It is all Doom and Gloom yet again

Experts on the health of our planet are terrified of the future. They can clearly see the coming collapse of global civilisation from an array of interconnected environmental problems.

“We’re all scared,” said Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. “But we must tell the truth about what’s happening and challenge people to do something to prevent it,” Ehrlich told IPS. Global collapse of human civilisation seems likely, write Ehrlich and his partner Anne Ehrlich in the prestigious science journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society.

This collapse will take the form of a “…gradual breakdown because famines, epidemics and resource shortages cause a disintegration of central control within nations, in concert with disruptions of trade and conflicts over increasingly scarce necessities”, they write.
Already two billion people are hungry today. Food production is humanity’s biggest industry and is already being affected by climate and other environmental problems. “No civilisation can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population,” the authors say.

Escalating climate disruption, ocean acidification, oceanic dead zones, depletion of groundwater and extinctions of plants and animals are the main drivers of the coming collapse, they write in their peer-reviewed article “Can a collapse of global civilisation be avoided?”.


Global population is projected to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050. It doesn’t take an expert to conclude that collapse of civilisation will be unavoidable without major changes. We’re facing a future where billions will likely die, and yet little is being done to avoid certain disaster, he said. “Policy makers and the public aren’t terrified about this because they don’t have the information or the knowledge about how our planet functions,” he said.


Last March, the world’s scientific community provided the first-ever “state of the planet” assessment at the “Planet Under Pressure” conference  in London. More than 3,000 experts concluded humanity is facing a “planetary emergency” and there was no time to lose in making large-scale changes.
In 2010, a coalition of the national scientific bodies and international scientific unions from 141 countries warned that “the continued functioning of the Earth system as we know it is at risk”.
“The situation is absolutely desperate and yet there’s nothing on the front pages or on the agenda of world leaders,” said Pat Mooney, head of the international environmental organisation ETC Group.

 A key element in meeting this unprecedented challenge is “…to see ourselves as utterly embedded in Nature and not somehow separate from those precious systems that sustain all life”, writes Prince Charles commenting on the Ehrlich’s paper. “To continue with ‘business as usual’ is an act of suicide on a gargantuan scale,” Prince Charles concluded.

Water War

Previously reported here that water resources will be the focus of future wars i now read in the Independent that the world faces a future of "water wars", unless action is taken to prevent international water shortages and sanitation issues escalating into conflicts, according to Gareth Thomas, the International Development minister.

"If we do not act, the reality is that water supplies may become the subject of international conflict in the years ahead," said Mr Thomas.

His department warned that two-thirds of the world's population will live in water-stressed countries by 2025. Each year 443 million school days are lost globally to diarrhoea and 1.8 million children die unnecessarily from these diseases. A coalition of charities has appealed for a global effort to bring running water to the developing world and supply sanitation to a further 2.6 billion people. It said international action was needed to prevent competition for water destabilising communities and escalating into conflicts.

"Already well over 1 billion people suffer from water shortages and 30 countries get more than a third of their water from outside their borders. With climate change, those figures are likely to grow, increasing the possibility of disputes." said a British national security report

A senior climate adviser at Greenpeace said the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, most of south Asia and western South America were at risk of water shortages if global warming continues.
"There is no doubt that climate change is going to be potentially the biggest source of water stress. If average global temperatures go more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels you are looking at 2 to 3 billion people potentially suffering water shortages. It's a pretty serious business."

Doom and gloom on weather change

“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen .We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming..." said James Lovelock , the originator of the Gaia hypothesis , that the Earth’s chemistry, climate and life are all closely linked into a kind of self-sustaining system . “...Human outpourings of greenhouse gases have flicked the switch that turns the world from its colder to its warm state – and it is probably too late to stop it,” he said.

In 2050 or soon after, most of the world may be scrub and desert and most of the oceans will be denuded of life . Millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people living in equatorial lands will be forced from their homes, with most of them heading northwards. The world will face mass shortages of food and water. That will lead to wars and the effective clearance of vast areas of land as the deserts spread . The grim possibility that billions of people face a miserable life and death as humanity finds a new equilibrium with the Earth.

In Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich. For Lovelock, however, such dreams are dangerous nonsense on a par with a drowning man clutching at straws:-

“It’s all ridiculous,” he sighed. “These new markets do some good in that they generate wealth and keep these people employed, but they and the IPCC are just raising false hopes. We have done too much damage to the world and now it is changing too fast for us to make much difference.”

Pessimistic forecast , indeed , but let's hope that the prognosis for the Earth is not as fatalistic as speculated if the peoples of the world can manage to create a socialist society with a steady-state ecologically-sound economy .