10. THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO
Men argue. Nature acts.
- Voltaire
When planning missions in Afghanistan, we’d always look at two scenarios when planning for what could happen; the most likely and the most dangerous, or worst-case, scenario. From a personal standpoint, one of the most dangerous scenarios was the possibility of getting separated from your unit, which actually happened to me on my first tour.
It was mid-March, and we’d been advancing along a mountain nearly 10,000 feet in altitude in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, a place that had seen snow just a week before. We’d dropped our rucksacks so we could make better time as we closed on suspected Taliban positions, but when night came, we decided we needed the equipment, food and warm gear we’d left behind and so we sent back work parties to gather our rucks.
I missed the departure of these teams because I was getting orders, and so when I was done with passing on all the information, I decided to follow the trail since I didn’t want anyone else to have to carry my kit. I’d been all over that part of the mountain that same day, I figured, so finding my way would be dead easy.
Turns out, the only thing that was dead easy was being utterly wrong. (To be fair, any senior Non-Commissioned Officer worth their rank would argue that being wrong comes easy to Lieutenants).
In any event, I managed to find the cache of ruck sacks without too much hassle, although I almost got shot by one of our own soldiers who’d been left to guard the equipment. After we sorted that out, I discovered my own ruck had already been carried off. Maybe the adrenaline of that encounter accounted for why I got turned around heading back to our patrol base, or, more likely, it was just me being the clichéd new lieutenant with his head up his ass. At any rate, it wasn’t long before I’d set off on my way back that nothing looked familiar. Because I was very aware of the embarrassment I’d suffer from getting off track, I was hesitant to radio in that I’d gotten turned around, and so I kept on marching along in the dark.
Now at that time, night vision goggles (NVGs) were a relatively new piece of equipment for us, and uncomfortable to wear for long periods, so when I eventually realized I wasn’t where I was supposed to be and stopped to put mine on, you can imagine my distress at discovering my route had been taking me toward the valley floor, where the Afghan villages were.
What had been anxiety at potential embarrassment from getting lost quickly shifted to near panic at being cut off from my platoon, and me with only what I’d been carrying that day. Then, after a few steadying breaths, I looked back at where I’d come from and glimpsed a few of the blinking infrared beacons we all wore on our helmets to identify ourselves to friendly planes overhead looking for targets to bomb. Like runway lights, I followed those beacons back to our patrol base, and promptly told nobody about what had happened. Ever since, though, I’ve had an appreciation for how worst-case scenarios can easily happen given just a few poor decisions.
Ever since that experience, I’ve really understood the need for every soldier to have a go-bag, some small pack containing the essentials they’d need to make it on their own in hostile landscape for 48 to 72 hours. There are a lot of different opinions on the minimum gear needed in a go-bag – the more that’s in there, the more you have to carry and the more it slows you down – but the bare essentials would probably be: food, water, a few first aid supplies, and something to keep you warm and dry, which might very well include fire starters.
The methodology of preparing for the worst-case scenario can also be applied to climate change, but first we have to accept that the world is not on track to keep global temperature rise below 2°C, not even close1. Quite the opposite actually. As of 2021, total global greenhouse gas emissions were not only not decreasing, or even slowing down, but continuing to rise year after year. The only exception was in 2020, when the rate of increase dropped slightly due to emissions decreases during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even then, the rate of emissions was still higher than the 10-year average for that period2.
At this point, short of dramatic near-term cuts in emissions – which seems unlikely – limiting temperature rise to 2°C is effectively a Hail Mary that relies on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) measures. The problem is that these technologies have never been deployed at scale, and in some cases, the technology doesn’t even exist yet3.
Still, the worst-case scenario isn’t that the world misses 2°C before temperatures stabilize, or, for argument’s sake, even 3°C. The worst-case scenario is Hothouse Earth. In this scenario, temperature rise crosses a planetary threshold that creates cascading tipping points, like the loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which could potentially change currents in the Atlantic Ocean that leads to accelerated loss of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet4.
In Hothouse Earth, compound hazards create feedback loops that worsen the drivers, like thawing Arctic permafrost releasing methane5, not to mention the ensuing famine, extreme weather events and vector-borne diseases that come with continued warming. Ultimately, Hothouse Earth sees us unable to stop temperature rise no matter what we do, and preventing this scenario by putting our communities ahead of ourselves is a call to action for everyone.
United Nations Environment Programme, Emissions Gap Report 2019: Executive Summary, https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30798/EGR19ESEN.pdf?sequence=13, page VIII, Accessed 5 Mar 2020
World Meteorological Organization, WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletion: The State of Greenhouse Gases in the Atmosphere Based on Global Observations through 2020., No. 17 (25 October, 2021).
James Temple, ‘The UN climate report pins hopes on carbon removal technologies that barely exist,’ MIT Technology Review, August 9, 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/09/1031450/the-un-climate-report-pins-hopes-on-carbon-removal-technologies-that-barely-exist/, accessed November 15, 2021.
Will Steffena, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” PNAS, August 14, 2018 vol. 115 (33), https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/33/8252.full.pdf, accessed 1 Jun 2023.
Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, and Timothy M. Lenton. (2022). “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic climate change scenarios,” in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, 119 (34). https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119, accessed 5 Aug 2022.