Most of us just want to know...
How bad will it get?
Every year, every month, every week, every day, another historic disaster hits another part of the world. Just recently, a category 5 hurricane flattened Jamaica. Melissa reached maximum sustained wind speeds of 185 mph and gusts at 252 mph. It ties with two other hurricanes for the strongest Atlantic landfall in history. According to some scientists, we're starting to see category 6 storms. We can't call them that because no agency officially recognizes the term... yet. The conditions that produce these beasts are now 900 times more likely, because of us.
It's not your imagination. It's getting worse. Maybe you're tired of lying awake at night, dreading what's next. You're tired of wondering if there's any point in trying to stop it, slow it down, or even prepare.
So, I did some homework.
I've pulled together the sources that paint our future for us. Some of them, I went out and found. Some of them, other readers and writers shared with me. I'm trying to keep it all short and simple, realistic and vivid. These aren't paranoid conspiracy theories. They're predictions by the world's leading climate scientists.
Here we go:
One of the world's most respected climate scientists, James Hansen, published a study in early 2025 providing an updated timeline for the climate crisis. His team's research accounts for factors that previous models missed. The new predictions put us at 2C of warming by the 2040s, and that's the most optimistic case. The climate world took this study seriously. It's been covered by Inside Climate News, and even The Guardian ran a story on it. More and more scientists are finally admitting, the 1.5C and 2C targets are "impossible." Not just unlikely, impossible.
Impossible.
Hansen isn't the only scientist rewriting the climate timetable. Another study in Global Environmental Change confirms that we'll see 3C of global warming by 2050. And another study in Environmental Research Letters agrees, putting 3C on the horizon for 2040 and 3C by 2060 or sooner. And yet another study in Nature Climate Change uses information from sea sponges to show that we've already crossed the 1.5C threshold and that we'll most likely cross 2C "by the late 2020s, nearly two decades earlier than expected." Climate scientist Leon Simons has offered predictions based on existing models that we'll cross 3C of global warming by the 2050s. Some scientists predict we could see even more than that. One study in Nature Communications points to warming anywhere from 7-14C by the end of the century.
That's been the refrain by climate scientists this year:
Decades earlier than expected...
And then you have more reports, that fires in the Amazon released 791 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere last year, as much as Germany, that we've officially crossed our first tipping point with the widespread death of coral reefs, that wildfire smoke alone will kill 70,000 Americans a year by 2050. It just goes on and on.
What does the year 2050 even look like?
We can refer to books like Our Final Warning by Mark Lynas, 3 Degrees More by Klaus Wiegandt (editor), and Racing to Extinction by Lyle Lewis for a detailed portrait, along with a pile of studies.
For starters, the Arctic Circle becomes a temperate zone, but not a very friendly one to human habitation, given the speed of the change. Permafrost thaws, releasing ancient microbes and more greenhouse gases.
Large parts of Europe and North America turn into deserts. Dustbowls reminiscent of the 1930s become permanent, leading to a 40-50 percent drop in crop production or worse. A 2020 study in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems modeled future dust bowls and found that in such a scenario, “the United States depletes nearly all of its wheat reserves” within four years, triggering a larger “loss of 31 percent of global wheat stocks.” An article in Yale Environment 360 refers to a 2016 study in Nature that used computer simulations to determine that corn and soy crops alone would fall 40 percent. Every degree above the preindustrial average would make it 25 percent worse. Famine ensues, mass starvation.
Africa and the Middle East?
They're uninhabitable.
Parts of Shanghai lie underwater. Parts of Miami lie underwater. Cities like New York experience catastrophic flooding. High tides invade large areas of downtown every night. These cities could end up completely submerged by the end of the century or sooner.
Dangerous heatwaves envelope large swaths of the world from May through September, and they'll start to disable our power grids. That means no air conditioning, no lights, no appliances, no internet. One 2023 study predicts that a grid outage in a city like Phoenix would mean “more than 50 percent of the total urban population” would require emergency medical care. Even cities like Atlanta could see at least 3 percent of their residents hospitalized. When heatwaves are so intense they knock out your grids, there's nowhere to go for emergency care.
In a 3C world, a billion people around the planet routinely endure "temperatures that exceed the workability threshold, where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.” We see four times more floods. They cause 10 times more damage, killing at least 20,000 people a year, and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless. That alone guarantees the collapse of the insurance industry.
As Mark Lynas says, “Researchers now suggest that we’ll be back in the Pliocene as soon as 2030 with current emission trends.” He goes on: “Forget survivalist fantasies. Nowhere will be safe—countries that still grow enough food might find themselves ruled by latter-day eco-fascists, as unscrupulous politicians stir up hate and division in order to cement their power behind rigidly policed national boundaries.” We're already halfway there. We already have a government that gleefully shuts down and refuses to release emergency food aid for the working poor.
In a 3C world, running water becomes a luxury.
Pandemics become routine events. Mosquitoes and other insects migrate, bringing everything from malaria to yellow fever with them. Ticks become an ever-present threat. Diseases we thought we conquered with vaccines will mutate and strike back harder.
F5 tornadoes become normal. Category 5 hurricanes become normal. Catastrophic floods and fires that used to happen every 100 or 1,000 years happen almost every year. Supply chains won't withstand the bombardment. Neither will power grids.
A 3C world pushes us beyond many of our tipping points. The ice sheets melt. AMOC collapses. Permafrost thaws. The rainforest dies. The boreal forest moves north. We know for sure these events will release even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They'll unleash new pandemics. They'll take us to 4C and beyond.
In a best case scenario, we see fractured supply chains and regular shortages of most items we take for granted now. Say goodbye to things like coffee and chocolate. Say goodbye to your pick of fresh fruits and veggies. We'll be happy to eat beans and lentils and maybe some canned collards. On top of that, we'll struggle to survive the heatwaves and dust storms. We'll face one pandemic after another, with outbreaks of other diseases in between. We'll feel like we're living in a permanent 2008 recession, plus all these other nightmares.
That's life in the 2050s.
It's possible that some of us will organize into what David Suzuki calls "units of survival," communities that endure despite the violence and chaos. They might find moments of peace, even joy.
Any community that stands a chance will have to do a lot more than grow food together. They'll have to take airborne diseases seriously. They'll have to provide the social services that the government is chopping down. They'll have to defend themselves against other, more violent groups with military-grade weapons. They'll have to deal with collapsing fascist regimes and billionaires who turn into dukes. It's going to look a lot like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.
Beyond 3C, you start to see megafires. You start to see monster typhoons and super hurricanes. You see the full collapse of civilization. Say goodbye to presidents. Say hello to warlords and feuding city-states.
At 4 and 5C, we're barely hanging on as a species.
Researchers like Lyle Lewis suspect that humans will be largely gone by the 2050s, and it's hard to argue with him. Once you factor in all the feedback loops and tipping points, even 3C sounds optimistic. Humans might make it to the end of the century. If they do, life for them will look more like it did thousands of years ago.
So, you can stop wondering.
The best thing we could do as a species now would be to stop fighting, come up with a global plan to deindustrialize, and start building a low-energy infrastructure that can save some of us. But if you look around, that idea isn't even on the table. We can't convince anyone to take those ideas seriously. It's more likely that the world will keep cranking out solar panels and burn through the last of its fossil fuels, while entertaining wild fantasies about colonizing space. We might try to geoengineer the atmosphere, with unpredictable results.
Our future lies somewhere in this mess, between the grid failures and the duststorms. It's not up to us to try and stop it or even slow it down, not anymore. Some of us will prep. Some of us will mourn. Some of us will party. Some of us will try to form units of survival. Some of us will try to convince our government to care. Some of us will make an exit plan. Some of us will do all of the above.
This is the future, already written for us.
What we can do is get ready for it.
However you see fit.
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