Thoughts on the climate crisis and entrepreneurship

Our planet has warmed over 1 degree since the industrialization of societies and is on trajectory to hit 1.5 degrees in 5 years. Scientists warn us that going beyond the 1.5 degrees will cause cascading effects that can accelerate the warming by 3-4 degrees.

How do the cascading effects work? For example, polar ice cover reflects a lot of the sunlight back to the space. When the ice cover is gone, the heat from the sunlight gets absorbed to the ocean water instead.

Oceans already absorb vast majority of the extra warmth caused by global warming, leading to further melting of the polar ice caps, glaciers and heating of the land interfacing with oceans. We have only felt a sliver of the true warming cost of fossil fuel emissions, and will pay a price for this later.

Siberia and other arctic areas have a massive amount of methane stored in the permafrost. When the permafrost melts, the methane is released into the atmosphere. Ice holes in lakes are becoming torches of fire - see the GIF. Methane (CH4) is 30 times more potent gas than carbon dioxide (CO2).

These are just a couple of examples of the cascading effects from the warming. What you need to understand is that even if we stop the current emissions, the cascading effects will cause the warming to continue for a long time to the future.

What happens if we hit the 4 degree mark?

Many coastal cities will drown, and we will see increased risk for famine due to disruptions in food production.

Saharan desert will expand to cover southern Europe. We will see unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics, rendering equatorial tropics uninhabitable for most of the year.

Extreme weather conditions become frequent, including high intensity tropical cyclones. We will see irreversible loss of much of our current biodiversity, including losing the coral reef systems.

The warming will cause mass migrations at a scale that will make the world turbulent and conflict-ridden. Many original cultures will go extinct.

If we don't take decisive action now, this new reality awaits us already in 2060s, about 40 years away.

The humanity will probably survive this, given that we can repopulate the earth even with a few hundred individuals in a fertile age. But why are we inviting such a terrible future upon ourselves?

The importance of impact entrepreneurship

This is one of the many reasons why it so important that more people decide to become impact entrepreneurs. We need to be building solutions that save us from our own undoing.

We need to be focused and resourceful in our quest to building sustainable and regenerative alternatives to the current products and services.

We need to build carbon neutral sources of energy, means of travel and food production.

We need to make the buildings we live in more ecological.

We need to move our consumption from atoms to bits.

We need to change our financial models from extractive to regenerative.

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When you are thinking of your next startup, think on your success in terms of positive impact.

That is how true unicorns are built.

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