Wastelands, Barren Forests: By 2500, Earth Will Almost be Uninhabitable if CO2 Emissions Rise

In a song by Busted which is an English pop band, 'not much has changed' by the year 3000, 'but they live underwater'. However, new climate predictions doesn't make things sound good.

Future Earth

If carbon dioxide emissions keep rising, the Amazon will be barren, the American Midwest tropical and India extremely hot to the extent that living there will be almost impossible by 2500 .

As warned by a research team led from Leeds University who succeeded in modelling potential climates under three greenhouse gas alleviation scenarios.

The research team then made an illustration of their worst case scenarios - as well as diagrams of life in the year 1500 AD and now so as to highlight the way alien the future Earth could look like.

They said the findings highlight the cruciality of not putting climate predictions to an end at the 2100 benchmark, as is common, but also putting the ongoing impacts into consideration.

The person who took on the study was Christopher Lyon, an environmental social scientist, previously of Leeds but presently stays at McGill University in Montreal, and his colleagues.

Paris Agreement Goals

Dr Lyon said: "We need to envision the Earth our children and grandchildren may face, and what we can do now to make it just and liveable for them."

"If we fail to meet the Paris Agreement goals and emissions keep rising many places in the world will dramatically change."

The researchers' models revealed that under low and medium greenhouse gas alleviation scenarios - that do not reach the goal of the Paris Agreement to make global warming remain under 3.6°F (2°C) - vegetation and plant growing regions will move toward either the North Pole or South Pole.

Leading to the risk that regions with long-term histories of cultural and ecosystem richness including the Amazon basin will become barren at some point. Also, the area which is ideal for planting many crops will also be reduced eventually.

Possible Extreme Heat

Meanwhile, tropical regions that have a lot of population like India will deal with extreme heat stresses which may get so high that the regions turn unsuitable for human occupation in the absence of the help of special personal protective equipment.

The researchers report that they anticipate that sea levels will keep rising as a product of increasing and mixing water in warming oceans even under high greenhouse gas emission alleviation scenarios.

Dr Lyon said: "These projections point to the potential magnitude of climate upheaval on longer time scales and fall within the range of assessments made by others."

"The Paris Agreement, the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's scientific assessment reports all show us what we need to do before 2100 to meet our goals, and what could happen if we don't," said Dr Lyon.

Journal Global Change Biology is where the detailed findings of the study were published.

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