Walking in England’s New Forest in 1892, butterfly collector S. G. Castle Russell encountered such numbers of the insects that they “were so thick that I could hardly see ahead”. On another occasion, he “captured a hundred purple hairstreaks” with two sweeps of his net. Patrick Barkham, who recounts these riots of nature in his 2010 book on […]
The thing about all the doom and gloom is that I don’t think anyone is seriously expecting the end of humanity. We’re not talking extinction, at least not yet and probably not for a very long time. We’re talking really hard times for people, though. Some previously habitable areas becoming uninhabitable, reduction in how much food we can produce and therefore how many people can be fed, things like that.
There’s this idea that we’re making Earth unlivable but, short of large-scale nuclear war, I don’t think we’re really capable of that. And humans are smart, when they have to be, and very adaptable. As a species, we’ll survive. But how many of us, and in what conditions, is very much up in the air.
millions will die. millions more will flee the worst places, putting more pressure on the enormous populations already migrating due to conflicts in Africa, the middle east and now eastern Europe.
The misery will compound, and the rich will continue to stick their heads in the sands and act like nothing is wrong.