Initial Research - 2052 by Jørgen Randers
Jørgen Randers is the former president of the Norwegian Business School and currently the professor of climate strategy in the same institution. In 1972 he wrote “Limits to Growth” outlining policy changes that could be put in place to slow down our impacts on the environment. Recently, he has written another book called 2052 outlining what the world may look like in less than 40 years time.
The “Extreme Weather in 2050” essay explains the expected impacts if the 194 member countries of the Earth Summit do not reach their carbon emission targets. Unfortunately, the predictions are not very positive.
A1FI, the worst case scenario, predicts:
High economic growth
Continued globalisation
Increase in the global surface temperature by 2.4ºC in 2050
Substantial increase in temperature over the arctic between 2ºC - 4ºC
Slight oceanic temperature increase.
“Water is likely to be a serious challenge particularly for developing countries with both availability and quality at risk”
What is interesting, is that although we are headed towards this worst case, during 2010 we were deviated due, most likely, to the financial crisis. During the last financial crisis many reported that crashes were part of running the capitalist economy, if this is true, we could see more set backs in the future. I will look into this further and see how it may effect the model above.
If we reach the A1FI, the predicted impacts will be severe; including mass exodus from low lying areas, depletion of large scale ecosystems and increased melting rates of glaciers. There are a couple of pieces of good news. I had thought that the population would be growing as it has been over recent years, but population is projected to stabilise at 2030. Also, crop yields are predicted to increase for highland areas like Scandinavia.
“Many large scale terrestrial and marine ecosystems will be unable to adapt to the rate of climate change”
From this research I see that there are some interesting trends which come up time and time again:
Sea level rise - people may be living in more dense areas at high above sea level.
Temperature rise.
Increase in extreme weather - more floods for wetter areas, more droughts for drier ones.
Biodiversity.
Food production.
Fresh water.
Air quality.
A move to 100% solar power in the next 50 - 100 years.
