Climate apocalypse

Rhetoric and belief centered on apocalypticism has deep roots in religious contexts, and similar rhetorical approaches undergird secular apocalyptic interpretations of climate.[2] Historical interpretations fall into two visions of apocalypse: the tragic and the comic. Tragic apocalypticism frames a clearly divided good and evil, with preordained events. In contrast, comic framing emphasizes flawed human agency, and it tends to be characterized by an open-ended, episodic, and ongoing timeline.[2] Some of the most significant books in environmentalism make use of either the tragic or comic apocalyptic framing: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1972), and Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992).[2]

There is a Western world tradition of describing a climate apocalypse with images and descriptions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and other features of the apocalypse of the Christian faith.[3]

A "climate apocalypse" is hypothesized to arrive through a set of interrelated concurrent factors such as famine (crop loss, drought), extreme weather (hurricanes, floods), war (caused by the scarce resources) and conflict, systemic risk (relating to migration, famine, or conflict), and disease.[11][1]

Political conversations about climate apocalypse (or similar terms) tend to describe how preventing it in the future would bring zero value for today, therefore the value of doing something today is zero.[12] The lack of response to climate change despite it being an existential risk may be an indication that human society lacks an ability to understand a threat of this magnitude without some radical change in perspective.[13]

A 2013 report described how incorporating the concept of preventing catastrophe into public policy seems unprecedented and challenging to accomplish.[14]

The media presents many imagined apocalypse scenarios in a way that conflates them all.[15]

Some researchers have speculated that society cannot comprehend an accurate end of the world prediction, and instead, more governments would be willing to respond productively to prevent catastrophe if reports framed the matter as a smaller problem than it actually is.[16] Talking about potential disaster can have a broad impact upon society by making many people feel that if the situation were truly horrible, then there must be good plans to prevent it so no further action is needed.[17]

Climate scientists may also downplay potentially disastrous scenarios in favor of more restrained predictions that are less likely to be rejected as alarmist or fatalist.[18] Discussions of "tail-end" risks of temperatures rising beyond 3°C (5.4°F) are also often neglected in research more generally.[19]

Sometimes, worst-case scenarios are used to highlight the importance of improved efforts in climate change mitigation or in calls for declarations of climate emergency in order to enable such.

There are many terms in use that are similar to climate apocalypse, such as climate dystopia and a climate-induced collapse, climate endgame, climate catastrophe and so forth.

Climate endgame is a term used to refer to the risk of societal collapse and potential human extinction due to the effects of climate change.[11] The usage of the term seeks to improve risk management by putting a higher priority on worst-case scenarios, to "galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy".[11][20] The term endgame has been used in relation to climate change by other authors in the past,[21] like in The Extinction Curve book by John van der Velden and Rob White, published in 2021.[22]