I’m a climate scientist and I think society will collapse by 2050. Here’s how I’m preparing
Professor Bill McGuire hasn’t always had such fatalistic thinking about climate disaster. But since COP26 he has been forced to formulate a plan for survival
In 27 years’ time, society as we know it will have collapsed. Food will be extremely limited. Lawlessness will have taken over the land. Gangs will roam the countryside scavenging for resources like food, water and fuel. This breakdown won’t be sudden. It will happen over a period of months. It might even have already begun.
This may sound like a cliché dystopian fantasy, but Bill McGuire, a professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London (UCL) and author of Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide, doesn’t think so. He is expecting, and preparing, for widespread riots by 2050. The riots will begin, he says, as they have throughout history, when we run out of food.
McGuire hasn’t always had such fatalistic thinking. As a professor he had remained hopeful throughout his career that politicians would be able to enact systemic solutions to the problem of global warming. But then came Glasgow COP26 in November 2021. For the entire conference, McGuire was enraged that policymakers appeared to be focusing their efforts on ways to keep global temperatures within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. “It was bloody obvious that wasn’t going to happen,” he says.
And he may be right. Researchers have since reported there is now a 66 per cent chance that Earth will surpass this warming threshold anytime between 2023 and 2027. Now McGuire is taking matters of survival into his own hands. But before he tells me his plan, McGuire pauses. “I think we do need to set the scene,” he says.
McGuire is exasperated as he speaks. He starts by explaining an infamous 1972 study, “Limits To Growth”; a model that predicts the world economy will collapse by 2100. When it was published, it was met with controversy and criticism. “Its models show that we can’t grow infinitely on a tiny planet with limited resources and accumulating pollution,” says McGuire. “It says that society and the economy would likely collapse by mid-century. The updates to this model, which are from 2021, don’t really show anything different.”
Grimly, McGuire likens the human population to bacteria in a petri dish. When these bacteria multiply, uncontrollably, their number becomes so big that they can no longer sustain themselves in the dish. At this point, they die.
That’s before we even consider the overheating of the planet. “If we burn all fossil fuels, then we’ll likely end up with a global average temperature rise of around 16°C. That would mean much of the Earth would be uninhabitable for humans,” he says.
The first thing to go would be the food. “Really, a few days without food and things fall apart. There’s one projection that by 2050, crop yields may be down by up to 30 per cent, at a time when the world will need 50 per cent more food [to account for population growth],” says McGuire. “That is a halving of food per person on the planet. If that’s realised, that is a recipe for mass hunger and the complete breakdown of order as people just desperately try and get food.”
McGuire warns that relying on importing food could be a problem. “Britain imports about 46 per cent of its food. And if elsewhere in the world that food isn’t there, we won’t have it.” In August, India banned all exports of non-basmati rice because of crop failures. “This is because of climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “When that sort of thing happens, countries hang on to their own food and unfortunately for Britain, we don’t grow much.”
This, then, is where McGuire’s plan begins. “I’m incredibly lucky because I live in an old stone house in a small village, with about an acre of land,” he explains. McGuire made the conscious decision to move his wife and two sons out of London in 2003 to the Peak District.
His house in the city was becoming unbearably hot during the summer heatwaves. “We didn’t move here thinking things were going to fall apart very soon,” he clarifies. “We moved because of global heating, which is of course contributing to things falling apart.”
Now in the countryside, McGuire’s house has walls that are two-thirds of a metre thick, to keep the heat out. He also has the space to be able to grow most of his own fruit and vegetables. He is collecting seeds so that he is able to harvest a selection of produce.
Then there is the water supply. He says it is important to be self-sufficient. “I am doing a lot of rainwater harvesting. The summers in Britain will be seeing consistent temperatures of 40 degrees plus, so water is going to be a huge issue,” says McGuire. Now, his home has a collection system across his home, with gutters taking water to stores that can hold thousands of litres.
Fuel is another essential that McGuire has ticked off. “We have solar panels and a log boiler, so our heat is actually from logs,” he says. “We’re at least on the way to becoming self-sufficient. But even then, it’s not enough in its own right.”
Regardless of all these measures that McGuire has taken, he still doesn’t believe it will be enough to survive for long as an isolated family. “If we are going to see the collapse of society and the economy, then it’s going to be unbelievably hard for everyone, it’s going to be a Wild West,” he says. “If society collapses, there will be no nobody to keep on top of the water supply, nobody to stop gangs roaming the countryside.”
McGuire has spoken with his two teenage sons about the prospect of climate catastrophe. “My 13-year-old is still too young to grasp all the implications, I think, but we can talk openly about how things are going to be hard for him and his brother in the years and decades ahead,” he says. “It don’t think it serves any purpose hiding this sort of thing, I think.”
Above all, McGuire reiterates the need for community in this bleak future. “The bottom line is that nobody can survive on their own,” he says. “And no household can survive on their own. A community would have to work together to try and muddle through as best they can: A village of 500 people or a block of flats with 100 people.”
His words hang in the air. “If we are to have any chance of survival, we need to co-operate, I think that’s absolutely critical.”
