Apocalypse Now?

I am going to tell you a story, a story so horrific that it may keep you up at night, especially if you have small children who you love with all of your heart. And, like any good story, it centres around a fundamental struggle between good and evil. However, there are no Hollywood endings here, for the latter looks almost certain to prevail so hold onto your hats!

Now, if you don’t have the stomach for it, there is no shame in turning back to your sugar coated instagram feed. But, for those of you who are brave enough to soldier on, may there be a hero amongst you, a hero who will save us from this collective madness.

Apocalypse as defined by the Oxford Dictionary: “the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of Revelation.” Its very notion has been imprinted onto the human psyche since the advent of Christianity in the 1st Century.

According to veteran philanthropist George Soros, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could mark the “beginning of World War III,” ushering in “the end of civilisation” as we know it.

In a blistering attack on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the veteran financier warned that autocratic regimes were in the ascendant and the global economy was heading for a depression:

“While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilisation is to defeat Putin as soon as possible.”

His stark warning comes one week after the head the Bank of England said that the UK was facing a “apocalyptic” rise in food prices brought on by rising post-pandemic inflation, an increase in extreme weather and wheat shortages from the bread baskets of the world: Russia and the Ukraine.

Together the two nations account for a third of of global wheat exports. Ukraine’s wheat production is likely be down around 35% this year, and exporting the rest of it may be largely impossible due to Russia’s blockage of the Black Sea.

Although the cost of living may have gone up in the UK, this is tantamount to the price of dying in the developing world. In March, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation recorded an unprecedented rise in global commodity prices, and they remain at record-breaking levels today.

Sounding the alarm earlier this month, the head of the UN, António Guterres, warned that Ukraine-related food shortages could “tip tens of millions of people over the edge into food insecurity” resulting in “malnutrition, mass hunger and famine in a crisis that could last for years.”

According to the World Food Programme, around 49 million people face emergency levels of hunger with a staggering 811 million going to bed hungry each night.

Global markets were hoping for some relief from India, the world’s second-largest wheat producer, but a historic heat wave exacerbated by climate heating damaged much of this year’s crop. Temperatures are skirting around the 50 degrees celsius mark and it is only May.

Double-digit inflation left many Pakistanis unable to afford basic foodstuffs, ushering in the recent downfall of prime minister Iman Khan. His fall from grace had echoes of the 2011 Arab Spring when soaring food prices lead to revolts, ousting several heads of state.

And, next in line could be Egypt. Today, it is the world’s largest wheat importer: last year, Russia and the Ukraine accounted for 80% of its grain imports. Over 70 million people there rely on state-subsidised bread.

“When the history of the Ukraine war is written,” writes Simon Tisdall in the Observer, “Russia’s reckless action in weaponising food and deliberately disrupting global supplies, thereby risking the lives of countless millions, may be counted a bigger crime than even its unprovoked attack on its neighbour.”

Moreover, by the end of summer, millions of hungry refugees could start pouring across the border into Europe, forcing one to wonder: is this is part of Putin’s pre-emptive attack on the continent?

However terrifying this may all seem, this is merely a preview of our future. And although the pain today is largely felt by the poor, it will eventually spread to all echelons of society.

Imagine a world plagued by raging wildfires, blistering heatwaves, biblical floods and then ravaged by war as a dying population fight over scare supplies of food and water. Although this sounds like some dystopian nightmare straight out of a hyped-up version of Mad Max, this is the terrifying world that awaits us in a mere 20 years from now.

According to Stanford University, for every one degree celsius rise in global heating, crop yields will fall by an average of 5%, begging the question: what will harvests look like at the turn of the century with another 3 to 4 degrees celsius of warming baked into the system?

All of the money in the bank will be worthless when we have to fight over one bag of precious rice. At this point, we will be living through a real life version of the Hunger Games where very few us will actually survive.

And, like I said at the beginning, for anyone who has small children, it is a heartbreaking thought for they will only be in their teens or early twenties when this madness starts to unfold.

Although the critical link between the climate and hunger crises has been widely recognised by governments, bringing about real change is proving to be very difficult as the recent failure of Cop26 reveals.

Moreover, governments across the globe have been distracted by a two year battle with Covid-19 and now the ongoing war in the Ukraine. But let us not forget:

“He who has bread has many problems. He who has no bread has only one problem.”

So to repeat Soro’s comment: “The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilisation is to defeat Putin as soon as possible:” time is of the essence.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, our planet is currently on track to warm up by up to five degrees Celsius by the turn of this century. When temperatures warmed to that extent over 200 million years ago, it melted the world’s permafrost, igniting a carbon time bomb which ended up killing 97% of all life on Earth.

How? Underneath the world’s permafrost lie vast stores of methane gas which if released, are far more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of cooking the planet. A few years ago, scientists discovered that this planetary warming gas is already seeping out from under both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

How did we get here?

Everyday, our species releases an alarming 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s a number so large, it’s impossible to visualise, but in terms of heat generated, it’s like dropping 400,000 Hiroshima sized atom bombs on the planet every single day. That amounts to 4 bombs every second: 240 every minute.

Although global heating started over two centuries ago with the dawn of the Industrial Age, more than half of that CO2 has been released in the past three decades. That means that climate change has brought us to the brink of civilisational collapse within the span of a single generation.

It’s an astonishing thought.

But, even more staggering is the fact that oil titan Exxon Mobil knew how sinister its products were as early as the late 1970’s. But, instead of sounding the alarm and warning humanity about its ruinous path, it set up a clandestine network of pseudo think tanks in order to discredit the science so that it could continue polluting the atmosphere unabated.

The result: Exxon became one of the wealthiest companies on Earth to the detriment of all life on it.

In the past, the planet has witnessed five mass extinction events which have effectively wiped the evolutionary slate clean. And, all of them, except for the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, were caused by climate change.

There are many scientists who now believe that the lifespan of a civilisation may only be a few thousand years, and that of an industrial civilisation such as ours, only a few hundred. The writer David Wallace-Wells wonders whether this is why we have never found intelligent life from other galaxies:

“In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilisations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another.”

Perhaps our species is only destined to live for a few millennia before being wiped out and relegated to the dustbin of history.

Shortly before his death, the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking warned that humans must leave Earth to avoid “annihalation.” His comments could not be more timely in light of the current war in the Ukraine:

“One way or another, I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years.”

He later shortened that timeline to 100 years. But, however grand our plans may be to colonise Mars, it’s surface is too cold to sustain human life whilst its atmosphere is mostly made up CO2. So, our choice is clear: we can either accept our upcoming demise, or we can rise up and save our species of extinction:

“Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future. Delay means death,” warned Guterres earlier this year.

According to the U.N., carbon emissions must reach zero by 2050. And whilst it’s a herculean challenge, it’s far from impossible. When the US joined WWII in 1941, it evolved from a civilian economy into a military one within a matter of months. After all, necessity is the mother of all invention.

And the good news is that we already have all the tools required for this shift: green energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. What we lack however is the political will to bring about grand scale top-down change, especially in the US which is beset with short term political cycles. If Donald Trump is re-elected as president in two years time, perhaps humanity will enter its final swan song.

However, recent history is our proof that the insurmountable is easier than we think: the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and the end of apartheid all took place when brave men and women stood up to shatter the status quo.

This time however, the stakes are much higher: the continuation of all life on Earth hangs in the balance. We must not fail. Will I see you at the fighting line?

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