Between 1500 and today, we have witnessed colonization and the Industrial Revolution, the birth of modern states, identities and institutions, the mass combustion of fossil fuels and the associated rise in global temperatures. A team of researchers think that If we fail to halt climate warming, the next 500 years and beyond will change the Earth in ways that challenge our ability to maintain many essentials for survival — particularly in the historically and geographically rooted cultures that give us meaning and identity.
To make their case more compelling they have used their projections and diverse research expertise to inform a series of nine paintings covering a thousand years from 1500 to 2500 CE, in three major regional landscapes: the Amazon, the Midwest United States and the Indian subcontinent.
An image is worth more than a thousand words…
Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring that these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for projection. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore short-sighted. Critical problems for food production and climate-forced human migration are projected to arise well before 2100, raising questions regarding the habitability of some regions of the Earth after the turn of the century. To highlight the need for more distant horizon scanning, we model climate change to 2500 under a suite of emission scenarios and quantify associated projections of crop viability and heat stress. Together, our projections show global climate impacts increase significantly after 2100 without rapid mitigation. As a result, we argue that projections of climate and its effects on human well-beingLyon, C., Saupe, E.E., Smith, C.J., Hill, D.J., Beckerman, A.P., Stringer, L.C., Marchant, R., McKay, J., Burke, A., O’Higgins, P., et al. Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100. Global Change Biology n/a.
and associated governance and policy must be framed beyond 2100.