Chart of the Century: Cooking The Planet

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate