Humanity's progress may be in peril as climate change sweeps in | Mint - Mint
Humanity's progress may be in peril as climate change sweeps in | Mint
Humanity's progress may be in peril as climate change sweeps in
Project Syndicate , Angus Deaton 12 min read 31 Dec 2023, 10:18 PM IST
Summary While progress has been made over the past 250 years, recent events suggest a reversal of fortune. Climate change poses the biggest threat to continued progress, and political arrangements have undergone profound changes.
It has been 10 years since I wrote The Great Escape, which tells the story of how human life improved over the past 250 years, particularly in terms of longevity and material living standards. But the past decadeHI has been unkind to my overwhelmingly positive account. My observation that “life is better now than at any time in history" may have been true in 2013, but it probably is not today, even for the typical person. The question is whether this reversal will be temporary, or whether it is only the beginning of worse to come. Do recent events demand that the basic story be retold?
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.