The threat of global warming would have been bad enough had it occurred on a planet of logic-filled Vulcans. That it happened on a planet full of irrational, illogical, self-aggrandizing egotistical humans is just proof of further bad luck. And according to a new report, that human penchant for selfishness may begin to exert itself once again in the next couple of decades.
I think we’ve all come to the realization that I do not have the world’s sunniest outlook on life. But that pales in comparison to my view of human society as a whole. That is why when we hear of awe-inspiring tales of heroism and camaraderie in battle or in tough times; it means all that more to us. Because we know, deep down, that it is a rare occurrence.
All of this will begin to play a much larger role in the next few decades, according to a report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the US. It states that climate change could end globalization by 2040.
Wikipedia helped me fully grasp just what globalization was about: it is the increasing interconnectedness of people and places as a result of advances in transport, communication, and information technologies that cause political, economic, and cultural convergence.
When you hear it like that, you begin to understand just how much climate change will affect things. Globalization has been a slow and plodding trend over the past decades. Interconnectivity between countries slowly evolving to the point where a Star Trek-esque future is only a pair of century’s away, instead of a millennia.
But with vital natural resources diminishing by the year, countries will begin to close their borders. Already water reserves across the planet are drawing dangerously low. Australia is in the midst of a drought and America is slowly beginning to lose its underwater reserves of water. Oil and gas reserves are gradually dropping; the oceans supply of fish is dropping as well.
“Some of the consequences could essentially involve the end of globalization as we have known it … as different parts of the Earth contract upon themselves in order to try to conserve what they need to survive,” said Leon Fuerth of George Washington University, one of the report’s authors, and a man who was national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore.
Fuerth also puts forth that racial tensions will rise in the event of such a retraction of globalization. “It also suggests the kinds of hatreds that build up between different groups will be accentuated as these groups attempt to move to more clement locations on the planet,” he said. “We predict a scenario in which people and nations are threatened by massive food and water shortages, devastating natural disasters and deadly disease outbreaks,” said John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and now president of the Center for American Progress think tank. Podesta believes this outcome to be inevitable, regardless of whether in an unlikely about face America instigated an international cap of emissions.
It is times like these, with a future evolving to one similar to that laid out above, that my worldview is not as cynical, jaundiced and world weary as originally conceived.
Environment Correspondent via ENN – Experts say climate change threatens national security
Photo Courtesy of Stefano Morandini
