MELBOURNE: A new policy paper presented this week from an Australian think tank claims that the risks of climate change are actually much, much worse than anyone can imagine.

Man-made climate change is already melting the World’s ice sheets, causing extinction of up to 1 million animal species. According to the paper, climate change poses a “near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization,” and there’s a good chance society could collapse as soon as 2050 if serious mitigation actions aren’t taken in the next decade.

It has been published by the ‘Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration in Melbourne’ (an independent think tank focused on climate policy).

United Nations’ Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 predicted that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk. Unless we de-carbonize the economy ( by finding alternative energy sources), a global temperature will increase 5.4 Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) by the year 2050.

At this point, the world’s ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rain-forest – one of the world’s largest carbon offsets; and the planet plunges into a heat-wave. Droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world’s land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet’s coral reefs, the rain-forest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world’s tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region’s agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees.

‘Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to lethal heat conditions for more than 20 days a year, beyond the threshold of human survival.’ (Agencies)