Anyone born today can witness the end of the world - understand

Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner has startled the world by making a serious statement some time ago: 100 years from now there will be no human life on our planet. The justification is relatively simple: we are creating an uninhabitable world.

Fenner, whose work has been recognized since his struggle in the 1970s to eradicate smallpox, is not optimistic about the end of the world. According to him, there are three factors that are leading us to human extinction: overpopulation, lack of natural resources and climate change.

While the scientist's prediction is not considered to be really accurate, a few years ago he has warned us of certain issues that need urgent rethinking, such as the minimal and insufficient effort we make to reduce the monstrous amount of polluting substances we send all the time to the atmosphere.

In the end, Fenner believes there is no way to reduce the damage we have done so far. Decreasing the number of pollution seems to be just the easiest part of the job that could change the direction of the thing. The most difficult part of this mission would be to develop technological means to reverse this long-apocalyptic process.

In 2007 Sir David King, scientific adviser to the British government, said: “Avoiding dangerous climate change is impossible - dangerous climate change is already here. The question is, can we avoid catastrophic climate change?

Following Fenner's reasoning, we can conclude from King's statement that either this is alarmism or, worse, we are in a scenario that simply cannot be changed. Columnist David Auerbach, who writes for Reuters, believes it is high time for us to change our energy sources and actually reduce the amount of pollutant emissions.

Currently, the goal is not to let the global temperature rise more than 2 ° C. By 2100 this increase is forecast to be 5 ° C, which is enough to cause flooding, famine, drought, sea level rise and mass extinction. Moreover, this rise in temperature would bring us close to 6 degrees Celsius, which is a point that could leave our planet uninhabited, destroying most species.

Although the US, the European Union and China have committed to the United Nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the effort is not enough. Auerbach used the thinking of journalist Bill McKibben to assess the issue: the planet's average temperature has now risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, and even if carbon dioxide emissions were completely halted now, the earth's average temperature would rise by a further 0.8. ºC.

This would happen because there would still be a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Doing a simple math account, we realize that we have only 0.4 ° C until we reach the temperature limit increase, which, in time, gives us about 30 years. That is: in three decades the situation tends to be really ugly.

With these data, which are real, it is unfortunately easy to understand Fenner's statement that a child born today can live to see the end of humanity. And what is known on the subject is that all the effort to slow down this process is still minimal.

This year, in November, there will be a conference in France, which should discuss precisely these climate issues. The hope is that some technological solution will emerge and give us a chance to gain more time to think of some strategy that not only reduces carbon dioxide emissions but gives us other ways to live without destroying our own home. Unfortunately, we have reached this point.