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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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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