No mercy for first offenders

The laws of thermodynamics allow no leniency in the court of cosmic justice. An inflated
Greenhouse effect due to increased CO2 and CH4 is even now yielding vast pools of
buoyant freshwater from the world’s shrinking icecaps, and these are already beginning to
shut down the giant gyres that drive the world’s abyssal currents. Readings from one arm
of the Gulf stream currently show a 30% decline in just 50 years.33 If that process
continues, fingers of warmth will reach down to unpin the methane hydrates that carpet
many seabeds and methane eruptions will send global temperatures rocketing upwards.
Agriculture will collapse under the climatic onslaught, and our energy-starved civilisation
will implode. Within a century the population will shrink below its 30% point, completing
the symmetry of a transitional pulse. Human population growth and decline will then
display the elegant waveform that typifies all animal plagues.

As one of 30–100 million extant species, ours does not differ from the others in any
fundamental respect. It follows that those who contend we are not in plague and will not
collapse are merely displaying one of our species’ most hallowed (genetic) delusions:
anthropocentrism. Such belief hinges on a bet that has odds of at least 30-million-to-one
stacked against it, and while astronomical odds like those might seduce the odd obsessive
gambler, no respectable scientist should fall for it.

-Reg Morrison