Moving to an Apocalypse

Dahr Jamail thinks so. Here are ten things he's worried about.

1. Arctic Sea Ice. The Arctic sea ice is close to historic lows in both extent, volume, and mass. The annual minimum Arctic ice volume, based on observations (not projections), is following a trend that shows we should expect periods of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer by 2023, and possibly sooner.

2. Increasingly Warm Oceans. Earth’s oceans have already absorbed 93 percent of the warmth humans have generated since just the 1970s.

3. Methane. One extremely worrying development in the Arctic came in the form of bubbling lakes. A report showed that large numbers of lakes across the region were leaking methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

4. Wildfires. Wildfires, amped up by climate change, ravaged many regions of the world in 2018.

5. Insect Apocalypse. Insects, and hence the global food web, are in crisis, according to several studies, one of which was published earlier this year.

6. A Broken Global Food System. The global food system is already broken, according to the 130 of the world’s science and medicine academies.

7. Uninhabitable and Permanently Altered Regions. Still suffering from the impacts of a devastating Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was officially left to its own devices to recover.

8. Great Barrier Reef. A record heat wave in Queensland, Australia, in November shattered the previous high temperature record by a stunning 5.4°C. The heat wave alarmed scientists, raising fears of another bleaching event that could further weaken the already beleaguered Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world.

9. UN Report: Only 12 Years Left to Limit Warming. A landmark UN report released in October served as an imminent warning that if governments fail to act swiftly and dramatically (and within the next dozen years), droughts, flooding, and increasingly extreme heat waves will increase drastically.

10. Nowhere Near Meeting Climate Change Goals. While many world leaders met in Poland for the COP24 climate talks in December, it was already clear that we are nowhere near on track to attain the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.