Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims

It seems every week there's a scary new report about how man-made climate change is going to cause the collapse of the world's ice sheets, result in the extinction of up to 1 million animal species and — if that wasn't bad enough — make our beer very, very expensive. This week, a new policy paper from an Australian think tank claims that those other reports are slightly off; the risks of climate change are actually much, much worse than anyone can imagine.

According to the paper, climate change poses a "near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization," and there's a good chance society could collapse as soon as 2050 if serious mitigation actions aren't taken in the next decade.

Published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne (an independent think tank focused on climate policy) and authored by a climate researcher and a former fossil fuel executive, the paper's central thesis is that climate scientists are too restrained in their predictions of how climate change will affect the planet in the near future. [Top 9 Ways the World Could End]

The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom.

How the world ends

What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions.

"Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized.

Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees.

This mass movement of refugees — coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability — begin to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in nuclear war, are likely.

The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."

How can this catastrophic vision of the future be prevented? Only with the people of the world accepting climate change for the emergency it is and getting to work — immediately. According to the paper's authors, the human race has about one decade left to mount a global movement to transition the world economy to a zero-carbon-emissions system. (Achieving zero-carbon emissions requires either not emitting carbon or balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal.) The effort required to do so "would be akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization," the authors wrote.

The new policy paper was endorsed with a foreword by Adm. Chris Barrie, a retired Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander who has testified before the Australian Senate about the devastating possibilities climate change poses to national security and overall human well-being.

"I told the [Senate] Inquiry that, after nuclear war, human-induced global warming is the greatest threat to human life on the planet," Barrie wrote in the new paper. "Human life on Earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way."

https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html

“Designated Survivor” was the political drama conservatives needed to watch

After three seasons, the Kirkman administration has come to an end.

Late last month, Netflix confirmed the cancellation of Designated Survivor, a political drama starring Kiefer Sutherland as US president Tom Kirkman. The streaming giant had briefly revived the series after it was originally axed by ABC in May 2018.

At the outset, the show’s premise was straightforward, if sensational. When a terrorist attack kills the sitting president and his cabinet, Kirkman—the secretary of Housing and Urban Development—is the highest-ranking government official left alive. In an instant, he is thrust into the nation’s highest office, and drafted to rebuild a country crumbling before his bespectacled eyes.

On ABC, the show’s first season commanded a strong audience—the premiere even set a record with more than 17 million viewers in its first week. But as Variety explains, Designated Survivor dipped from an average of 12.1 million viewers during season one to 8.6 million during season two. (After all, it’s hard to top the first season’s opener: blowing up the US Capitol building.) ABC decided not to renew.

While ABC’s two seasons—43 episodes in total—wove together breathless conspiracy theories ripe for broadcast television, Netflix charted a new course with season three (10 episodes). Ahead of the third season’s release, showrunner Neal Bae said Designated Survivor would become “more cable-oriented,” meaning producers wouldn’t need to worry as much about offending viewers.

“When I pitched these [new] characters to ABC, they kind of looked at me like, ‘Whoa.’ And when I pitched to Netflix, they were like, ‘Oh, tell me more,'” Baer told TVLine. “You can go much further, deeper, darker, edgier, and be more realistic, and that was great for us.”

Though short, Netflix’s season three confronted issues that matter deeply to groups who are often underrepresented on screen. The show introduced Sasha, president Kirkman’s (previously unmentioned) sister-in-law, who is transgender. While Designated Survivor could be accused of making gender identity a spectacle, it did so by mirroring political theater. Sasha’s emergence—and the conservative backlash against her—was jarring, as it was in 2015 when the national spotlight fell on Gavin Grimm, a transgender student barred from using the boys’ bathroom at his high school. By making LGBTQ concerns White House concerns, and directly so, Designated Survivor 2.0 approached social divisions (and biases) with the seriousness they demand.

Throughout season three, the show exhibited a similar sensitivity toward Dontae Evans, a social media strategist on Kirkman’s campaign staff. The relationship (and specifically, a steamy sex scene) between Evans—an HIV-positive, gay black man—and Troy, a Secret Service agent, caught viewers off guard. But as Phillip Zonkel wrote for QVoiceNews, Designated Survivor became one of the first shows “to debunk the misinformation about what it means to be HIV positive and undetectable.”

By paying attention to the LGBTQ community, the show’s third season welcomed differences, and paid homage to human decency. Designated Survivor also acknowledged that many Americans are still wrestling with these issues. Asked by his sister-in-law about accepting her transition, Kirkman admits: “Honestly, I’d have to say that viscerally, I’m still a work in progress.”

Throughout season three, Kirkman’s social agenda demonstrates that what affirms people’s dignity isn’t necessarily politically palatable. In addition to addressing LGBTQ issues and racism, he contends with hot-button issues that include fake news, assisted suicide, opioid addiction, and immigration. In the season’s sixth episode, a Guatemalan family arrives illegally in the US in the hopes of securing a kidney transplant for their young son. The Kirkman administration carefully explores the ramifications of allowing the child medical care. Helping little Mateo is the right thing to do but, as Kirkman notes, allowing the family to remain in the US could signal a broader willingness to help anybody with medical problems who crosses the border.

Ultimately, Designated Survivor‘s greatest success (and perhaps a reason for its cancellation) is that it got too close to real politics. However brief, Netflix’s experiment helped give a voice to marginalized people—often of color—living under the presidency of a white man. In doing so, Designated Survivor nodded to America’s changing electorate, and it served as a powerful reminder that a president should serve all people.

https://qz.com/quartzy/1675121/conservatives-should-watch-netflixs-designated-survivor/

Wealth Distribution in the Pre-Civil War South

Wealth was not well distributed and most whites were poor. Nonetheless, there were minimal class tensions in the South among whites because they were united by racism. One source writes:

The South prospered, but its wealth was very unequally distributed. Upward social mobility did not exist for the millions of slaves who produced a good portion of the nation’s wealth, while poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own slaves of their own. Because of the cotton boom, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Valley by 1860 than anywhere else in the United States. However, in that same year, only 3 percent of whites owned more than fifty slaves, and two-thirds of white households in the South did not own any slaves at all. Distribution of wealth in the South became less democratic over time; fewer whites owned slaves in 1860 than in 1840.

At the top of southern white society stood the planter elite, which comprised two groups. In the Upper South, an aristocratic gentry, generation upon generation of whom had grown up with slavery, held a privileged place. In the Deep South, an elite group of slaveholders gained new wealth from cotton. Some members of this group hailed from established families in the eastern states (Virginia and the Carolinas), while others came from humbler backgrounds. South Carolinian Nathaniel Heyward, a wealthy rice planter and member of the aristocratic gentry, came from an established family and sat atop the pyramid of southern slaveholders. He amassed an enormous estate; in 1850, he owned more than eighteen hundred slaves. When he died in 1851, he left an estate worth more than $2 million (approximately $63 million in 2014 dollars).

Wealthy plantation owners like Edward Lloyd came close to forming an American ruling class in the years before the Civil War. They helped shape foreign and domestic policy with one goal in view: to expand the power and reach of the cotton kingdom of the South. Socially, they cultivated a refined manner and believed whites, especially members of their class, should not perform manual labor. Rather, they created an identity for themselves based on a world of leisure in which horse racing and entertainment mattered greatly, and where the enslavement of others was the bedrock of civilization.

Below the wealthy planters were the yeoman farmers, or small landowners. Below yeomen were poor, landless whites, who made up the majority of whites in the South. These landless white men dreamed of owning land and slaves and served as slave overseers, drivers, and traders in the southern economy. In fact, owning land and slaves provided one of the only opportunities for upward social and economic mobility. In the South, living the American dream meant possessing slaves, producing cotton, and owning land.

Despite this unequal distribution of wealth, non-slaveholding whites shared with white planters a common set of values, most notably a belief in white supremacy. Whites, whether rich or poor, were bound together by racism. Slavery defused class tensions among them, because no matter how poor they were, white southerners had race in common with the mighty plantation owners. Non-slaveholders accepted the rule of the planters as defenders of their shared interest in maintaining a racial hierarchy. Significantly, all whites were also bound together by the constant, prevailing fear of slave uprisings.

Because race bound all whites together as members of the master race, non-slaveholding whites took part in civil duties. They served on juries and voted. They also engaged in the daily rounds of maintaining slavery by serving on neighborhood patrols to ensure that slaves did not escape and that rebellions did not occur. The practical consequence of such activities was that the institution of slavery, and its perpetuation, became a source of commonality among different economic and social tiers that otherwise were separated by a gulf of difference.

Southern planters exerted a powerful influence on the federal government. Seven of the first eleven presidents owned slaves, and more than half of the Supreme Court justices who served on the court from its inception to the Civil War came from slaveholding states. However, southern white yeoman farmers generally did not support an active federal government. They were suspicious of the state bank and supported President Jackson’s dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States. They also did not support taxes to create internal improvements such as canals and railroads; to them, government involvement in the economic life of the nation disrupted what they perceived as the natural workings of the economy. They also feared a strong national government might tamper with slavery.

With the rise of democracy during the Jacksonian era in the 1830s, slaveholders worried about the power of the majority. If political power went to a majority that was hostile to slavery, the South—and the honor of white southerners—would be imperiled. White southerners keen on preserving the institution of slavery bristled at what they perceived to be northern attempts to deprive them of their livelihood. Powerful southerners like South Carolinian John C. Calhoun highlighted laws like the Tariff of 1828 as evidence of the North’s desire to destroy the southern economy and, by extension, its culture. Such a tariff, he and others concluded, would disproportionately harm the South, which relied heavily on imports, and benefit the North, which would receive protections for its manufacturing centers. The tariff appeared to open the door for other federal initiatives, including the abolition of slavery. Because of this perceived threat to southern society, Calhoun argued that states could nullify federal laws. This belief illustrated the importance of the states’ rights argument to the southern states. It also showed slaveholders’ willingness to unite against the federal government when they believed it acted unjustly against their interests.

Although slavery is gone, remnants of the old elitist mindset are still common. For example, many people in the South still fear and strongly oppose a strong national government and its defense of civil liberties. They prefer authoritarian autocrats to exert power and shape society. The unequal wealth distribution of the pre-war South looks rather like the wealth distribution of today. Some things just don't seem to change much.

Based on 2010 survey data

Footnote:
Recent research suggests (summarized here) that the standard of living for most whites was higher than previous accounts from some writers who visited the Antebellum South in the 1840s through the pre-war 1860s. One observer wrote in 1863 that “for all practical purposes we may still regard Southern society as consisting of aristocratic planters and ‘white trash’”.

States With No Legal Protections for LGBT: Our National Experiment

The AP reports that another local government employee has been fired after undergoing male to female gender transition. In this case, a local fire chief was fired for and alleged “lack of performance.” The firing occurred about 18 months after the transition was complete and the chief was openly working as a woman.

Twenty-eight U.S. states have no laws to prohibit workplace discrimination against LGBT employees. A few cities and counties offer protection, leaving Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as the only possible source of protection against discrimination for most affected people.

The Supreme Court is considering whether the Civil Rights Act cover sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination complaints. AP comments:

Only 21 states have their own laws prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Wisconsin outlaws discrimination because of sexual orientation but doesn’t protect transgender workers. And fewer than 300 cities and counties have local ordinances protecting LGBT workers, according to an advocacy group.

“If the Supreme Court sides against LGBT employees, it means they have to be really cautious and careful about living their lives openly and proudly,” said Jillian Weiss, a New York attorney who focuses on LGBT discrimination cases. “They may encounter a lot of discrimination, and there may not be anything they can do about it.”

The fired fire chief's life has spiraled down. AP writes:

Mosby said being jobless left her in financial straits. The public humiliation of her firing further strained relationships with her family, already stressed following her transition. “I’ve lost my family, I’ve lost my house,” Mosby said. “Now I’m living with friends that keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach, so I’m not having to live in my car. It’s been utterly devastating.”