The climate is a topic that has plagued classrooms, political debates, weekly news updates, and social media stories for many years. Towards the start of the pandemic, news outlets reported the recovery of the climate due to COVID-19 lockdowns. In other words, when humans left for mere weeks, the environment snapped back together with a ferocity never thought possible. There is another ferocious effort with the environment in mind. Specifically, to eradicate the usage of non-renewable energy, switch to non-pollutive manufacturing, transportation, energy consumption, and all in all, save the planet from collapsing on us completely.
This switch in mindset didn’t happen all of a sudden. It took many decades for the world to take the planet seriously (bask in the irony). People realized that the Earth’s temperature had risen significantly due to human action alone, bringing along many other environmental factors like the melting ice caps and rising sea levels. If left unchecked, these factors can result in coastal cities like New York and Shanghai becoming uninhabitable or causing much stronger hurricanes and typhoons which affect everyone left in its wake. Currently, the emphasis (surprisingly being enforced by some governments) is to reduce and eventually eradicate the usage of fossil fuels in favor of green energy like wind, solar and tidal. The problem, however, isn’t in the conceptual frameworks designed to save humanity; it’s with the people that don’t care about the immediate future, the ones that are focused on short-term profit and increasing their net worth’s as much as possible. For this reason, and this reason alone, the 21st century could see the first climate singularity in history.
As mentioned in previous blog posts, a singularity is a point in time where things cannot be reversed. For example, the technological singularity has been prophesied as the point in time where humans no longer control technology; technology is left on its own accord, being able to redesign itself and create other forms of technology from scratch (also referred to as AGI or ASI). In this case, the climate singularity represents something similar, a point in time where the climate catastrophe no longer lies in human control; where humans have lost the battle against rapid climate change and will be forced to deal with an ever-declining planet until they evacuate or go extinct.
Picture a moment in time where people find out that the fight against climate change has been lost, that all of our past, present, and future efforts amount to nothing. Who’s to blame? No one can say for sure. What happens next? Anarchy in the streets. See, the only reason why the fight against climate change is so provocative at this stage is that people have some form of hope. They want to start families, businesses, and empires, but some can’t or won’t. Why? They don’t believe humans will be around long enough to live purposeful lives. All because of the declining planet. Once word gets out that humans have lost the battle against climate change and will eventually go extinct (if or until we evacuate the Earth), expect people to stop caring about energy consumption, waste management, water usage, etc. Littering, polluting, looting, rioting, suicides, murders, cyberattacks, infrastructure collapses, and much more will occur almost instantaneously.
Why? Because humans have no other choice. They have to defend themselves and their families from the future. Worse, a collapse of caring about the environment will only accelerate climate change further.
Of course, there is some small nugget of optimism. Humans have always battled the most existential disasters; volcanoes, diseases, a short German fellow with a toothbrush mustache. As a civilization, we have always come out on top. However, this time may be different. This time, it may only be the wealthy and the powerful that will be able to evacuate the planet. 99% of the world may be left fighting over remaining resources and space.
This post is a PSA: to help reduce pollution and energy consumption; to help out with the environment any way you can; to spread the word on the ever-changing and declining climate; to urge fellow humans to do whatever little they can to avoid a total collapse of civilization. Do your part. The planet depends on it.