Scripps Institution: 5% Odds "Catastrophic" Warming By 2050, 20-30% Existential Threat By 2070
There’s a very small but distinct possibility that rapid global warming could pose an “existential threat” to the survival of humans by 2050, UC San Diego said Thursday in one of the most dire forecasts yet about climate change.
The school’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography published a paper that said there is a 5 percent chance of catastrophic change within roughly three decades, and a smaller chance that it would broadly wipe out human life. Scripps made the claim while proposing two new classifications for climate change: catastrophic and unknown, or existential.
Catastrophic means that most people would have trouble adapting to such change. The latter terms means that they would not be able to. “Other people have used the word catastrophic, but I have resisted doing so until now,” said the study’s lead author, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a renowned climate scientist who helped influence Pope Francis to urge the world to fight global warming in 2015. “I changed my mind because, over the past five years, I have gone back and reviewed data that we began collecting from satellites in the 1980s and data from aircraft and changes in the intensity of storms, and studies about the possible health affects of rapid global warming.
“There is a low probability that the change will be catastrophic. But you would not get on an airplane if you thought there was a 5 percent chance that it was going to crash.” He noted that the probability of an existential threat is even smaller, but said, “that chance rises to 20 to 30 percent by 2070.”
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http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-scripps-climatechange-20170914-story.html
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