and how it will affect everyone in its path. These two lists and the whole pages are shocking eye and mind openers!
Putting ALL of the above together as a single unified process
There is a lot of complex climate information listed above. To help you see this page developing from one deadly, multilayered, overarching process called the Climageddon Feedback Loop, click here. This one page will tie all the processes and interconnections above together in a way that will allow you to see the climate nightmare at the level the best global climate researchers see it.
When you understand the Climageddon Feedback Loop, you understand why you should start preparing for the coming climate chaos NOW. You will also understand why climate change researchers who accurately include it in their calculations are terrified and quietly moving their families to safer climate change locations if they are currently in medium to high-risk areas.
Please share these critical nine global warming facts with everyone you can and, please sign this
Global Warming Emergency Petition
And, if you read nothing else from the links above, read this page!
Despite Everything Disheartening that You Have Read Above, the Job One For Humanity organization is NOT an End-of-the-World, all-is-lost organization
Please click here to read our balanced, positive approach toward the monumental challenges we face to avoid extinction and the widespread collapse of our global systems.
Still Feeling Sad, Angry, or Anxious About Global Warming? Here is what to do.
Click this link and start feeling better.
And, if you have not done so already,
after reading the above article, you will definitely also want to read this page. It is a detailed overview of the 80 primary and secondary global warming-related consequences that will occur as we cross the four major extinction-triggering climate tipping points described below.
Click Here Now if You Are Ready to Vote if the Global Fossil fuel Cartel is Guilty of Causing Climate change and Financially Responsible for all Climate change Loss and Damage.
Important technical details for the 2025 targets
It should be noted that many, many climate scientists have had the courage to say we are already well past the point of effectively stopping global warming from reaching a 2 degree Celcius increase in average global temperature (above our pre-industrial temperature levels.) Our average global temperature will reach a 1.5 degree Celcius increase because we have already crossed over the carbon 386 ppm climate cliff. This means that the other mass extinction-accelerating global warming tipping points described on this page will soon be triggered.
In essence, what these "it is already too late" climate scientists are now saying is:
a. All we can do now is prepare for and adapt to the horrible list of consequences described in this article.
b. We will not be able to avoid a mass extinction event and die-off. And,
c. The only thing our governments (not us as individuals) can still do is slow, save, and salvage what we can to still prevent a runaway global heating-driven near-total extinction event. To do this, they need to slow down the accelerating rise in global temperature from the rate that it is now. This will allow more of us to survive a little bit longer to get prepared. (On this page, you will find our Plan B for how to prepare for and adapt to the many consequences we can no longer change.)
d. The global warming extinction emergency is part of a much larger and more dangerous ongoing global collapse process. Click here to read about this more extensive global collapse process, and how the global warming emergency is accelerating it.
e. According to a new 2023 study, the correct climate sensitivity constant is 4.8 degrees Celsius, not the IPCC's 3 degrees Celsius constant used by the IPCC over the last 30-plus years in almost all critical climate change calculations. The new study is called Global Warming in the Pipeline. It is by James Hansen et al. (James Hansen was the climate scientist at NASA, primarily responsible for bringing the climate change emergency globally into the public mind.)
This new and correct 4.8 degrees Celsius climate sensitivity constant amount confirms that climate consequences will be sooner, worse, and far beyond what we are being publicly told. The climate sensitivity constant is used in every major calculation involved in climate change consequence severity predictions, consequence timetables, and discovering the correct global fossil fuel reduction amounts to keep humanity from going extinct.
This corrected 4.8 degrees Celsius corrected climate sensitivity constant also implies that we are already in a hidden worst-case climate change scenario for which humanity is not even remotely prepared.
Our organization, which has done over a decade of extensive research analysis on the global warming emergency and which has created this Doomsday Clock, has also aligned itself with the many climate scientists who have said we are well past the point of effectively stopping global warming from reaching a 2 degree Celcius increase. (On this page you will find the almost two dozen reasons why our organization now also believes that global warming has gone out of our reasonable control and that we will face unavoidable mass extinction with just a few decades.)
If that is our current position, it is only natural to wonder why we have also created and are promoting the Climate Change and Global Warming Doomsday Clock? The answer is simple.
We wanted to promote the extreme urgency of the global warming extinction emergency so that our governments finally begin to significantly reduce global fossil fuel use to at least slow down the current global warming acceleration curve enough to prevent a near-total extinction event. Also, if more people understand the urgency of our emergency, they also will do what they can to slow it down and, they will have more time to prepare for and adapt to the upcoming horrific global warming consequences. As this happens more of humanity and civilization can also survive longer and most importantly, we still have a chance to avoid near-total extinction. It is just that simple! (Click here to see the many effective government actions needed to slow down the near-total extinction nightmare so more of us can survive longer.
For those interested in the most complete timeframes, triggering events, and supplemental information related to when and how the preceding primary and secondary global warming consequences will occur, please see the six unique phases of the Climageddon Extinction Scenario. This is dense reading but well worth the time for those who must know every known warning sign and signal tracking the acceleration of the unfolding mass extinction and collapse. Individuals with significant personal investments, businesses that could be affected, or working in predictive positions at insurance companies, investment banks, or hedge funds are the most frequent readers of the six phases of the Climageddon Extinction Scenario.
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 see most of the published climate research and other summary references reviewed or used for content on this website. This master references listing also includes a description of the analysis process used to develop the facts found on these pages.
Please send this article to politicians and social media all over the world. Ask your politicians what they are doing to prevent the coming mass extinction of most of humanity by mid-century?
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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