Chart of the Century: Cooking The Planet

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What happens if we do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions and end up in a worst case climate change scenario a century from now?  A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a look at the likely effects of very high global warming and concludes that large swathes of the world — including the East Coast of the United States — would become pretty much uninhabitable. In the map below, that’s all the yellow and light purple areas.

Stuart Staniford has the details. But don’t worry. It’s only 5% likely that things will ever get this bad. Or the scientists might have miscalculated. It might only be 1% likely. Those are pretty good odds, right?

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Managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom is staggeringly hard. There’s no cushion in our budget—no backup revenue, no corporate safety net. We can’t afford to fall short, and we can’t rely on corporations or deep-pocketed interests to fund the fierce, investigative journalism Mother Jones exists to do. That’s why we need you right now. Please chip in to help close the gap.

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