Plague, famine, heat no human can survive. This is not science fiction but what scientists, when they’re not being cautious, fear could be our planet’s future—far sooner than we think.
“Doomsday”
PEERING BEYOND SCIENTIFIC RETICENCE.
IT IS, I PROMISE, WORSE THAN YOU THINK. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas—and the cities they will drown—have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault—a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.
Denne historien er fra July 10–23, 2017-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Denne historien er fra July 10–23, 2017-utgaven av New York magazine.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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LIFE AS A MILLENNIAL STAGE MOM
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How George C. Wolfein collaboration with Audra McDonald-subtly, indelibly reimagined musical theater's most domineering stage mother.
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Denial, resilience, déjà vu.
The Most Dangerous Game
Fifty years on, Dungeons & Dragons has only grown more popular. But it continues to be misunderstood.
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The new senator from New Jersey has vowed to shake up the political Establishment, a difficult task in Trump's Washington.
Apex Stomps In
The $44.6 million mega-Stegosaurus goes on view (for a while) at the American Museum of Natural History.
