Will Climate Change End Civilization?

Written By Teacher: Liz Ransom

As a High School Spanish teacher and student newspaper advisor, Liz has taught for over 20 years and has served as World Languages Department Chair and K-6 summer camp activities leader. She has worked in Ohio, Maine, New Jersey, Maryland, and Chile.

While climate change is not predicted to end humanity, climate change potentially will have catastrophic impacts for many communities. Climate change deniers, those who spread baseless claims about climate change, often point to worst case scenarios that have not come to pass as evidence that climate change isn’t happening at all. Teachers can help older students unpack what’s at stake for humanity with this unit on ecocide, or examine the data about climate impacts, quality of life, and equitable solutions through the EnRoads simulator. Middle school students can explore climate justice with this lesson on wildfires, while younger students can be introduced to the concept of thriving, equitable communities for all with this unit on green spaces. Regardless of the lesson topic, through this climate change explainer, teachers can equip themselves to balance hope with urgency, and be prepared to educate students about credible, compassionate pathways to avert the climate crisis.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

First, the good news: climate scientists, as a whole, are not warning us to prepare for the apocalypse. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a group of hundreds of scientists working with the United Nations to analyze climate change research from around the world—names many serious risks brought on by the warming of our planet, but human extinction is not among them.

“If I had to rate odds, I would say the chances of climate change driving us to the point of human extinction are very low, if not zero,” says Adam Schlosser, the Deputy Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a climate scientist who studies future climate change and its impact on human societies.

In some ways, the most recent climate science even shows some encouraging trends. IPCC reports have always spelled out different scenarios for the amount of climate-altering greenhouse gases humans will put into the atmosphere, to show a range of possible climate risks the world may face. The IPCC calls these scenarios “representative concentration pathways” (RCPs), and they range from the relatively mild RCP2.6 scenario all the way up to RCP8.5, whose risks would be calamitous.