This is what the world will be like if we do not act on climate change.
The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2°C hotter, which scientists call the “threshold of catastrophe”.
Why is that the good news? Because if humans don’t change course now, the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4°C at the end of this century, which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus.
David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8°C and even 13°C increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into complacency. “It should make us focus on them more intently,” he says.
David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City. His latest book is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
In 2017, China banned all plastic from entering the country. This single decision has disrupted the entire global flow of recycling. Stuff that once found its way to China is now ending up in Vietnam, Thailand, and most of all, Malaysia.
But those countries can’t process the amount of plastic China used to, and waste from the US, Europe, Japan, and beyond is piling up in small mountains.
China’s ban didn’t break the system, but it revealed just how broken it really is. In episode one of our Quartz’s video series Because China, they go to Malaysia, Shanghai, and New Jersey to figure out what is going on in the wild world of recycling.
There’s been a breakthrough in the battle against plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. A company based in the Netherlands called Ocean Clean Up has announced the successful trial of a new device designed to collect huge amounts of plastic by remote control. It’s been trialed in the Great Pacific Garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean, an enormous body of plastic waste that drifts on natural currents between Hawaii and the West Coast of the US.
