There are numerous reports based on scientific research that delve into the subject of long-term consequences of climate change, like rising sea levels, temperatures, and levels of greenhouse gases by the year 2100.
There have been made some conventions in an attempt to diminish the consequences of the current problems.
For example, the so-called Paris Agreement requires us to limit warming to less than 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
Since 1990, specialists have evaluated humanity’s progress through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) via assessment reports and other forms of special reports.
The purpose of IPCC reports is to reveal where we are in terms of achieving the goal of the Paris Agreement, what we have to do in order to fulfill the requirements, and what might happen if we don’t.
The newly-published United Nations assessment of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) claims that the official promises from the world’s governments would lead to an alarming 2.7 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century.
That change would lead to catastrophic phenomenons of nature like extensive, unprecedented-scale fires, droughts, storms, floods, and heat, which would also lead to severe land and aquatic ecosystem changes.
Though some climate projections look past the end of the current century, they aren’t particularly taken into account in environmental decision-making at the moment, which is unfortunate.
When we think of 2100, it may sound like a faraway future, but people born this year will be in their late 70s by that year.
Future Planning
To seek large-scale solutions, specialists must look well beyond the 2100 milestone.
If climate warming doesn’t stop by 2100, that will spell out bad news for humans, according to a recently published article in Global Change Biology.
The researchers ran simulations according to the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP), which are “time-dependent projections of atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.”
The simulations analyzed low, medium, and high mitigation scenarios and took into account vegetation distribution, heat stress, and the growing conditions for the currently existing significant crop plants to get a grasp of the scale of the changes that need to be done today for a safer, healthier 22nd century.
The simulation data revealed that the global average temperature keeps rising beyond 2100 in the RCP 4.5 (medium mitigation) and 6.0 (low mitigation) scenarios.
In these conditions, vegetation and the best places for crop-growing will slowly shift to the poles, and the area suitable for many crops will decrease considerably.
Places with a vast history of rich ecosystems like the Amazon Basin could become barren.
Additionally, it was discovered that heat stress could reach unlivable levels for humans in tropical areas, which, at the moment, are highly populated.
The situation could get so dire that the areas might even become uninhabitable anymore.
The study’s predictions are based on a single climate model, but they fall within the range of projections from others, helping them reveal the possible magnitude of climate change on a scale of a few centuries.
The Unlivable Future?
Between 1500 and the current year, humanity did many large-scale actions with considerable impacts on the planet, like the industrial revolution, the apparition of modern states, and the large-scale combustion of fossil fuels, which, in turn, led to the rise in global temperatures that we’re experiencing.
If we don’t manage to get climate warming under control in the next five centuries, the planet will be changed in ways that would make it hard or impossible for humans to endure.
As an attempt to avoid that, our immediate task is to decrease emissions while adapting to the warming that we simply can’t avoid due to the emissions we’ve produced to date.
