New research says it could be 'fatally foolish' not to think the unthinkable on climate change.
, the closest attempts to directly understand or address how climate change could lead to global catastrophe have come from popular science books such asIn recent years climate scientists have more often studied the impacts of warming of around 1.5C or 2C above the temperatures seen in 1850, before the onset of global industrialisation.
"I think it's sane risk management to think about the plausible worst-case scenarios and we do it when it comes to every other situation, we should definitely do when it comes to the fate of the planet and species," said lead author Dr Luke Kemp from the University of Cambridge. "Average annual temperatures of 29C currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast," said co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University.
There should also be more focus on identifying potential tipping points, where increasing warmth triggers another natural event that drives temperatures up even more - such as methane emissions from melting permafrost or forests that start emitting carbon rather than soaking it up.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeThe researchers said that seriously studying the consequences of worst-case scenarios was vital, even though it might scare people.
"We saw this when it came to the identification of the idea of a nuclear winter that helped compel a lot of the public efforts as well as the disarmament movement throughout the 1970s and '80s."
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