A global story on the risk of civilizational collapse after 2050

In July 2019, I broke an exclusive story via my ‘system shift’ column at VICE, covering a new report which warned that from 2050, global civilization could face the risk of collapse due to the impact of climate change. What made the report especially interesting was that it had been endorsed by a former top Australian military chief. The story went viral and global, and became perhaps one of the most-read pieces I’ve written during my career. It also sparked a new conversation about whether climate change does indeed pose an existential threat to humanity - and while many didn’t agree with the substance of the report, and some took issue with my reporting, the conversations that followed have been important and necessary.

As usual with this sort of reporting, my piece was often either heavily plagiarised or simply used without attribution by numerous major media outlets who rushed to cover the story, but wanted to take credit. This is par for the course for me, unfortunately. Thankfully, some outlets did give due credit and a link back.

The report was put out by a small think-tank in Australia which, until my story, is relatively unknown. It’s due to having cultivated connections on the ground like this over many years that I was able to receive a copy of the report direct from the authors when it was published, allowing me to break the story and give it a mass audience before anyone else.

My editor at Motherboard, VICE’s tech publication, told me that the article was one of the most popular pieces across the entirety of VICE’s platforms, raking in something like 2.5 million reads in total (and counting). Elsewhere, the piece was picked up by major outlets like CNN, CBS News, FOX News, NBC News, ABC News, International Business Times, and so on.

In fact, a google search of ‘civilization collapse 2050’ shows that hundreds of media outlets across the world covered this story. Even tabloids like Daily Start, New York Daily News and Lad Bible picked it up. Most of them didn’t credit me or VICE - this is largely CNN’s fault, who essentially ran their own piece after mine without any acknowledgement, from which most other places picked it up.

But it’s pretty likely that these outlets likely reached a million or so readers each. In short, this piece probably reaching anywhere between ten up to a hundred million people.

The piece also received some welcome criticism. Vox published a thoughtful piece arguing that the report went too far in its claim about existential risk, and that my own reporting was too sensationalist. I disagree with that, of course - at VICE I pushed for the headline to be changed to put potential civilizational collapse as beginning around 2050, given that this was more consistent with the report’s conclusions. We did that fairly quickly.

The Vox piece cited a separate fact-check piece by the respected science blog, Climate Feedback, where six scientists weighed in arguing that both the report and the story were alarmist and misleading. The problem is that while some of them acknowledged that the scenario was possible, they all disagreed with the proposition that the scenario had a “high likelihood”. The problem is that this critique overlooked the caveat noted in the report itself (and in my own coverage of it), that the scenario had a “high likelihood” only on a business-as-usual trajectory involving the escalation of fossil fuel emissions. The scientists’ critique was premised on the assumption that this trajectory itself is not “likely”. This is, unfortunately, an unknown - but I and the report authors would probably stand by the projection that such a scenario is indeed highly likely if we do not change course.

The major problem which Vox completely missed is that the fundamental reason the climate science projections, and the climate scientists who interpret them, do not explicitly predict ‘mass civilizational collapse’, is because they simply don’t possess the modelling capacity of framework to conceptualise or understand the dynamics of civilizational collapse in the first place. None of the scientists cited by Vox have any experience or expertise in all in understanding societal or civilizational collapse - and climate models don’t say anything one way or another about the issue because its not intrinsic to climate data: it’s a matter of interpretation to understand how that data impacts on societal institutions. That’s why, and Vox misses entirely the argument of the report, we need experts in risk analysis to examine this climate data to examine how it might impact on societies.

That said, the scientists did point out a few errors in the report where particular dimensions of the scenario could have been overblown (the interpretation of what constitutes a lethal heatwave, for instance).

Perhaps the stupidest and most bizarre claim by Vox is that even a 10 degrees Celsius rise would not make the collapse of civilization likely. For that ridiculous claim, Vox quotes someone called John Halstead, who is described as ‘an expert in existential risk’. Halstead’s PhD thesis was about the intrinsic value of democracy - his claim to fame on existential risk is that he was a lead author of two reports about existential risk, one for the Finnish Foreign Ministry and another for Oxford University’s Global Priorities Project. He hasn’t published much else, either on climate change or existential risk. He did, however, self-publish a google doc on the latter, which, interestingly, sticks extremely closely to IPCC scenarios (the Breakthrough report I cover covers other scientific literature outside the IPCC modelling) but also ignores “indirect risks” due to things like “war” and “mass migration”. As an example of the amateur, reductive, non-systems approach Halstead uses, he dismisses the risk of climate change producing unliveable temperatures with the following:

“As discussed, this warming would take 100+ years to materialise at which point everyone will be able to afford air conditioning, and we will have probably have much more abundant energy from e.g. nuclear fusion. It is therefore wrong to say that air conditioning would be unaffordable for the third world. One cannot both say that energy demand-led GHG emissions will lead to extreme warming and that people in 100 years won’t have a lot more energy at their disposal.”

So, don’t worry folks. Climate change won’t pose an existential risk, because we will have solved the nuclear fusion problem by then. Let’s just ignore the astonishing EROI caveats around the still non-existent technology, and overlook the massive (and many still unknown) hurdles by pretending that, yep, it’s really likely to happen, cos, y’know, humans and progress and all.

And this is supposed to be a serious existential risk analysis?

The Vox journo would have done better by speaking to people who have actually done serious risk analysis research into this issue, such as the folks at IPPR, whose report out this February similarly warned of how climate change BAU could lead to social and economic collapse.