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Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-nclc-01581)

The Industrial Revolution, the period in which agrarian and handicraft economies shifted rapidly to industrial and machine-manufacturing-dominated ones, began in the United Kingdom in the 18th century and later spread throughout many other parts of the world. This economic transformation changed not only how work was done and goods were produced, but it also altered how people related both to one another and to the planet at large. This wholesale change in societal organization continues today, and it has produced several effects that have rippled throughout Earth 's political, ecological, and cultural spheres. The following list describes some of the great benefits as well as some of the significant shortcomings associated with the Industrial Revolution.

Pro: Goods Became More Affordable and More Accessible
Factories and the machines that they housed began to produce items faster and cheaper than could be made by hand. As the supply of various items rose, their cost to the consumer declined ( see supply and demand). Shoes, clothing, household goods, tools, and other items that enhance people's quality of life became more common and less expensive. Foreign markets also were created for these goods, and the balance of trade shifted in favor of the producer-which brought increased wealth to the companies that produced these goods and added tax revenue to government coffers. However, it also contributed to the wealth inequality between goods-producing and goods-consuming countries.

Pro: The Rapid Evolution of Labor-Saving Inventions
The rapid production of hand tools and other useful items led to the development of new types of tools and vehicles to carry goods and people from one place to another. The growth of road and rail transportation and the invention of the telegraph (and its associated infrastructure of telegraph-and later telephone and fiber optic-lines) meant that word of advances in manufacturing, agricultural harvesting, energy production, and medical techniques could be communicated between interested parties quickly. Labor-saving machines such as the spinning jenny (a multiple-spindle machine for spinning wool or cotton) and other inventions, especially those driven by electricity (such as home appliances and refrigeration) and fossil fuels (such as automobiles and other fuel-powered vehicles), are also well-known products of the Industrial Revolution.

Pro: The Rapid Evolution of Medicine
The Industrial Revolution was the engine behind various advances in medicine. Industrialization allowed medical instruments (such as scalpels, microscope lenses, test tubes, and other equipment) to be produced more quickly. Using machine manufacturing, refinements to these instruments could more efficiently roll out to the physicians that needed them. As communication between physicians in different areas improved, the details behind new cures and treatments for disease could be dispersed quickly, resulting in better care.

Pro: Enhanced Wealth and Quality of Life of the Average Person
Mass production lowered the costs of much-needed tools, clothes, and other household items for the common (that is, nonaristocratic) people, which allowed them to save money for other things and build personal wealth. In addition, as new manufacturing machines were invented and new factories were built, new employment opportunities arose. No longer was the average person so closely tied to land-related concerns (such as being dependent upon the wages farm labor could provide or the plant and animal products farms could produce). Industrialization reduced the emphasis on landownership as the chief source of personal wealth. The rising demand for manufactured goods meant that average people could make their fortunes in cities as factory employees and as employees of businesses that supported the factories, which paid better wages than farm-related positions. Generally speaking, people could save some portion of their wages, and many had the opportunity to invest in profitable businesses, thereby growing their family "nest eggs." The subsequent growth of the middle class in the United Kingdom and other industrializing societies meant that it was making inroads into the pool of economic power held by the aristocracy. Their greater buying power and importance in society led to changes in laws that were updated to better handle the demands of an industrialized society.

Pro: The Rise of Specialist Professions
As industrialization progressed, more and more rural folk flocked to the cities in search of better pay in the factories. To increase the factories' overall efficiency and to take advantage of new opportunities in the market, factory workers were trained to perform specialized tasks. Factory owners divided their workers into different groups, each group focusing on a specific task. Some groups secured and transported to the factories raw materials (namely iron, coal, and steel) used in mass production of goods, while other groups operated different machines. Some groups of workers fixed machines when they broke down, while others were charged with making improvements to them and overall factory operation.

As the factories grew and workers became more specialized, additional teachers and trainers were needed to pass on specialized skills. In addition, the housing, transportation, and recreational needs of factory workers resulted in the rapid expansion of cities and towns. Governmental bureaucracies grew to support these, and new specialized departments were created to handle traffic, sanitation, taxation, and other services. Other businesses within the towns also became more specialized as more builders, physicians, lawyers, and other workers were added to handle the various needs of the new residents.

Con: Overcrowding of Cities and Industrial Towns
The promise of better wages attracted migrants to cities and industrial towns that were ill-prepared to handle them. Although initial housing shortages in many areas eventually gave way to construction booms and the development of modern buildings, cramped shantytowns made up of shacks and other forms of poor-quality housing appeared first. Local sewerage and sanitation systems were overwhelmed by the sudden influx of people, and drinking water was often contaminated. People living in such close proximity, fatigued by poor working conditions, and drinking unsafe water presented ideal conditions for outbreaks of typhus, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. The need to treat these and other diseases in urban areas spurred medical advances and the development of modern building codes, health laws, and urban planning in many industrialized cities.

Con: Pollution and Other Environmental Ills
With relatively few exceptions, the world's modern environmental problems began or were greatly exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution. To fuel the factories and to sustain the output of each and every type of manufactured good, natural resources (water, trees, soil, rocks and minerals, wild and domesticated animals, etc.) were transformed, which reduced the planet's stock of valuable natural capital. The global challenges of widespread water and air pollution, reductions in biodiversity, destruction of wildlife habitat, and even global warming can be traced back to this moment in human history. The more countries industrialize in pursuit of their own wealth, the greater this ecological transformation becomes. For example, atmospheric carbon dioxide, a primary driver of global warming, existed in concentrations of 275 to 290 parts per million by volume (ppmv) before 1750 and increased to more than 400 ppmv by 2017. In addition, human beings use more than 40% of Earth's land-based net primary production, a measure of the rate at which plants convert solar energy into food and growth. As the world's human population continues to grow and more and more people strive for the material benefits promised by the Industrial Revolution, more and more of Earth's resources are appropriated for human use, leaving a dwindling stock for the plants and animals upon whose ecosystem services (clean air, clean water, etc.) the biosphere depends.

Con: Poor Working Conditions
When factories sprung up in the cities and industrial towns, their owners prized production and profit over all else. Worker safety and wages were less important. Factory workers earned greater wages compared with agricultural workers, but this often came at the expense of time and less than ideal working conditions. Factory workers often labored 14-16 hours per day six days per week. Men's meager wages were often more than twice those of women. The wages earned by children who worked to supplement family income were even lower. The various machines in the factory were often dirty, expelling smoke and soot, and unsafe, both of which contributed to accidents that resulted in worker injuries and deaths. The rise of labor unions, however, which began as a reaction to child labor, made factory work less grueling and less dangerous. During the first half of the 20th century, child labor was sharply curtailed, the workday was reduced substantially, and government safety standards were rolled out to protect the workers' health and well-being.

Con: The Rise in Unhealthy Habits
As more cheap labor-saving devices become available, people performed less strenuous physical activity. While grueling farm-related labor was made far easier, and in many cases far safer, by replacing animal power and human power with tractors and other specialized vehicles to till the soil and plant and harvest crops, other vehicles, such as trains and automobiles, effectively reduced the amount of healthy exercise people partook in each day. Also, many professions that required large amounts of physical exertion outdoors were replaced by indoor office work, which is often sedentary. Such sedentary behaviors also occur away from work, as television programs and other forms of passive entertainment came to dominate leisure time. Added to this is the fact that many people eat food that has been processed with salt and sugar to help with its preservation, lower its cooking time, and increase its sweetness. Together, these lifestyle trends have led to increases in lifestyle-related diseases associated with obesity, such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer.

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The Rise of the Machines: Pros and Cons of the Industrial Revolution

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This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society.

Golam Mostafa Sarder starts every day before dawn, rising from a thin reed mat in the shed that he shares with fifteen roommates. Each has just enough space to lie flat. He dresses in gym shorts and t-shirt by the light of a single dangling bulb.

Outside the shed's open doorway, in the outskirts of Dhaka, the sprawling megacity capital of Bangladesh, is the brick factory where Golam and his neighbors work for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at least six months a year. His home in Gabura, a remote village on the country's southwestern coast, is more than a day's journey from the city by bus, rickshaw, and ferry.

Golam's job is to push wheelbarrows of mud down the production line. Waist-high rows of drying bricks spiral off from a towering kiln that belches smoke over an area the size of a city block. By 6 p.m. his lanky frame is spattered in gray mud. The evening air swims with mosquitoes. He has just enough strength left to clean his bare feet and angular face, inhale a dinner of lentils and rice, and collapse back onto his mat.

Golam has never heard of global warming. But he says he knows one thing for sure: "If the river didn't take our land, I wouldn't need to be here."

Bangladesh, a densely populated, riverine South Asian nation, has always survived its share of tropical storms, flooding, and other natural disasters. But today, climate change is accelerating old forces of destruction, creating new patterns of displacement, and fueling an explosion of rapid, chaotic urbanization.A report last week from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the State Department and other foreign aid agencies have not done enough to combat climate change-induced migration in developing countries, and highlighted Bangladesh as particularly vulnerable. And as climate change drives the migration of up to 200 million people worldwide by 2050, Dhaka offers a cautionary tale for refuge cities around the globe.

Interviews with dozens of migrant families, scientists, urban planners, human rights advocates, and government officials across Bangladesh reveal that while the country is keenly aware of its vulnerability to climate change, not enough has been done to match the pace and scale of the resultant displacement and urbanization, toppling any prospect of a humane life for one of the world's largest populations of climate migrants.

"Right now the government's vision is to have no vision," says Tasneem Siddiqui, a political scientist who leads the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit at the University of Dhaka. "It's just that everything is in Dhaka, and people are all coming to Dhaka. And Dhaka is collapsing."

Climate-driven displacement

Bangladesh holds 165 million people in an area smaller than Illinois. One-third of them live along the southern coast, a lush honeycomb of island villages, farms, and fish ponds linked by protective embankments. Most of the country's land area is no higher above sea level than New York City, and during the rainy season more than one-fifth of the country can be flooded at once.

For tens of thousands of years, people living in the vast Ganges Delta accepted a volatile, dangerous landscape of floods and tropical storms as the cost of access to rich agricultural soil and lucrative maritime trade routes.

"People have always coped with flooding, and they learned how to cope with death," Siddiqui says. "But with climate change, many of the damages are permanent. So you have to adapt to a new way of life." ( Learn about Bangladesh's floating hospital.)

Climate change is disrupting traditional rain patterns-droughts in some areas, unexpected deluges in others-and boosting silt-heavy runoff from glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains upstream, leading to an increase in flooding and riverbank erosion. Every year, an area larger than Manhattan washes away. Meanwhile, sea-level rise is pushing saltwater into coastal agricultural areas and promising to permanently submerge large swaths.

Over the last decade, nearly 700,000 Bangladeshis were displaced on average each year by natural disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. That number spikes in years with catastrophic cyclones, like 2009's Aila, which displaced millions of people and killed more than 200. But even in relatively calm years, there is a rising drumbeat of displacement as sea-level rise, erosion, salinity intrusion, crop failures, and repeat inundation make life along the coast untenable.

Overall, the number of Bangladeshis displaced by the varied impacts of climate change could reach 13.3 million by 2050, making it the country's number-one driver of internal migration, according to a March 2018 World Bank report.

"On the coast, we can predict with great certainty that many people living there now will simply not be able to continue there, because their livelihoods will be lost," says Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development and one of the country's leading climate scientists.

As people flee vulnerable coastal areas, most are arriving in urban slums-particularly in Dhaka, one of the world's fastest-growing and most densely populated megacities. The city is perceived as the country's bastion of economic opportunity, but it is also fraught with extreme poverty, public health hazards, human trafficking, and other risks, including its own vulnerability to floods. Already, up to 400,000 low-income migrants arrive in Dhaka every year.

"Dhaka is filled with people who fled their village because it was swallowed by the sea or the rivers," Huq says. "The coming millions will be impossible to absorb."

Today, city planners, policymakers, scientists, and farmers are reinforcing embankments, innovating home design, rebuilding communities, building shelters, and cultivating salt-tolerant rice seeds, among other actions. But they're moving too slowly to help many people like Golam, who survived a series of catastrophic storms only to find that migration was the only viable path remaining.

Golam was a child the first time his family's house was destroyed. He was too young to remember the wind ripping out his father's fruit trees, floodwaters carrying off tea and rice from the family's small shop, the mud walls crumbling, him taking shelter with his mother in a neighbor's house and then, when that too washed away, falling into an empty grave as they ran from the raging riverbank in the dark.

A second storm several years later took their next house. And a third, after that: CycloneAila washed away not only the latest house and everything in it, but also the land on which it stood, the family's last piece of property.

After Aila, Golam's family was homeless, landless, with almost no possessions, and awash in high-salinity water that would silently sabotage fishing and agriculture for the next decade. For a young man with a third-grade education, the brick factory and its promise of hard cash became the only way to feed his family.

"In my childhood, no one used to come out here for work," he says. "But now, from my village, nearly every family sends at least one person."

Golam's family sent two: A couple years ago, his younger brother joined him. Each earns just shy of $1,500 in six months, his total income for the year.

Their only time off is when it rains. On those days, they take a bus to the international airport and stand outside the perimeter fence to watch planes fly in and out, and imagine where they might be going.

"I hope God will look at me kindly," Golam says, "and change my luck." ( Learn about Bangladesh's shipbreakers.)

A city of climate change slums

For climate migrants who arrive in Dhaka, life is seldom easy. Men and boys work in brick factories, drive rickshaws, and build skyscrapers. Women and girls clean houses, stitch Western fashions, and raise families-often fending off sexual violence at multiple steps along the way. Education is a luxury; rent is preposterous. Eviction can come as suddenly as a collapsing riverbank. Home feels very far away.

Sahela Begum, 34, lost her husband to a heart attack in February. She managed to support their four daughters off his life savings for a few months in a town called Naria, on the banks of the Padma River. Then she lost their house. On a sticky evening in August, the riverbank it was on crumbled, sending it downstream along with a dozen of her neighbors' houses.

"When my house was going in the water, I felt like I was having a stroke and might die," she says. "When we lost the house, we ran out of options."

Within a week, she left with her daughters for Dhaka, several hours upstream. They managed to find a room in a slum called Kamrangirchar, near the city center, in a dead-end alleyway behind a cacophonous fabric market built over an old trash dump. She pays around $40 a month, seventy percent of the salary she earns doing domestic work every day, for a darkened, ten-by-ten-foot concrete room under a stairway. Her oldest daughter, 13, also does domestic work, while the 11-year-old stays home to care for the 6- and 9-year-olds. They share three toilets and one four-burner stove with twelve other families living in the alley.

Forty percent of the city's residents live in slums like this, hundreds of which are spread across the city. According to the International Organization for Migration, up to seventy percent of the slums' residents moved there due to environmental challenges.

Slums emerge unplanned and unsanctioned in the backyards of glassy skyscrapers, straddling railroad tracks, on stilts above water-logged floodplains, on the fringes of construction sites. Single beds are frequently shared by five or more family members. Sewage runs freely. Structure fires spread easily. Most electricity, when it's working at all, is tapped illegally from the grid. Insect infestations are inescapable. Skin and gastrointestinal diseases transmitted by dirty water are routine, and the infant mortality rate is twice that of rural areas. Rent money flows into a real estate black market controlled by corrupt local officials and businessmen.

"It's very hard to get a living here," Begum says. "But my life is my childrens' life. If I can make a good future for them, that's the best thing I can hope for." ( Read about Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee crisis, which also has roots in environmental degradation.)

Cities for climate migrants

When Bangladesh gained independence in 1971, the population was 91 percent rural. But as the country began to pivot from an agricultural economy to one diversified into manufacturing and other urban industries, Dhaka exploded. Today, nearly one-third of the population lives in cities, and Dhaka's population is nearly triple that of the country's next three biggest cities combined. The city holds 47,500 people per square kilometer, nearly twice the population density of Manhattan.

Throughout that process of growth, "low-income people were totally left out of the development framework of the city," says A.Q.M. Mahbub, an urban studies researcher at the University of Dhaka. Affordable housing, and public transit connecting the city center to suburbs as is common in megacities in India and China, were never priorities.

Local officials still tend to view slum dwellers as illegal squatters, rather than residents with a right to basic services. Tariq bin Yousuf, a senior official at the Dhaka City Corporation, a government agency that manages the city's infrastructure, says that while the city has plans to build more affordable housing, it prefers to leave slum residents reliant on aid from local and international non-governmental organizations.

"If we invest money directly in slum areas, or give them an electricity supply, they will start to think, 'O.K., we have these facilities, so we have the ownership of this land,'" he says. "Once we give them improved services, they become permanent."

Many of the country's leading public policy experts think that attitude-that climate migrants are a regrettable burden-is short-sighted.

"Climate change and migration you cannot stop," the University of Dhaka's Siddiqui says. "But you can turn them into an opportunity for development."

Mongla, a booming port town on the country's south-central coast, is testing that theory by embarking on an urban overhaul that aims to turn it into a magnet for climate migrants. It's one of several emerging "secondary cities," models of climate-savvy urban planning where investments in sea walls and other adaptive infrastructure are being paired with factories and other blue-collar job opportunities, as well as public services like affordable housing, schools, and hospitals.

"There's no way to stop people coming to Dhaka unless we can attract them to other places," Huq says. "The next ten million could go to these secondary towns. The girls and boys of today, the next generation of citizens."

Mongla has the right ingredients, planners hope. It has a well-established deepwater port, surrounded by a sprawling industrial area with cement factories, diesel fuel mass storage facilities, and two dozen factories with jobs for 4,300 workers producing everything from luggage and electronics to packaged snacks and mannequins. Located in the center of the country's coastal belt, it's big enough to offer opportunities but small enough that there's room to grow.

"We have a master plan for making the city more functional and beautiful," says Mohammed Alauddin, Mongla's deputy mayor. "People used to have to leave Mongla to find work. Now they're coming to work in industry, and staying because of the good living conditions."

So far, local officials have invested in two flood-controlgates; a freshwater treatment and distribution system that Alauddin says has increased the number of houses with running water from one-third of the city's total to one-half; eleven kilometers of pedestrian-friendly riverside brick pathways; two dozen closed-circuit security cameras; a citywide loudspeaker system that can announce inclement weather and broadcast motivational pop music; and four thousand shade trees. Several new apartment towers are under construction, as well as a watchtower from which tourists can peer into the nearby Sundarban mangrove forest.

The investments appear to be paying off. In the last five years, the population has jumped nearly sixty percent to 110,000, and the price of land has skyrocketed. The industrial area is across a river from the town center, and every evening at rush hour the river is jammed with ferries on which passengers stand shoulder to shoulder. And the town's reputation is spreading.

"Because of salinity and flooding, there's not much opportunity in my village. But here, I can make good money," says Mohammed Kabir Hossain, who drives a rickshaw from the industrial area to the ferry station. He came to Mongla a few years ago from Koyra on the southwestern coast. "A lot of people are coming here from across southern Bangladesh, especially those who are unwilling to go to Dhaka."

'Only Allah can save us'

At Golam's family home in Gabura, two low wooden buildings frame a courtyard that opens onto a constellation of rectangular shrimp ponds stretching to the horizon. Immediately behind it is a crumbling ten-foot embankment, no more than three feet across, paved with the same gray bricks that Golam and men from every family here labor far from home to produce. Behind the embankment, a river divides civilization from the uninhabitable Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest. The family lives in fear that their house-on a tiny wedge rented from the village-will again wash away.

Forida Khatun, Golam's mother, shares her son's angular face. She crouches against the exterior wall of the house wrapped in a purple sari with yellow flowers, her arms shimmering in silvery bracelets, shooing away a nosy chicken. In a high, thin voice she recalls how Golam was an energetic, devious child, always in trouble. He loved boats, and once took a canoe out into the mangroves for so long that he was too exhausted to row himself home. That time, Khatun was able to dispatch a few older boys from the neighborhood to rescue him. Now, she worries that he's slipped away from her for good.

"If we had the land still, if the salinity was less, our sons could have managed to stay," she says. "Only Allah can save us. We don't have any power to save our children."

Here, land is wealth, and the family has none left. At the same time, salinity has poisoned the job market as much as it has the water and soil: Many wealthier farmers have converted their rice paddies-a reliable opportunity for paid labor-into salt-tolerant shrimp ponds, which essentially care for themselves.

The corrosive effect of salinity on local agricultural economies could displace up to 200,000 people from coastal Bangladesh, a November study from the International Food Policy Research Institute found. That exodus is already well underway in Gabura.

"Because of climate change, the job opportunities are reducing," says Isharat Jahan Mintu, the chairman of the village government. "And the huge risk of natural disasters makes people want to go to safer areas."

Mintu estimates that the high tide is rising by one foot per year on average, and that one-third of the village's farmable acres have been rendered useless by salinity. Farmers are reluctant to bring more than a fraction of their useable acres into cultivation, for fear of seeing their entire nest egg washed away at once and local banks, seeing the same risk, are stingy with loans. As a result, up to two-thirds of the village's men, including Golam, have left to find work in Dhaka and other cities either temporarily or for good.

As a generation of young people loses faith in what was once one of the most richly productive regions of South Asia, those who remain worry that the village's social fabric will be irreparably damaged. Families are fragmented, children grow up without fathers, and lifelong neighbors turn against one another over land. Parts of the embankment resemble ghost towns, lined with boarded-up shops. No one wants to leave, but many see no way to stay.

"Migration is very emotional," Mintu says. "It makes an emptiness in the heart of the village."

Tim McDonnell's reporting was supported by a National Geographic Storytelling grant. Tim is a former Fulbright-National Geographic fellow and environmental journalist. Follow him on Twitter @timmcdonnell and Instagram@timothy.m.mcdonnell.

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Climate change creates a new migration crisis for Bangladesh

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This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society. Golam Mostafa Sarder starts every day before dawn, rising from a thin reed mat in the shed that he shares with fifteen roommates. Each has just enough space to lie flat. He dresses in gym shorts and t-shirt by the light of a single dangling bulb.

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INCHEON, South Korea - A landmark report from the United Nations' scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has "no documented historic precedent."

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 - a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report "is quite a shock, and quite concerning," said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. "We were not aware of this just a few years ago." The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.

The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.

[How much hotter is your hometown today than when you were born? Find out here.]
For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions - perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 - would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world's largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the world, including in China, the European Union and California, have enacted carbon pricing programs.

President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And on Sunday in Brazil, the world's seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.

The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to prevent warming of more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels - long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees of warming.
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Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows. "It's telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime," said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050, use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.

"This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal," said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report.

The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. In a statement, Katie Warrick, its interim chief executive, noted that forecasts from the International Energy Agency, a global analysis organization, "continue to see a role for coal for the foreseeable future."

Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for governments to invest in carbon capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too expensive for commercial use, could allow coal to continue to be widely used.

Despite the controversial policy implications, the United States delegation joined more than 180 countries on Saturday in accepting the report's summary for policymakers, while walking a delicate diplomatic line. A State Department statement said that "acceptance of this report by the panel does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report."

The State Department delegation faced a conundrum. Refusing to approve the document would place the United States at odds with many nations and show it rejecting established academic science on the world stage. However, the delegation also represents a president who has rejected climate science and climate policy.

"We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement at the earliest opportunity absent the identification of terms that are better for the American people," the statement said.

The report attempts to put a price tag on the effects of climate change. The estimated $54 trillion in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow to $69 trillion if the world continues to warm by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does not specify the length of time represented by those costs.

The report concludes that the world is already more than halfway to the 2.7-degree mark. Human activities have caused warming of about 1.8 degrees since about the 1850s, the beginning of large-scale industrial coal burning, the report found.

The United States is not alone in failing to reduce emissions enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The report concluded that the greenhouse gas reduction pledges put forth under the Paris agreement will not be enough to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming.

The report emphasizes the potential role of a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. "A price on carbon is central to prompt mitigation," the report concludes. It estimates that to be effective, such a price would have to range from $135 to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution in 2030, and from $690 to $27,000 per ton by 2100.

By comparison, under the Obama administration, government economists estimated that an appropriate price on carbon would be in the range of $50 per ton. Under the Trump administration, that figure was lowered to about $7 per ton.

Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning against politicians who support a carbon tax.

"Carbon taxes are political poison because they increase gas prices and electric rates," said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded Washington research organization, and who led the Trump administration's transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.

In addition, it said, the United States along with Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million people who will be exposed to the effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of warming occur.

At 3.6 degrees of warming, the report predicts a "disproportionately rapid evacuation" of people from the tropics. "In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant," said Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and an author of the report. "You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million."

The report also finds that, in the likelihood that governments fail to avert 2.7 degrees of warming, another scenario is possible: The world could overshoot that target, heat up by more than 3.6 degrees, and then through a combination of lowering emissions and deploying carbon capture technology, bring the temperature back down below the 2.7-degree threshold.

In that scenario, some damage would be irreversible, the report found. All coral reefs would die. However, the sea ice that would disappear in the hotter scenario would return once temperatures had cooled off.

"For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then coming back to it is attractive because then they don't have to make such rapid changes," Dr. Shindell said. "But it has a lot of disadvantages."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040 (Published 2018)

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How Climate Change Impacts the Economy

The Fourth National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, warned that if we do not curb greenhouse gas emissions and start to adapt, climate change could seriously disrupt the U.S. economy. Warmer temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather will damage property and critical infrastructure, impact human health and productivity, and negatively affect sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries and tourism. The demand for energy will increase as power generation becomes less reliable, and water supplies will be stressed. Damage to other countries around the globe will also affect U.S. business through disruption in trade and supply chains.

A recent report examined how climate change could affect 22 different sectors of the economy under two different scenarios: if global temperatures rose 2.8˚ C from pre-industrial levels by 2100, and if they increased by 4.5˚ C. The study projected that if the higher-temperature scenario prevails, climate change impacts on these 22 sectors could cost the U.S. $520 billion each year. If we can keep to 2.8˚ C, it would cost $224 billion less. In any case, the U.S. stands to suffer large economic losses due to climate change, second only to India, according to another study.

We are already seeing the economic impacts of the changing climate. According to Morgan Stanley, climate disasters have cost North America $415 billion in the last three years, much of that due to wildfires and hurricanes.

In 2017, Texas's estimated losses from Hurricane Harvey were $125 billion; Hurricane Sandy caused about $71 billion of damages in 2012. And while it's not yet possible to directly link climate change to hurricanes, warmer temperatures and higher sea levels are known to enhance their intensity and destructiveness.

"Science advances also give us more detailed spatial information to say which assets and operations are in harm's way with climate change-for example say, just how many buildings will be inundated due to sea level rise," said climatologist Radley Horton, associate research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. But the indirect economic impacts may be felt long before an actual disaster.

"For example, it's not just whether a building is underwater or not," he said. "What's important are the harder-to-define things like when does societal risk perception shift? It may be that buildings lose their value before the water actually arrives, once people realize that eventually the water's going to arrive. We need deeper thinking about the interconnection between physical and social systems."

Here are some of the many ways that climate change will likely affect our economy, both directly and indirectly.
Agriculture
The sector most vulnerable to climate risk is agriculture.

Environmental economist Geoffrey Heal, a professor in the Columbia Business School, explained that although agriculture makes up a fairly small part of the total U.S. economy, "locally these effects could be big. There are about a dozen states in the Midwest that are very dependent on agriculture and they could take quite a big hit."

They already have. Extreme rainfall events have increased 37 percent in the Midwest since the 1950s, and this year, the region has experienced above normal amounts of rain and snowmelt that have caused historic flooding.

Many fields have washed away and livestock have drowned; Nebraska alone lost $440 million worth of cattle, and as of March, Iowa had suffered $1.6 billion in losses.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expects the coming months to bring even more flooding, which could impact our food supply. To date, farmers have only planted 67 percent of their corn crop compared to last June, when they had planted 96 percent. This lost yield could cause prices for animal feed and ethanol to rise, and potentially disrupt marketplaces at home and abroad. As a result of climate change impacts, the Midwest is projected to lose up to 25 percent of its current corn and soybean yield by 2050.

In addition to flooding, increased heat and drought will likely reduce crop yields. According to a 2011 National Academy of Sciences report, for every degree Celsius the global thermostat rises, there will be a 5 to 15 percent decrease in overall crop production. Many commodity crops such as corn, soybean, wheat, rice, cotton, and oats do not grow well above certain temperature thresholds. In addition, crops will be affected by less availability of water and groundwater, increased pests and weeds, and fire risk. And as farmers struggle to stay afloat by finding ways to adapt to changing conditions, prices will likely increase and be passed along to consumers.
Infrastructure
Much of our society's critical infrastructure is at risk from flooding. "Sea level rise could potentially cause a loss of value of assets in the trillions of dollars-probably anywhere from two to five trillion dollars-by the end of the century," said Heal. "That's loss from damage to housing, damage to airports on the coasts, damage to docks, the railway line that runs up and down the East Coast all of which is within a few feet of sea level, damage to I-95 which runs also along the coast. And that's just the East Coast. If you take a global perspective, this is repeated around the world." Much of this infrastructure will likely need to be repaired or replaced.

Military bases are also vulnerable. According to a 2016 report published by the Center for Climate and Security policy institute, sea level rise could flood parts of military bases along the East and Gulf coasts for up to three months a year as soon as 2050. Inland military installations near rivers are also vulnerable, because they can overflow with heavy precipitation, which is expected to become more common as the atmosphere warms. Extreme weather will necessitate more maintenance and repair for runways and roads, infrastructure and equipment.

In addition, our communication systems will be affected. A 2018 study found that over 4,000 miles of fiber optic cable as well as data centers, traffic exchanges and termination points - the lifeblood of the global information network - are at risk from sea level rise. According to NOAA's sea level rise projections, this infrastructure could be underwater by 2033 because most of it is buried along highways and coastlines. When it was built 25 years ago, climate change was not a concern, so while the cables are water resistant, they are not waterproof. New York, Miami and Seattle and large service providers including CenturyLink, Intelliquent and AT&T are most at risk. Threats to the internet infrastructure could have huge implications for businesses in the U.S.
Human health and productivity
If temperatures rise 4.5˚ C by 2090, 9,300 more people will die in American cities due to the rising heat. The annual losses associated with extreme temperature-related deaths alone are projected to be $140 billion.

Increasing warmth and precipitation will also add to the risk of waterborne and foodborne diseases and allergies, and spur the proliferation of insects that spread diseases like Zika, West Nile, dengue and Lyme disease into new territories. Extreme weather and climate-related natural disasters can also exacerbate mental health issues. The most vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, children, low-income communities and communities of color, will be most affected by these health impacts.

Temperature extremes are also projected to cause the loss of two billion labor hours each year by 2090, resulting in $160 billion of lost wages. Because of heat exposure, productivity in the Southeast and Southern Great Plains regions is expected to decline by 3 percent, and some counties of Texas and Florida could lose more than 6 percent of labor hours each year by 2100. According to a 2014 Rhodium Group study, the largest climate change-related economic losses in the U.S. will be from lost labor productivity.
Tourism
Two billion dollars could be lost in winter recreation due to less snow and ice. For example, rapid warming in the Adirondack Mountains could decimate the winter activity sector, which makes up 30 percent of the local economy.

In addition, as water temperatures increase, water quality could suffer due to more frequent and more intense algae blooms, which can be toxic, thus curtailing recreational water activities and freshwater fishing. More frequent and severe wildfires will worsen air quality and discourage tourism. Sea level rise could submerge small islands and coastal areas, while deforestation and its destructive impacts on biodiversity could make some tourist destinations less attractive.
Businesses and the financial market
Climate change and its impacts across the globe will threaten the bottom line of businesses in a variety of ways. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather, both in the U.S. and in other countries, can damage factories, supply chain operations and other infrastructure, and disrupt transport. Drought will make water more expensive, which will likely affect the cost of raw materials and production. Climate volatility may force companies to deal with uncertainty in the price of resources for production, energy transport and insurance. And some products could become obsolete or lose their market, such as equipment related to coal mining or skiing in an area that no longer has snow.

Whether in the U.S. or abroad, new regulations such as carbon pricing and subsidies that favor a competitor may affect a business's bottom line. A company's reputation could also suffer if it's seen as doing something that hurts the environment. And investors and stakeholders are increasingly worried about the potential for "stranded assets"-those that become prematurely obsolete or fall out of favor, and must be recorded as a loss, such as fossil fuels that many believe should stay in the ground or real estate in a newly designated flood plain.

In 2018, the Carbon Disclosure Project asked more than 7,000 companies to assess their financial risks from climate change. The CDP found that, unless they took preemptive measures, 215 of the world's 500 biggest companies could lose an estimated one trillion dollars due to climate change, beginning within five years. For example, Alphabet (Google's parent company) will likely have to deal with rising cooling costs for its data centers. Hitachi Ltd.'s suppliers in Southeast Asia could be disrupted by increased rainfall and flooding. Some companies have already been impacted by climate change-related losses. Western Digital Technologies, maker of hard disks, suffered enormous losses in 2011 after flooding in Thailand disrupted its production.

PG&E became liable for fire damages and had to file for bankruptcy after its power lines sparked California's deadliest wildfire last fall. And GE cost its investors $193 billion between 2015 and 2018 because it overestimated demand for natural gas and underestimated the transition to renewable energy.

"The movement away from fossil fuels will have a big impact which could affect banks and investment firms that have relationships with the fossil fuel industry," said Heal. "For example, the stock market value of the U.S. coal industry in 2011 was something like $37 billion. Today it's about $2 billion. So anybody that lent a lot of money to the coal industry 10 years back would be in trouble. One of the things worrying those in the financial field is that this could happen to the oil and gas industry. So people who have invested in them or lent money to them are potentially at risk."
Climate change and opportunity
The good news is that climate change also presents business opportunities. The Carbon Disclosure Project reported that 225 of the world's 500 biggest companies believe climate change could generate over $2.1 trillion in new business prospects.

There will be more opportunity in clean energy, resilient and green buildings, and energy efficiency. Hybrid and electric vehicle production and the electric public transit sector are expected to grow. Construction of green infrastructure and more resilient coastal infrastructure could create many new jobs. Carbon capture and sequestration and uses of captured CO2 present opportunities, especially in light of the new 45Q federal tax credits. In addition, there are forward-thinking new businesses-witness the dramatic rise of Beyond Meat, the company selling plant-based burgers at Carl's Jr. and A&W.

As the Arctic sea ice melts, new shipping lines will open up for trade, substantially cutting transport time. The warming Arctic could also offer more prospects for oil and gas drilling. Weather satellites and radar technology will be in demand to monitor extreme weather. Air conditioning and cooling products will be needed around the world. Biotech companies are developing new crops that are resistant to climate change impacts. Pharmaceutical companies expect increased demand for drugs to combat diseases such as malaria and dengue and other infectious diseases. And the market for military equipment and private security services may expand because the scarcity of resources could trigger civil unrest and conflict.
What individuals, businesses and governments can do to protect themselves
How much climate change will hurt the economy depends on what measures we take to adapt to and prepare for it.
Individuals
Individuals need to consider the implications of climate change when choosing where to spend and invest their money. And be aware that while a particular risk may not seem to be factored into prices yet, things could turn on a dime when the realization of risk sinks in, resulting in a massive redistribution of wealth. So it's best not to buy or move to an area near wild lands, which have a higher risk of wildfires. Don't move into a flood zone or buy real estate in an area that's vulnerable to sea level rise. And in any case, purchase flood and fire insurance, and diversify your investments.

Individuals should also think about different opportunities in terms of new places that people are moving to. And, if possible, people who work outdoors in construction, agriculture or tourism should consider alternative jobs within the sector or new industries to work in.
Businesses and financial entities
Businesses need to scrutinize their operations carefully. "There's a groundswell towards the view that any companies that fail to study their exposure to extreme weather and fail to disclose the types of vulnerabilities, including indirect ones, are going to have a hard time in the future," said Horton. "Are companies looking at what's coming down the road and making strategies to deal with it? I think investors are going to demand that and the companies that don't do that are going to have trouble getting underwriting, getting infrastructure funded by the Moody's of the world, and getting insurance." He added that he's seen a change in the last three or four years in what his students are demanding and believes that young people in the future will not work for companies that are not thinking about climate change.

Banks and funds need to analyze where their investments are and see if they are vulnerable to climate change. Have they invested in someone who has coastal property, or given a loan to a fossil fuel company or in agriculture operations that might be affected by climate change? Sixty-three percent of financial risk managers surveyed now believe climate change is a major concern. As a result, "The total value of funds that have integrated environmental, social and governance factors into their investment process has more than quadrupled since 2014, rising to $485 billion as of April," reported the Wall Street Journal.
Governments
Governments should proactively think about the risks their communities face before disaster strikes.

They should be investing in resiliency measures such as hardening infrastructure, improving water resources, building redundancy into important systems, moving people out of harm's way and improving health care services. "You want to do it before the disaster but you also need to be cognizant that the only time people will listen seems to be right after a disaster," said Horton. "Those are also the times when money's available to rebuild."

Government leaders are currently debating whether the country can afford the Green New Deal (an ambitious plan to address climate change) or something like it. The question should be, 'can we afford not to afford it?' Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, wrote in an op ed, "We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another, so it makes sense to spend the money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences... It's a cliché, but it's true: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

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The Fourth National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, warned that if we do not curb greenhouse gas emissions and start to adapt, climate change could seriously disrupt the U.S. economy. Warmer temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather will damage property and critical infrastructure, impact human health and productivity, and negatively affect sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries and tourism.

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In a new report published in September 2018, the world's leading climate scientists made their starkest warning so far: our current actions are not enough for us to meet our target of 1.5C of warming. We need to do more.

It's settled science that climate change is real, and we're starting to see some of the ways that it affects us. It increases the likelihood of flooding in Miami and elsewhere, threatens the millions of people living along the Brahmaputra River in north-eastern India and disrupts the sex life of plants and animals.

So we don't need to ask whether climate change is happening - or whether humans are causing it. Instead, we need to ask: "what can we do?"

What can you do that will have the biggest impact? Here's our guide.
1. What is the single most important thing humanity has to do in the coming years - and what does that mean for me?
The number one goal? Limiting the use of fossil fuels such as oil, carbon and natural gas and replacing them with renewable and cleaner sources of energy, all while increasing energy efficiency. "We need to cut CO2 emissions almost in half (45%) by the end of the next decade," says Kimberly Nicholas, associate professor of sustainability science at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), in Sweden.

The road towards that transition includes daily decisions within your reach - like driving and flying less, switching to a 'green' energy provider and changing what you eat and buy.

Of course, it's true that climate change won't be solved by your buying or driving habits alone - although many experts agree these are important, and can influence others to make changes too (more on that later). Other changes are needed that can only be made on a bigger, system-wide basis - like revamping our subsidy system for the energy and food industries, which continue to reward fossil fuels, or setting new rules and incentives for sectors like farming, deforestation and waste management.

One good example of the importance of this regards refrigerants. An advocacy group of researchers, business-people and NGOs called Drawdown found that getting rid of HFCs (chemicals used in fridges and air conditioning) was the number-one most effective policy to reduce emissions. That's because they are up to 9,000 more warming for the atmosphere than CO2. The good news is that we have made global progress on this, and two years ago 170 countries agreed to start phasing out HFCs in 2019.
2. Changing how industries are run or subsidised doesn't sound like anything I can influence... can I?
This is important because we need "unprecedented changes in all aspects of society to deal with climate change, says the IPCC report. "Everyone is going to have to be involved," says Debra Robert, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group tasked with the report.
3. Other than that, what's the best daily action I can take?
You can. Individuals need to exercise their rights both as citizens and as consumers, Robert and other experts say, putting pressure on their governments and on companies to make the system-wide changes that are needed.

Another way, increasingly undertaken by universities, faith groups and recently even at a countrywide level, is to 'divest' funds out of polluting activities - such as avoiding stocks in fossil fuels, or banks that invest in high-emission industries. By getting rid of financial instruments related to the fossil fuel industry, organisations can both take climate action and reap economic benefits.
4. But isn't renewable energy extremely expensive?
One 2017 study co-authored by Lund University's Nicholas ranked 148 individual actions on climate change according to their impact. Going car-free was the number-one most effective action an individual could take (except not having kids - but more on that on that later). Cars are more polluting compared to other means of transportation like walking, biking or using public transport.

In industrialised countries such as European nations, getting rid of your car can reduce 2.5 tonnes of CO2 - about one-fourth of the average yearly emissions (9.2 tonnes) contributed by each person in developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
5. Could I make a difference by changing my diet?
"We should choose more efficient vehicles and, whenever possible, switch directly to electric vehicles," says Maria Virginia Vilarino, co-author of the mitigation chapter in the IPCC's latest report.

Actually, renewables like wind and solar are becoming increasingly cheap across the world (although final costs are subject to local circumstances). The latest report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) found that several of the most commonly used renewables, like solar, geothermal, bioenergy, hydropower and onshore wind, will be on par with or cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020. Some are already more cost-effective.

The cost of utility-scale solar panels has fallen 73% since 2010, for example, making solar energy the cheapest source of electricity for many households in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In the UK, onshore wind and solar are competitive with gas and by 2025 will be the cheapest source of electricity generation.

Some critics argue that these prices disregard the price of integrating renewables on the electricity system - but recent evidence suggests these costs are 'modest' and manageable for the grid.
6. How harmful are my flying habits?
That's a big one, too. In fact, after fossil fuels, the food industry - and in particular the meat and dairy sector - is one of the most important contributors to climate change. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the US.

The meat industry contributes to global warming in three major ways. Firstly, cows' burping from processing food releases lots of methane, a greenhouse gas. Secondly, we feed them with other potential sources of food, like maize and soy, which makes for a very inefficient process. And finally, they also require lots of water, fertilisers that can release greenhouse gases, and plenty of land - some of which come from cleared forests, another source of carbon emissions.

By reducing your consumption of animal protein by half, you can cut your carbon footprint by more than 40%

You don't have to go vegetarian or vegan to make a difference: cut down gradually and become a 'flexitarian'. By reducing your consumption of animal protein by half, you can cut your carbon footprint by more than 40%. A larger-scale approach could be something like banning meat across an organisation, as office-sharing company WeWork did in 2018.
7. Should I be shopping differently?
This explainer of sustainable diets by the World Resources Institute (WIR) and its longer associated report provides more answers to questions about food and carbon emissions.

Planes run on fossil fuels, and we haven't figured out a scaleable alternative. Although some early efforts to use solar panels to fly around the world have had success, we are still decades away from commercial flights running on solar energy.
8. Should I think about how many children I have (or don't have)?

A normal transatlantic flight can release around 1.6 tonnes of CO2 - almost as much as the average yearly emissions of one person in India.

A normal transatlantic flight can release around 1.6 tonnes of CO2, according to Nicholas's study - almost as much as the average yearly emissions of one person in India. This also highlights the inequality of climate change: while everyone will be affected, only a minority of humans fly and even fewer people take planes often.

There are groups of scientists and members of the public who have decided to give up flying or who fly less. Virtual meetings, holidaying in local destinations or using trains instead of planes all are ways to cut down.

Wondering how much your travel contributes to climate change? Measure your carbon emissions in this calculator by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
9. But if I eat less meat or take fewer flights, that's just me - how much of a difference can that really make?
Most likely. That's because everything we buy has a carbon footprint, either in the way it is produced or in how it is transported.

For instance, the clothing sector represents around 3% of the world's global production emissions of CO2, mostly because of the use of energy to produce attire. The hectic pace of fast fashion contributes to this figure as clothes are discarded or fall apart after short periods.
10. What if I just can't avoid that flight, or cut down on driving?
International transport, including maritime and air shipping, also has an impact. Groceries shipped from Chile and Australia to Europe, or the other way around, have more 'food miles' and usually a higher footprint than local produce. But this is not always the case, as some countries grow out-of-season crops in energy-intensive greenhouses - so the best approach is to eat food that is both locally grown and seasonal. Even so, eating vegetarian still beats only purchasing local.[DA1]

Nicholas's study concluded that having fewer children is the best way to reduce your contribution to climate change, with almost 60 tonnes of CO2 avoided per year. But this result has been contentious - and it leads to other questions.

One is whether you are responsible for children's climate emissions, and the other is where are these babies born.

If you are responsible for your kids' emissions, are your parents responsible for yours? And if you are not, how should we consider the fact that more people will likely have more carbon emissions? We also could ask whether having offspring is a human right beyond questioning. And we could ask if having children is necessarily a bad thing for solving climate change: our challenges may mean we will need more problem-solvers in future generations, not fewer.

Those are hard, philosophical questions - and we're not going to try to answer them here.

What we do know is that no two people have the same emissions. Although the average human releases around 5 tonnes of CO2 per year, each country has very different circumstances: developed nations like the US and South Korea have higher national averages (16.5 tonnes and 11.5 tonnes per person, respectively) than developing countries like Pakistan and Philippines (around 1 tonne each). Even within national borders, richer people have higher emissions than people with less access to goods and services. So if you choose to take this question into account, you have to remember that it's not just about how many children you have - it's where (and who) you are.

Actually, it's not just you. Social scientists have found that when one person makes a sustainability-oriented decision, other people do too.

Here are four examples:

Social scientists believe this occurs because we constantly evaluate what our peers are doing and we adjust our beliefs and actions accordingly. When people see their neighbours taking environmental action, like conserving energy, they infer that people like them also value sustainability and feel more compelled to act.

If you simply can't make every change that's needed, consider offsetting your emissions with a trusted green project - not a 'get out of jail free card', but another resource in your toolbox to compensate that unavoidable flight or car trip. The UN Climate Convention keeps a portfolio of dozens of projects around the world you can contribute to. To find out how many emissions you need to 'buy' back, you can use its handy carbon footprint calculator.

Whether you are a coffee farmer in Colombia or a homeowner in California, climate change will have an impact on your life. But the opposite is also true: your actions will influence the planet for the coming decades - for better or for worse.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Ten simple changes to help save the planet

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We know that climate change is happening - but there are plenty of things individuals can do to help mitigate it. Here's your handy guide to the most effective strategies.

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ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- So what's the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that'll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

The one that -- if not solved soon -- renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?

News flash: the "Billionaires Club" knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the "home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan," reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was "given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an 'umbrella cause' that could harness their interests."

The world's biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.

And yet, global governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren't even trying to solve the world's overpopulation problem. G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth's population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion says the United Nations.

And what about those billionaires and their billions? Can they stop the trend? Sadly no. Only a major crisis, a global catastrophe, a collapse beyond anything prior in world history will do it. Here's why:

Civilizations collapse fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist, Pulitzer prize winner and author of "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

Other voices are darker, shrill: "We're past the point of no return." "It's already too late." "The end is near." As with Rome's collapse, it happens fast. Clueless leaders are caught off-guard, like Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson a couple years ago.

Call it "WWIII: The Population Wars." A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that "climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues" Population unrest would then create "massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes." And "by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening ... an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life." War will be the end-game: For capitalism, civilization, earth?

Diamond's 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare scenario: "More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources ... There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth called the 'demographic bulge' with a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people." And if the "bulge" stops for any reason, game over. Economic "growth" ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond's equation has 12 time-bombs. But note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10 are derivative variables.

1. Overpopulation Multiplier

According to TimesOnline: A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: "Official [U.N.] projections say the world's population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive health care, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion." Still, that's 23% more than today's 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called "the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment." Why? Population's the new "third-rail" for politicians. So they ignore it.

Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we'd need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America's population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.

2. Population Impact Multiplier

Diamond warns: "There are 'optimists' who argue that the world could support double its human population." But he adds, they "consider only the increase in human numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it's current impact." And yet, that's exactly what happens with "all third-world inhabitants adopting first-world standards."

Folks, we oversold the American dream. Now everyone wants it. Not just 300 million Americans, but 6.3 billion people worldwide are demanding more, more, more!

"What really counts," says Diamond, "is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment," the "per-capita impact." First-world citizens "consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World." So the race is on: "Low impact people are becoming high-impact people" aspiring "to first-world living standards." The American dream is now the global dream.

Warning: The "Impact Multiplier" will drive the global "WWIII-Population Wars" equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond's masterpiece, "Collapse," the two key variables are what we call the "Over-Population Multiplier" and "Population Impact Multiplier." Now let's closely examine Diamond's other 10 variables that are driving our "WWIII-Population Wars" equation:

3. Food

Two billion people, mostly poor, depend on fish and other wild foods for protein. They "have collapsed or are in steep decline" forcing use of more costly animal proteins. The U.N. calls the global food crisis a "silent tsunami." Food prices rise making it worse for the 2.7 billion living below poverty levels on two dollars a day.

In "The End of Plenty," National Geographic warns that even a new "green revolution" of "synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds" may fail. Why? A joint World Bank/U.N. study "concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world's poor."

Meanwhile, a Time cover story warns that America's "addiction to meat" has led to farming that's "destructive of the soil, the environment and us."

4. Water

Diamond warns: "Most of the world's fresh water in rivers and lakes is already being used for irrigation, domestic and industrial water," transportation, fisheries and recreation. Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: "Today over a million people lack access to reliable safe drinking water." British International Development Minister recently warned that two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries by 2015.

Water will trade like oil futures as wars are fought over water and other basic essentials noted earlier in Fortune's analysis of the Pentagon report predicting that warfare will define human life in this scenario of the near future.

5. Farmland

Crop soils are "being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 to 40 times the rates of soil formation," much higher in forests where the soil-erosion rate is "between 500 and 10,000 times" replacement rate. And this is increasing in today's new age of the 100,000-acre megafires.

6. Forests

We are destroying natural habitats and rain forests at an accelerating rate. Half the world's original forests have been converted to urban developments. A quarter of what remains will be converted in the next 50 years.

7. Toxic chemicals

Often our solutions create more problems than they solve. For example, industries "manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals" that break down slowly or not at all. Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics ... the list is endless.

8. Energy resources: oil, natural gas and coal

Pimco manages $747 billion: equity, bonds and commodity funds. Manager Bill Gross recently described a "significant break" in the world's "growth pattern." He's betting we're past the "peak oil" tipping point. Consumer shopping will continue declining as economies grow very slowly in the future and "corporate profits will be static."

A recent issue of Foreign Policy Journal warns of the "7 Myths About Alternative Energy." Are biofuels, solar and nuclear the "major ticket?" No, they're not, never will be.

9. Solar energy

Sunlight is not unlimited. Diamond: We're already using "half of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity" and we will reach the max by mid-century. In "Plundering the Amazon," Bloomberg Markets magazine warned that Alcoa, Cargill and other companies "have bypassed laws designed to prevent destruction of the world's largest rain forest ... robbing the earth of its best shield against global warming."

Free market capitalism may be the enemy of survival.

10. Ozone layer

"Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere" where they can destroy the protective ozone or absorb and reduce solar energy.

11. Diversity

"A significant fraction of wild species, populations and genetic diversity has been lost, and at present rates, a large percent of the rest will disappear in half century."

12. Alien species

Transferring species to lands where they're not native can have unintended and catastrophic effects, "preying on, parasitizing, infecting or outcompeting" native animals and plants that lack evolutionary resistance.

In spite of the clear message in Diamond's 12 time-bombs, he still says he's a "cautious optimist." What fuels his hope? Our leaders need "the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions."

Unfortunately, history tells us that cautious leaders are myopic, driven more by self-interest and nationalism than courage and long-term thinking. Eventually they're caught off guard and their worlds collapse, fast. They only respond to crises.

And, yes, out of crisis may come opportunity. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman put it in his classic, "Capitalism and Freedom:" "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change" because in the aftermath of crisis "the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." Too many, however, delay and respond to crises with too little, too late.

Bottom line: The betting odds are 100% that global leaders will wait for a Pentagon-style "black swan" crisis before acting. Unfortunately, that delay positions the "WWIII: The Population Wars" dead ahead.

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The coming Population Wars: a 12-bomb equation

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So what's the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that'll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

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The current rate of global warming could raise sea levels by "several meters" over the coming century, rendering most of the world's coastal cities uninhabitable and helping unleash devastating storms, according to a paper published by James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who is considered the father of modern climate change awareness.

The research, published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, references past climatic conditions, recent observations and future models to warn the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will contribute to a far worse sea level increase than previously thought.

Without a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global sea level is likely to increase "several meters over a timescale of 50 to 150 years", the paper states, warning that the Earth's oceans were six to nine meters higher during the Eemian period - an interglacial phase about 120,000 years ago that was less than 1C warmer than it is today.

Global warming of 2C above pre-industrial times - the world is already halfway to this mark - would be "dangerous" and risk submerging cities, the paper said. A separate study, released in February, warned that New York, London, Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai will be among the cities at risk from flooding by 2100.

Hansen's research, written with 18 international colleagues, warns that humanity would not be able to properly adapt to such changes, although the paper concedes its conclusions "differ fundamentally from existing climate change assessments".

The IPCC has predicted a sea level rise of up to one meter by 2100, if emissions are not constrained. Hansen, and other scientists, have argued the UN body's assessment is too conservative as it doesn't factor in the potential disintegration of the polar ice sheets.

Hansen's latest work has proved controversial because it was initially published in draft form last July without undergoing a peer review process. Some scientists have questioned the assumptions made by Hansen and the soaring rate of sea level rise envisioned by his research, which has now been peer-reviewed and published.

Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said the revised paper still has the same issues that initially "caused me concern".

"Namely, the projected amounts of meltwater seem ... large, and the ocean component of their model doesn't resolve key wind-driven current systems (e.g. the Gulf Stream) which help transport heat poleward," Mann said in an email to the Guardian.

"I'm always hesitant to ignore the findings and warnings of James Hansen; he has proven to be so very prescient when it comes to his early prediction about global warming. That having been said, I'm unconvinced that we could see melting rates over the next few decades anywhere near his exponential predictions, and everything else is contingent upon those melting rates being reasonable."

Hansen was one of the first scientists to push climate change into the public's consciousness, following a series of appearances before Congress in the 1980s. He retired from his role at Nasa in 2013 and has become increasingly outspoken about the need to slash emissions, criticizing last year's Paris climate deal as a "fraud" because it didn't go far enough.

His new research warns that water gushing from melted glaciers is already influencing important ocean circulations near both poles. The added cold water risks "shutting down" the North Atlantic heat circulation, triggering a series of storms similar to Hurricane Sandy, which hobbled New York City in 2012.

"If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large-scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters," the paper states. "The economic and social cost of losing functionality of all coastal cities is practically incalculable."

Hansen said the world was "pretty darned close" to the point of no return, warning that emissions need to be cut by about 6% a year in order to stabilize the climate.

"What we are threatening to do to young people is irreversible, it's irreparable harm," he said. "This is something they didn't cause but will be out of their control. Among the top experts, there's agreement that this is very urgent, we can't continue on this path hoping that emissions will go down, we have to take actions."

Hansen reiterated his call for a global tax on carbon, denying that the roles of scientist and advocate for change are conflicted.

"This isn't advocacy, this is what is needed," he said. "We are allowing fossil fuel companies to use the atmosphere as a free waste dump. If scientists don't say it then politicians will tell you what's needed and that will be based upon politics rather than science. I don't see any reason to not make the whole story clear, or to draw a line and say 'I'm not going to step beyond this.'"

Tom Wagner, Nasa's program scientist for the cryosphere, said Hansen has done an "amazing job" in providing a "provocative" piece of research on sea level rise.

"It's an interesting paper as it's one of the few times when all of these different fields have been combined," he said. "It is at odds with some research from other places. He's made a great effort to combine the Eemian period to what is happening today, which is hard to do. It's a tough one.

"We know that our knowledge of ice sheet behavior is imperfect, and this is a paper that really gets into that question. We are narrowing down the error bars all the time."

Scientists recently expressed alarm at the record heat that has baked the planet in the first few months of 2016, which follows a year that was the warmest on record.

These record temperatures, aided by a strong El Niño event, come as nations appear to be slowing the growth of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the excess heat. Recent figures show the world emitted 32.1bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from energy in 2015, on a par with 2014, while accelerating the shift to renewable energy.

Nevertheless, humanity is still pumping out CO ₂ into the atmosphere at a rate 10 times faster than at any point in the past 66m years, with the resulting sea level rises, extreme weather events, coral bleaching and drought already evidenced around the globe.
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Climate guru James Hansen warns of much worse than expected sea level rise

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The current rate of global warming could raise sea levels by "several meters" over the coming century, rendering most of the world's coastal cities uninhabitable and helping unleash devastating storms, according to a paper published by James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who is considered the father of modern climate change awareness.