more than four degrees Celsius of warming: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers (Geneva, 2014), p. 11, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.
would be rendered uninhabitable: Gaia Vince, “How to Survive the Coming Century,” New Scientist, February 25, 2009. Some of this assessment is a bit extreme, but it is incontrovertibly true that warming on that scale will render large parts of those regions brutally inhospitable by any standard we apply today.
a group of Arctic scientists: Alec Luhn and Elle Hunt, “Besieged Russian Scientists Drive Away Polar Bears,” The Guardian, September 14, 2016.
killed by anthrax released: Michaeleen Doucleff, “Anthrax Outbreak in Russia Thought to Be Result of Thawing Permafrost,” NPR, August 3, 2016.
one million Syrian refugees: Phillip Connor, “Most Displaced Syrians Are in the Middle East, and About a Million Are in Europe,” Pew Research, January 29, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/29/where-displaced-syrians-have-resettled.
likely flooding of Bangladesh: “By 2050, it is estimated that one in every seven people in Bangladesh is likely to be displaced by climate change,” Robert Watkins of the United Nations said in a 2015 statement: see Mubashar Hasan, “Bangladesh’s Climate Change Migrants,” ReliefWeb, November 13, 2015.
140 million by 2050: World Bank, Groundswelclass="underline" Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington, D.C., 2018), p. xix, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461.
more than a hundred times Europe’s Syrian “crisis”: Connor, “Most Displaced Syrians.” “Nearly 13 million Syrians are displaced after seven years of conflict in their country,” Connor reported.
The U.N. projections are bleaker: Baher Kamal, “Climate Migrants Might Reach One Billion by 2050,” ReliefWeb, August 21, 2017, https://reliefweb.int/report/world/climate-migrants-might-reach-one-billion-2050.
Two hundred million was the entire: U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Estimates of World Population,” www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.
“a billion or more vulnerable”: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, “Sustainability. Stability. Security,” www.unccd.int/sustainability-stability-security.
Fifteen percent of all human experience: Eukaryote, “The Funnel of Human Experience,” LessWrong, October 9, 2018, www.lesswrong.com/posts/SwBEJapZNzWFifLN6/the-funnel-of-human-experience.
another name for that level of warming: “Marshalls Likens Climate Change Migration to Cultural Genocide,” Radio New Zealand, October 6, 2015, www.radionz.co.nz/news/pacific/286139/marshalls-likens-climate-change-migration-to-cultural-genocide.
bell curve of more horrific possibilities: Technically, this is not a bell curve but a distribution curve, because it has a long tail of negative outcomes, rather than a balanced distribution of optimistic and pessimistic scenarios (that is, there are many more worst-case-like outcomes that are possible than best-case-like outcomes).
about 3.2 degrees of warming: Perhaps the best reference for all of the various predictive models is the Climate Action Tracker, which calculates that all of the world’s existing pledges would likely yield global warming of 3.16 degrees Celsius by 2100.
planet’s ice sheets: Alexander Nauels et al., “Linking Sea Level Rise and Socioeconomic Indicators Under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways,” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 11 (October 2017), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa92b6. In 2017, Nauels and his colleagues suggested that warming of merely 1.9 degrees Celsius could push the ice sheets past a tipping point of collapse.
That would eventually flood: The total collapse of the ice sheets would raise sea levels by more than two hundred feet, it is estimated, but a much smaller rise would be necessary to flood these cities. Miami sits six feet above sea level, Dhaka thirty-three feet. Shanghai is at thirteen feet, and parts of Hong Kong are as low as zero feet—which is why, in 2015, the South China Morning Post reported that four degrees of warming could displace 45 million people in those two cities: Li Ching, “Rising Sea Levels Set to Displace 45 Million People in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin If Earth Warms 4 Degrees from Climate Change,” South China Morning Post, November 9, 2015.
several recent studies: Thorsten Mauritsen and Robert Pincus, “Committed Warming Inferred from Observations,” Nature Climate Change, July 31, 2017; Adrian E. Raftery et al., “Less than 2°C Warming by 2100 Unlikely,” Nature Climate Change, July 31, 2017; Hubertus Fischer et al., “Paleoclimate Constraints on the Impact of 2°C Anthropogenic Warming and Beyond,” Nature Geoscience, June 25, 2018.
“century of hell”: Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney, “Scientists Nearly Double Sea Level Rise Projections for 2100, Because of Antarctica,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2016.
underestimating the amount of warming: Alvin Stone, “Global Warming May Be Twice What Climate Models Predict,” UNSW Sydney, July 5, 2018, https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/global-warming-may-be-twice-what-climate-models-predict.
fire-dominated savanna: Fischer, “Paleoclimate Constraints on the Impact.”
“Hothouse Earth”: Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (August 14, 2018).
At two degrees, the ice sheets: Nauels, “Linking Sea Level Rise and Socioeconomic Indicators,” https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa92b6.
400 million more people: Robert McSweeney, “The Impacts of Climate Change at 1.5C, 2C and Beyond,” Carbon Brief, October 4, 2018, https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/impacts-climate-change-one-point-five-degrees-two-degrees.
thirty-two times as many: Ibid.
9 percent more heat-related deaths: Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera et al., “Temperature-Related Mortality Impacts Under and Beyond Paris Agreement Climate Change Scenario,” Climatic Change 150, no. 3–4 (October 2018): pp. 391–402, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2274-3.
eight million more cases of dengue: Felipe J. Colon-Gonzalez et al., “Limiting Global-Mean Temperature Increase to 1.5–2 °C Could Reduce the Incidence and Spatial Spread of Dengue Fever in Latin America,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 24 (June 2018): pp. 6243–48, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718945115.
The last time that was the case: As with all work in paleoclimate, estimates on this point vary, but this summary comes from Howard Lee, “What Happened the Last Time It Was as Warm as It’s Going to Get at the End of This Century,” Ars Technica, June 18, 2018.
“hyperobject”: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
due for about 4.5 degrees: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, p. 11, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.