A University of Wisconsin professor has prophesied that for “most of humanity” life in 2050 will be “a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety” because of climate change.
Alfred McCoy, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes this week that by mid-century, “rising seas will have flooded the downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people.”
“Relentless waves will pound shorelines around the world, putting villages, towns, and cities at risk,” he asserts.
With the flourish of a fiction novelist or a Hollywood screenwriter, McCoy declares that in 2050, “ever more powerful hurricanes, propelled by climate change, will pummel the East and Gulf Coasts of this country, possibly even forcing the federal government to abandon Miami and New Orleans to the rising tides.”
Lest his readers be confused, McCoy avows that this “dismal vision of life circa 2050 comes not from some flight of literary fantasy, but from published environmental science.”
The good professor refrains from sharing which prescient environmental Nostradamus has published his visions of Earth 2050.
Untrammeled by facts, McCoy plows forward, insisting that ecological changes brewing beneath the Arctic tundra “will accelerate global warming in ways sure to inflict untold future misery on all of us.”
The thawing of the Arctic’s frozen earth, he warns, “will shape humanity’s fate for the rest of this century — destroying cities, devastating nations, and rupturing the current global order.”
“Think of it this way: in the Arctic, ice is drama, but permafrost is death,” he exclaims. “The spectacle of melting polar ice sheets cascading into ocean waters is dramatic indeed. True mass death, however, lies in the murky, mysterious permafrost.”
To no one’s surprise, the solution to global cataclysm proposed by Prof. McCoy is to empower the United Nations to exercise governance over humanity.
“Just as the Security Council can (at least theoretically) now punish a nation that crosses international borders, so a future U.N. could sanction in potentially meaningful ways a state that continued to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or refused to receive climate-change refugees,” he muses.
Without such change, he concludes, “the current world order will almost certainly collapse into catastrophic global disorder with dire consequences for all of us.”
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