Author: Jon Legg, Ottawa.
Title: “The World in 2050; the globe is in a mess, but most people really don’t care, or are not in a position to care”
COMMENT: The “not in a position to care” part of the title is a reference to the people of the poor countries who are at starvation level, and not aware enough of the background causes to temperature rising to exercise pressure on political leaders to change the relevant policies.
OVERVIEW STATEMENT:
The following scenario is a doggedly “business as usual” scenario built on the “second quadrant”, i.e. the lower-left one, based on a vertical axis of “The state of the planet” (P), and a horizontal axis of “Degree of Engagement by Society” (E). Group #2, who worked on this quadrant, is composed of Sybil Grace, Zachary Jacobsen, Jon Legg, Bill Pugsley, and Ian Whyte. We maintain that our scenario for 2050 is fairly realistic; even if the publics of the wealthy countries might have become more engaged in the light of deterioration of conditions from actual global warming, the majority of the world, which will still be poor and uninformed and/or simply unable to reduce greenhouse gases (GGH), will NOT be more engaged.
A qualification: The figures used are sometimes well-based, sometimes approximate.
The order of the sections in the description of the world in 2050 is that of the acronym, “STEEPLES”, i.e. Social, Technology, Economics, Environment, Political, Legal, Ethical, and Security.
A DESCRIPTION OF THE SCENARIO
1) Social
Summary: Life will be “…nasty, brutish and short” (From Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan)
Gated communities and armed guards will increase 2-4 times because of individuals’ concern about themselves or their nuclear family.
Life expectancy will be 10-15 years shorter (it now is 79 years in the USA), and the decrease will be almost entirely among the 99%, not the 1%. Infant mortality will increase from 6 deaths per 1000 to 10 per 1000 in North America. Both these processes will be due to more epidemics accelerated by climate warming and the spread of previous tropical diseases by insects.
In addition, the greying society will have more old age diseases accelerated by poorer air quality mixed with climate warming and will have to deal with a loss of effectiveness of antibiotics used to combat infections, including Caesarean births in particular.
Health care will be reduced due to increasing overall costs due to more diseases and an aging society; the percentage of the population over 65 will double from 16% to 32%.
Globally, population growth will have continued, and will be about 10 billion in 2050. This increase, in itself, will have resulted in much more GHG. In other words, the world has ignored the fact that keeping global population fixed, or even lowering it, would make the task of lowering GHG an easier one.
In a number of wealthy countries, women will be found in 2050 in more positions of leadership. In Canada, from an average of about 25% at all three levels of governments, a level of about 50% will have been reached. As a result, policies regarding families will not be as harsh as they would have been with the lower rate of participation in leadership.
2) Technology
Reliance on two unproven technologies, biofuels and carbon capture and storage/sequestration, will have been disproved and abandoned.
There will be increased demand for renewable energy sources as carbon fuels become exhausted.
3) Economics
The 1% will be richer, and the poorer 99% will be poorer.
In the 3rd world, the Gross National Products will – on average – have declined by about 20%.
4) Environment
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be 440-450 ppm (parts per million) (The level now is about 400)
Global Average temp will be 2-3 degrees C above present times. Since the present global average has already risen about 1.5 degrees C since1880, the total in 2050 will be 3.5 to 4.5 above pre-industrial times. In other words, we will be into a runaway global temperature rise situation because the various positive feedback loops will have combined to make the temperature rise on its own.
Sea levels will rise 2-3 m higher than now. This is a conservative estimate, assuming that there will not have been a major ice collapse, in Antarctica in particular. In actuality, sea level rise will be characterized likely by a nonlinear step function, with one or more steps during the XXI Century and with the timing of the steps unpredictable.
The positive feedbacks* will be numerous. Some are listed below.
- a) Most permafrost will have melted, and its methane released.
- b) The Arctic Ocean ice will have melted and will be largely ice-free year round (as it is north of Russia)
- c) As a result of warmer surface temperatures, there will be higher evaporation and therefore higher moisture content in the atmosphere which results in higher greenhouse gas warming (since H2O vapour is a GHG)
*(Remember that a “positive feedback” is a feedback loop that feeds on itself, and is thus the worst type of feedback. A negative feedback will eventually die out, but a positive feedback grows at an accelerating rate.)
There will be more extreme weather, resulting in more frequent heat waves e.g. double the number of days each summer above 30 deg C (for Toronto and Ottawa, this means 10 days become 20 days)
Flora and fauna: There will be 50% fewer in numbers in 2050 within each species. In addition, a number of species themselves will have disappeared.
Floods and droughts; more of each will produce millions of environmental refugees.
5) Political
The UN is weaker than now, in 2050, with only the “technical agencies” such as WHO (World Health Organization), WMO (World Meteorological Organization), FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization) and “UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees)” in good health, because they are useful to all governments. UNESCO will be threatened from a decreasing lack of support, because it is primarily a recipient agency.
The more “political” units in the UN, the Security Council and the General Assembly, will have even less influence than they do now, because most governments will have recognized how non-useful they have been, and have given up trying to use them to solve global problems.
The emergence of mega cities as the most important sources of global political power will be a political feature in 2050, but they will probably not be able to join together to have any collective influence.
6) Legal
Societies within countries will have become indifferent to the needs of the public, generally leading to loss of human rights.
There has been a significant increase of environmental refugees, but most wealthy countries have less appetite for immigration. In Canada, there will be many fewer immigrants accepted, or none at all.
The Law of the Sea is one special legal area that will deteriorate badly as super tankers and other large vessels ignore the niceties of the present legal regime.
7) Ethical
There will be more focus on individual interests and narrow family interests and on survival due to lack of support from society. In other words, there will be less concern for needs of others.
Positive ethics will have become an unaffordable luxury.
8) Security
Globally, there will be more conflicts, many being resource wars, or wars over water and arable land.
Human security, food security and energy security will be threatened. There will be more famines globally, but not in Canada, whose arable land will be more plentiful with global warming.
Addendum:
The backcasting exercise did not produce a series of intermediary benchmarks except one vital one. It is estimated by climatologists that 2030 is the last time for the human species to have put in place the measures to reduce greenhouse gases. If measure have not been put in place by that time, it will be very difficult if not impossible to take measures later on to reverse the process of global warming.
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Bio: Jon graduated from two military colleges and McGill with an engineering degree, served three years in the Navy, and joined the Department of External Affairs. After serving as a Canadian diplomat for 31 years in six countries around the world and in Ottawa, he retired in 1996 to devote himself to a number of voluntary activities. He has been on the board and led a community association in Ottawa, has been a board member and led a Canadian unity organization, and has done the same with a national association which deals with global environmental issues that threaten the planet.
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