Humans could go extinct within 100 years, says renowned scientist

[GliderGuider]

Humans could go extinct within 100 years, says renowned scientist

Are we among the final generations of humans to walk the earth? One Australian scientist says yes, and he's not just another 2012 doomsday believer. Professor Frank Fenner, who announced the eradication of smallpox to the World Health Assembly in 1980, says overpopulation and climate change are just two of many reasons why humans won't survive much more than a century into the future.

In fact, Fenner declines to speak about climate change because he believes there's no use — our fate is sealed.

"Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years," he said in an interview with The Australian. "A lot of other animals will, too. It's an irreversible situation. I think it's too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off."

Thanks to the population explosion and “unbridled consumption”, Fenner says food wars and global droughts will intensify problems like malnutrition and poverty. "Mitigation would slow things down a bit, but there are too many people here already," he says.

Fenner declines to speak about climate change because he believes there's no use — our fate is sealed.
Over the last year I've seen a number of previously outspoken voices falling silent because they've had this same realization.

[dipsydoodle]

1. Hopefully it will work out better next time around.

.

[BeyondGeography]

2. Except he blinks at the end of the article

At the very least, says Fenner, "The grandchildren of today's generations will face a much more difficult world."

What a gap between extinction/our fate is sealed and a much more difficult world. That's not hedging your bets, it's covering every number on the board.

[GliderGuider]

3. Extinction is an emotionally difficult position to hold.

I share Fenner's view - the overwhelming probability is human extinction by 2100, but I always leave some small space open for a miracle to happen. But I don't know if the people who lived through such a "miracle" would consider it a blessing...

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

4. It's the 'enclave' idea.

We've actually got real scientists working on this, although supposedly they're trying to figure out how to stay alive onboard a spaceship for decades on end. But if they can come up with a completely self-sustaining enclosed biome, it would work for humans stuck on a screwed up earth too. I just don't know if even if you could get enough such enclaves built, you could keep a human population with enough people to keep all the tech up to allow them to survive long term while also spending time working to re-terraform the planet.

I just fear slipping into self-absorbed solipsism. I WANT the people who can see what's coming to be spending their time trying every idea out there to try and give us more of a fighting chance, not giving up and becoming sybarites before the inevitable end.

[GliderGuider]

5. Those who stop trying to fix the unfixable don't necessarily become solipsists or sybarites

Last edited Wed May 7, 2014, 12:32 PM - Edit history (1)

In the face of irrevocable devastation to the planet, I recommend a life of service to others and being mindful in all actions. What that entails will be different for each of us. Others may choose to work on what I consider to be forlorn hopes, and that's fine - it's their choice.

We have a one-time opportunity in front of us to practice being adults. I think we should seize it.

[Bigmack]

15. Totally agree NT

[Jim Lane]

6. The irony is that the species causing extinctions is the one least likely to go extinct itself

I'm no renowned scientist, but I see the probability of human extinction as being virtually zero.

It's virtually certain that there'll be widespread suffering and death. Human population will continue to increase, but by 2100 will have decreased to below what it is now. Some areas that we now inhabit will be under water or otherwise uninhabitable. Food will be less abundant (ocean fish die-off, agricultural land becoming less productive or barren).

Nevertheless, the traumatized planet will still be able to support some humans. Some other species will be unable to find the plants they eat, but we can pick up seeds and move them several hundred miles north, to the latitude that's become congenial to them. After we pollute rivers and aquifers, everyone else goes thirsty but we can build desalination plants. If summer high temperatures in warm-weather cities hit 130 degrees Fahrenheit, we can build enclosed air-conditioned areas and never go out except at night when we can provide artificial light, so that we can go about our business without tripping over the corpses of the animals who've died from the heat.

One reason there are now so many (too many) of us is that technology enables us to cope with many different conditions. Humans live in the Arctic, in deserts, in rain forests, in mountain ranges, etc. That will apply to the different conditions that we ourselves are creating.

[cprise]

11. How likely is it that Artic soil will support agriculture?

I don't think its likely at all considering that warming may be too rapid for necessary organisms to take hold and enrich that soil (at least not on the scale of decades). And that land sits in darkness for half the year.

When the ocean food chains collapse to jellyfish or worse, even a fish-heavy Eskimo/Scandinavian diet for a couple million Artic dwellers will seem like an optimistic dream.

[Jim Lane]

12. No question that the planet's carrying capacity will drop

I'm just saying it won't drop to zero.

[cprise]

14. If Greenland's past is any indication

...then I'd say the Precautionary Principle absolutely applies to humans, too. Extinction is definitely a possibility if people are confined to a small rim in the Arctic.

[Jim Lane]

20. I'm no denialist, but "people...confined to a small rim in the Actic" is outlandish

We are nowhere close to that kind of warming in any projection I've seen.

For a quick comparison, I took the U.S. and our immediate neighbor to the north, Canada, and picked the capital of each. Climate data are from Wikipedia for Washington, D.C. and Ottawa. In each city, the hottest month is July, and the average high temperature for July, in degrees Celsius, is:
Washington, D.C. -- 31.3
Ottawa -- 26.5

That means that, with warming of five degrees Celsius, Canada would be the new United States. The impact of a five-degree warming would be disastrous but, worldwide, hundreds of millions of humans would survive even with current technology.

What would be the situation back in Washington? Well, currently, Phoenix, Arizona has an average high July temperature of 41.2 degrees Celsius. So by this admittedly very crude measure, it would take warming of ten degrees Celsius to make Washington as hot as Phoenix is now. At ten degrees we're certainly talking horrific impacts, and I realize that even if you turn on the air conditioner the food still has to come from somewhere, but dire warnings about human extinction seem to me to be so extreme that they hurt rather than help the cause of prompting action on climate change.

[GliderGuider]

22. It's not the averages that kill people, it's the excursions.

A city with an average high temperature of 30C already experiences short-term excursions to 40. Add 5 degrees to the "average", then add another 5 degrees to the amplitude of the excursions (because the weather is getting more variable and extreme), and you're looking at days that boom to +50C. That kills people who are accustomed to temperate climates - a lot of them.

A common mistake is thinking that global warming is a game of averages. It's not, it's about increasing extremes.

[cprise]

31. And the speed at which they (averages and excursions) set in.

There's a world of difference between a 5C increase that occurs over a hundred years, and a 5C increase over a hundred-thousand years.

Jim Lane is assuming that the microbes, flora and fauna that normally live in that higher thermal bracket will just get in their cars and drive to Canada. Even if they did, the soil they find would not be what they're adapted to.

I think that a heated-up Canada could turn into mostly dust-bowl by 2120.

[Jim Lane]

33. No, I'm not making the assumption you impute to me

I wrote above that "we can pick up seeds and move them several hundred miles north" precisely because I'm aware that other species don't have cars.

If a heated-up Canada is indeed mostly a dust bowl by 2120, some people could still live there. My point is simply that there's a big difference between a horrific impact and extinction. For example, the scientist quoted by NickB79 in #23 talks about a worst-case scenario in which half the population is in an uninhabitable environment. Even if they all die, that leaves half alive. Even a die-off of about 86% still leaves a billion or so humans. Many of them might be living in underground warrens and subsisting on food grown in vast hydroponics gardens on the surface (yes, grown, not raised, meat being a thing of the past) -- but they'd be subsisting.

I return to the tactical point. As a practical matter, why should we try to convince the public that human extinction is certain, or even likely, or even a significant danger? That just gives the denialists a fatter target to shoot at. I'd be happy if we could convince people that the road we're on leads to mass deaths (possibly even into the billions), plus horrible quality of life for the survivors, plus extinctions of many other species.

[cprise]

34. You'd need a lot more than "seeds". Ecosystems do not just up and move.

...they are based on many interlocking relationships, most involving the right micro-organisms in the right proportions in order to stay healthy (healthy soil, healthy rivers and lakes, healthy insects). For all we know, an 80-year migration toward the Arctic could net us no more than invasive fungus and e.coli.

For example, the scientist quoted by NickB79 in #23 talks about a worst-case scenario in which half the population is in an uninhabitable environment. Even if they all die, that leaves half alive.

No, that leaves most (or all) of the other half in an extremely precarious environment. In any case, the relative equilibrium of the past 10,000+ years is shattering now, and agricultural/technological civilization might not hold fast under chaotic environmental conditions... its reasonable to assume there will be a problem there when we couldn't develop it in the first place until the climate became cool (e.g. 'big-brain friendly') and stable.

So, without most of the tech we have today, how are humans going to hang on in a climate that is simultaneously warm and deprived of light for 6 months each year *and* also experiencing wider (more violent) weather extremes along with the rest of the globe? Humans are simply not adapted to these conditions.

Unlike GG, I don't buy into the idea that tipping into dangerous warming is a *sure* thing. But at this point its quite likely. I assert that the potential for extreme outcomes (though avertible) does exist and this is further supported with each passing year.

Perhaps the convincing we need to do is not based so much on new reports and data, but on a change in perspective that would lead a person to accept the Precautionary Principle; to put ecology on at least an equal footing with economics.

[NickB79]

23. It's not just the heat, but the humidity, that kills

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/100504HuberLimits.html

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change central estimates of business-as-usual warming by 2100 are seven degrees Fahrenheit, eventual warming of 25 degrees is feasible, he said.

"We found that a warming of 12 degrees Fahrenheit would cause some areas of the world to surpass the wet-bulb temperature limit, and a 21-degree warming would put half of the world's population in an uninhabitable environment," Huber said. "When it comes to evaluating the risk of carbon emissions, such worst-case scenarios need to be taken into account. It's the difference between a game of roulette and playing Russian roulette with a pistol. Sometimes the stakes are too high, even if there is only a small chance of losing."

Steven Sherwood, the professor at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia, who is the paper's lead author, said prolonged wet-bulb temperatures above 95 degrees would be intolerable after a matter of hours.

"The wet-bulb limit is basically the point at which one would overheat even if they were naked in the shade, soaking wet and standing in front of a large fan," Sherwood said. "Although we are very unlikely to reach such temperatures this century, they could happen in the next."

Remember, just because our estimates generally stop at 2100, man-made climate change will keep going for centuries (possibly millennia) into the future.

[GliderGuider]

37. FWIW, I don't think near-term extinction is in the cards either

If we recovered from Toba, we can get past pretty much anything, for quite a while. What I think is much more likely is an undulating, crash-and-recovery decline of the species, one that could reduce our numbers back to a sustainable 10 million or less in a couple of thousand years. Here's a graph of what I think such a process might look like, taken from my assessment article on sustainability.



As I say in the article, in a scenario like this it wouldn't take much of a problem to bump the decline from 99.9% to 100%.

[LouisvilleDem]

7. Food Wars?

Please. The countries that suffer from a lack of food and the greatest population growth rates have puny militaries. If they were stupid enough to start a "food war", it wouldn't last long. I think it was Napoleon who said "an army marches on its stomach". It's as true now as it was then.

[GliderGuider]

8. How about "Large Scale Food Conflicts"?

Armies in better-off countries may well be deployed to drive back waves of food and climate refugees, after all. And civil wars triggered by food prices have already happened, as in Egypt. Much of the impetus of the Arab Spring was rising food prices.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

9. ALL of the impetus for the coup that overthrew the MB was food.

Egypt was starving, quite literally. Their central bank had been spending its reserves to pay for importing food, because the economy was moping along at a very low level. Egypt is hugely dependent on tourism, and post the victory of the MB that collapsed.
I don't know if its come back, haven't checked. But Egypt is the canary in the coal mine: they are in a desperate situation. They don't grow enough to feed themselves, and they pay for their imports via tourism.
Anyway, you know my thoughts from before on the bigger question: the next 10 to 20 years are going to look really bad. After that, it'll get better faster than most realize right now. It'll be a cliffhanger, but I do think we'll make it to the other side more or less OK, which is not to say there won't be some dire stuff going on between now and then. But then the period from 1914 to 1945 was no cakewalk for the human race, and I don't think we're in for a period quite as bad as that was. It'll feel that way at times, I'm sure.

[LouisvilleDem]

10. Food is cheaper than Soldiers

Why send troops to "drive back waves of food and climate refugees" when you can just give them food? It's cheaper and it makes you look better.

[GliderGuider]

13. Why send troops?

Because if you don't, the refugees will stay.

[Bigmack]

16. And to "just send food,"

you have to have the EXRA food…...

[GliderGuider]

18. Good point. Even regions with excess supplies will want to sell them, not give them away.

I expect humanitarian aid will become harder and harder to get as the years go by. Bullets however are never in short supply...

Here's a look at the world's success so far in meeting the Millennium Development Official Development Assistance goal of 0.7% of GNI. In the face of this performance, and with climate change hitting rich and poor countries alike, the chances of sufficient urgent humanitarian aid being available in a couple of decades is marginal.

[LouisvilleDem]

25. Half of all the food produced gets thrown away

The problem has always been one of distribution, not scarcity.

The world produces plenty of food, it just doesn't produce food that the people who are starving can afford. The bottom line is that the places that export food are almost all first world countries, and their farmers enjoy a standard of living that the poor of the world can't pay for. As a result, farmers sell their food to other people in the first world who throw away about half of it.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20968808

[Maedhros]

29. Things will not always be as they are today.

Food surpluses are not guaranteed to persist.

[LouisvilleDem]

38. Agreed

Things will not always be as they are today. As you say, we might be producing less food. But 40 years from now we could also be producing more food than anyone predicted we could, just like today we are producing more food than Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome ever thought we would. Either way, the biggest error you can make is to assume that nothing will change.

[NickB79]

17. Food shipments aren't a one-time thing though

If, for example, a large percentage of the population of Bangladesh were to start moving into India as the seas rose, giving each Bangladeshi a few bags of rice wouldn't make them stop their migration. At best, it would last the week or two to use up that rice.

Plus, military service often becomes a works program for the government during times of economic instability anyway (to prevent civil unrest by both providing employment to the unemployed and having a large force to control the remaining unemployed), so the cost of military personnel becomes negligible.

[GliderGuider]

19. +1 - Good insight about security as a public works program. nt

[hatrack]

21. Which explains why India has already built a heavily policed wall along their border with Bangladesh

A wall separates much of India and Bangladesh, which share a border that spans more than two thousand five hundred miles. Beginning in 1993, India built the wall to discourage illegal immigration; recently, the photojournalist Gaël Turine spent two years documenting its socioeconomic repercussions. Indian soldiers called the Border Security Force, or B.S.F., heavily guard portions of the wall, and although foreigners and the press are banned from some parts of the border area, Turine gained access with the help of locals, smugglers, and, in one instance, a B.S.F. guard. Over time, he recognized that the wall itself was trivial compared to the long history shared by the people living nearby.

Many of these communities, though divided, have kept the same religious, economic, linguistic, cultural, and familial infrastructures, Turine explained. And, regardless of India’s justifications for the wall and the question of whether these commonalities will remain, Turine has highlighted the basic truth implicit in the construction of any border. “Whatever name we call it—‘wall,’ ‘barrier,’ or ‘fence,’?” he says, “its goal is the same: to restrict any human and geographic relation between ‘us’ and ‘them.’?”

EDIT

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/01/gael-turine-india-border-wall.html#slide_ss_0=1









Almost 4,100 kilometers long, in fact . . .

[LouisvilleDem]

24. Depends on the time frame

In the case of people migrating because of sea level rise, you aren't talking about a lot of people moving all at once. Yes, 17 million people (I think that is the number) in Bangladesh will eventually lose their land, but when you stretch those numbers out over 20-30 years it stops looking unmanageable. In a world with 7 billion people, a million people picking up and moving over the course of a year is hardly noticeable.

[phantom power]

26. extinction is nature's way of telling you to slow down

[qazplm]

27. baloney

it's this kind of over the top hyperbole that makes convincing folks of the real danger of climate change so hard.

It's pretty darn hard to make an ominvore go extinct. Short of a really big asteroid, there's not much that can make mankind go extinct in 100 years. Even if you added 20 degrees to the global temperature, mankind would not go extinct. He'd be limited to very narrow ranges, and it would knock him back to the stone age probably, but there would still be arable land and water in certain spots, and still be plants and animals to eat.

[hunter]

30. It's already here, people are dying now.

I'd speculate the Americas have a lower population because of a really big asteroid strike or near miss. Or maybe something else equally awful.

The human population density maps of this planet are... interesting.

The human species that survives the squeeze will be smarter than we are, or stupid.

Who will win? Brains or rapid reproduction?

People are animals. We are not exceptional. Innovative species come, and then they go.

[GliderGuider]

35. Here's some mustard for your baloney.

This is a quote from a poster on another blog, reposted here with permission. It explains the reasoning behind the "hyperbole" - the predicted collapse is already underway, and there is no end in sight.

People have known about what rising CO2 emissions would lead to for decades now.

I read a paper thirty years ago which gave all the relevant details re rising sea levels, ocean acidification, dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and glaciers, more frequent extreme weather events, desertification, dying forests which burn, melting permafrost releasing methane, etc, etc.

It was all predicted, it is all happening.

The only thing that was unexpected was that nothing would be done. It was expected that international action would be taken. That did not happen.

The Arctic ice went much faster than the models predicted, and now everything is happening faster than predicted, and it’s obvious that NO effective action is going to be taken.

There is a 40 year time lag between cause and effect. What we have now, is the result of emissions 40 years ago, when they were much lower. They have risen rapidly ever since and continue rising faster then ever.

Why is no action taken ? Why will we get NTE (near term extinction) ?

Because we get to 2 deg C then 3, 4, 5, 6 and upward, and the whole global biosphere collapses, so that it is uninhabitable.

There is nothing to eat, because crops do not grow, there is nothing in the ocean except dinoflagellates and jellyfish, the air is toxic from anoxic oceans filled with rotting material and blooms of bacteria giving off hydrogen sulphide which drifts across the land.

The nuclear plants all melt down so radio active crap rains down everywhere for centuries, sea levels rise for centuries, there is chaotic climate for 80 – 100,000 years, with completely unforeseeable extreme cold, winds, droughts, etc.

People seem to think that they will survive this, as a bottleneck, and emerge into some sort of utopia, or some sort livable future.

But this is the fastest most extreme change in the geological history of the planet, barring impacts from Space and Supervolcanoes.

It’s a mass extinction event. There isn’t a techno fix. Life does not flourish again for 10 million years or so after such an event.

The reason we cannot avoid this, is because we’d have to stop doing what we are doing, that is Industrial Civilization.

Nobody living in Industrial Civilization really wants to do that, because they lose all the benefits and probably die very quickly. Nobody will accept the cost, nobody will vote for it, it’s politically and economically impossible.

All leaders, elites, corporations, banks, all the infrastructure, all the jobs, all the scientists, everybody, has a vested interest in keeping the status quo as long as possible.

But that condemns us all to NTE.

We’re over the edge and in freefall.

[ZombieHorde]

28. Haha, suckas! nt

[DreamGypsy]

32. Yeah, Prof. Fenner attempted to exterminate the Australian rabbit population deliberately...

...and how well did the myxo work? From Wikipedia, Rabbits in Australia:

In 1950, after research was conducted by Frank Fenner, myxoma virus was deliberately released into the rabbit population, causing it to drop from an estimated 600 million to around 100 million. Genetic resistance in the remaining rabbits allowed the population to recover to 200-300 million by 1991.

Yes, the article title is "Humans could go extinct within 100 years" and. yes, the referenced article in The Australian quotes Frank as saying

""We're going to become extinct," the eminent scientist says. "Whatever we do now is too late."

Both statements are true: At some point in time Homo sapiens will be extinct. It could happen within a hundred years.

But more likely, as with the bunnies, humans will adapt to anthropogenic climate change. Sure, the human population could drop to...oh, let's just say... 1.17 billion. Then, with appropriate adaptations, the human population could recover to 2.5 - 3.5 billion by, oh, let's say 2345. And then, in the best circumstances, a few millennia will pass before the next crisis...and then 10's of millennia before the next...and, unless some generation gets their act together sending populations beyond the solar system, or maybe beyond the galaxy...the sun will nova, or we'll collide with Andromeda, and everything human is toast.

The universe doesn't care.

The question is what do we care to do, now, and is it really too late?

[Yo_Mama]

36. IMO, he's gone senile

If you look at human population crashes in history, there have been many. The current circumstances are in fact pretty favorable, and human population increase rates have slowed dramatically.

Disease? We have lower death rates among the younger cohort from disease than any time in human recorded history.

Climate? Not in the catastrophic tailspin we have been led to expect.

Population increase? Well, birth control is pretty widespread, and global population growth is therefore going to moderate sharply in the next 90 years, with many regional populations reaching stasis or declining.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/10-projections-for-the-global-population-in-2050/

The next great population effect we know about that is absolutely certain is that our current interglacial period is more than half over. It could be in a century, but it is more likely to be a few thousand years. Eventually, we will slide back into the ice phase, and at that point the atmosphere becomes terribly dry, so that agriculture will fail rapidly in just a few centuries across most of the world. It's hard to see how the planet can support even a billion humans in those conditions.

I wouldn't worry about disaster so much. It's baked in. Humans are the product of the current glacial age. We are uniquely adapted to this catastrophic climate, and we will survive the next Ice Age. But it is doubtful that our civilization will.

If you want catastrophe, just look at vegetation maps from the last glacial maximum. There's your catastrophe:
http://anthro.unige.ch/lgmvegetation/download_page_js.htm

Agriculture can survive in only a few places, some of those places now being underwater. Basically SE Asia and parts of north South America. Florida, parts of the central US plains, and parts of the western US coast have climates that will support small scale ag and hunter-gatherer rural low-density populations. For the rest, it's some nomad, grazer-type cultures, but not the high density urban-type civilization we have today.

And you know what? Over the last 5 million years it's basically been getting colder. The Holocene optimum is long over. Our doom is written in the stars.

http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall12/atmo336/lectures/sec5/holocene.html

People are getting hysterical about a 1-2C temp change, when that would just bring us back to the climate of the Holocene Optimum, and it's doubtful that we will stay in that range.

If you spend some time at this page, you'll get it:
http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/shiny/Milankovitch/