Essays on Business and Climate Change
Peering beyond clinical reticence.
It really is, I promise, worse than you imagine. In case the anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you might be barely scratching the outer lining of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — additionally the places they are going to drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, they’ve occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their everyday lives, elements of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we have been unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed ‘Doomsday,’ designed to make certain that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have-been flooded by climate change not as much as ten years after being built.
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The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition
The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure was secured additionally the seeds are safe.
