World Leaders Urged To Consider Climate Endgame

A team of international scientists says the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of a climate endgame -- as extreme weather events keep ravaging the planet.

So far, the conversation has been primarily about how to prevent it from getting worse. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning at last month’s Petersberg Climate Dialogue conference in Berlin, Germany. "Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune,” he said.

But now a team of international experts led by Cambridge University in England says, we should be prepared for failure. "Right now, I think we're being naive not looking at the worst-case scenarios at all, really,” says Dr. Luke Kemp with Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

Researchers warn about what they call the four horsemen of the climate endgame. Famine, extreme weather, conflict, and diseases spread by insects. Scientists are urging world leaders to investigate possible outcomes ranging from a loss of 10 percent of the global population to eventual human extinction. "The ultimate purpose of this area of study, it's not supposed to be any kind of disaster voyeurism, it's supposed to about better understanding which prevents the worst case,” Kemp says.

A worst case that climate scientists say we should be ready for – if all else fails.

In their research, published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,’ scientists note - with current emissions, within 50 years, 2 billion people could experience an annual average temperature of more than 84 degrees.