Nowa Fantastyka Apr 2018
There’s this guy I’ve known since the eighties: evolutionary biologist, parasitologist of some renown, has a cabinet full of awards and accolades acquired over the course of his career. His name is Dan Brooks (if you’ve read Echopraxia you may find that name vaguely familiar). He’s retired now, lives in Hungary while he and a couple of colleagues finish off a book on the epidemiological consequences of climate change.
Dan has these friends: physicists, climatologists, biologists. He calls them The Cassandra Collective. Five, ten years ago their Facebook timelines were full of links to their own research, to the latest findings in their field. Today, those same pages are festooned with cat pictures and selfies from Alaskan cruises.
They’ve given up, you see. For thirty or forty years they did the research, read the signs, tried to warn the world. World didn’t care. Now, they figure, they did their best and it wasn’t good enough. Now it’s too late. So all these people have quietly retired, and are just enjoying whatever time they have left before the ceiling crashes in. They’re not making a fuss—not any more. They realize there’s no point. They’ve just gone quietly into that good night.
What does it look like when the ceiling crashes in? Well, Dan and his coauthors have worked out a best-case prognosis—and the good news is, we’re probably not looking at outright extinction. People are everywhere, and enough of us are used to living under medieval conditions for Humanity to persist as a species. What we are looking at is the collapse of technological civilization. We can expect a series of rolling urban pandemics starting about a decade from now. (Monkey pox is apparently poised to make one hell of a comeback.) As much as 60% of humanity will be infected; maybe 20% killed.
A measly 20% dead might be something we could handle without too much trouble (and it would certainly be a relief for the nonhuman inhabitants of the planet). Sixty percent sick, though, not so much. Imagine half the people responsible for delivering your food, maintaining your water supply, and keeping your ATMs online call in sick for a few weeks; imagine that half their backups call in sick as well. Historically, once the infrastructure collapses even in a single city, it takes mere hours for people to start killing each other over food; check out what happened in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina if you don’t believe me.
Now, scale that up to every city on the planet.
If current trends continue, the world’s arable land will be exhausted by 2070. Here in North America the USA will have run out of fresh water long before then. (I expect they’ll have decided in the meantime that Canada has WMDs, and that they have to “liberate” us in the name of freedom and democracy. I expect this to happen around the time they finish sucking the Great Lakes dry.) Scandinavia and western Europe will be back in Little Ice Age territory when Arctic meltwater short-circuits the Gulf Stream. The good news is, Malaria and Dengue Fever will have spread to the Baltic before then, so the temperature drop will at least take out the mosquitoes.
That’s one prognosis—but it’s most likely not the road down which we are headed, because it’s a mainly disease-based apocalypse. It derives all its predictions from the fact that climate change promotes the relocation and spread of pathogens and parasites into new areas and new hosts. That 21% mortality—about 1.5 billion people—are just those who died because they got sick. It doesn’t include deaths due to social unrest, or the forced migration of environmental refugees (it’s been argued that the Syrian crisis ultimately tracks back to extended drought conditions in that country; get ready for a lot more of the same). It doesn’t factor in food shortages due to overfishing and ocean acidification. It doesn’t factor in the fact that it’s only taken us since 1970 to kill off half the animals on this planet, and apparently we’re just getting started. It doesn’t factor in crop failure: back in 1999, for example, a mutant strain of wheat rust appeared in Uganda and has been spreading ever since, helped by warmer-than-usual temperatures throughout that region; now it’s in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It does not respond to any known fungicide. We could conceivably lose the world’s wheat crop within a decade.
Dan’s scenario doesn’t even touch on nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, or AI apocalypses or grey-goo rogue nanotech or mutable digital viruses evolving to shut down the internet or any of the other increasingly-less-science-fictional apocalypses that some very smart people are suddenly taking very seriously. It doesn’t factor in purely economic collapse—collapse not instigated by environmental or social stressors but by the inherent paradoxical dumbness of Economics itself. (Conventional economics is a pyramid scheme, predicated on a model of unlimited growth in a resource-limited environment; if it was a physics model, it would be perpetual motion. It’s bound to break sometime.)
Dan’s scenario is, in fact, way too optimistic.
A more plausible scenario might be found in a 2014 paper out of the University of Melbourne1, which factored in some of the variables not considered by Brooks et al; it suggests that population will peak around 8-9 billion over the next couple of decades, followed by a catastrophic decline that ends up cutting our numbers almost in half by century’s end. This may also be naively cheerful, since it ignores the disease elements that inform Brooks et al’s models. But maybe it’s less naively cheerful.
As for me, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know how it’s going to end. All I know is, I never consciously plan on getting drunk when Dan blows through town and we meet up for beers and conversation.
But after fifteen minutes with the guy, I never want to be sober again.
1 Turner, G., 2014: “Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data”, MSSI Research Paper No. 4, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. 21pp.