Existential risk and resilience in the Anthropocene

For many people these days, it’s hard not to feel like the end of times is at hand. Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have brought extreme climate concerns into the mainstream, big-time. Global catastrophe and the collapse of civilization have made the leap from fringe to commonplace so quickly that the new talk is about “climate trauma” and “climate grief” — coming to terms with the impending apocalypse — as well as the “courageous” wartime measures supposedly necessary to survive it. As I write, this zeitgeist is further exacerbated by 2020’s “black swan”, the coronavirus outbreak, which many are interpreting as proof of the increasing fragility of our ever-more-interconnected Anthropocenic Earth.

On the other hand, if you want to believe the opposite — that our world is robust to climate change— there’s plenty of reputable literature for you. The models of “mainstream” scientists vary in assumptions, parameters, causal effects and the degree of the severity of their conclusions, but even the most dramatic scenarios are not quite Armageddon. Indeed, the dissonance between public perception and the scientific status quo is such that a reputable climate researcher has felt the need to make it explicit: “There’s never been that much evidence that climate change is going to literally cause the extinction of the human race”.

Of course, there is a huge spectrum between “business as usual” and “human race goes extinct”; it would be useful for those of us with a stake in the game — i.e., everyone…