politicartoons | The Newsroom and Climate Change

Newsroom interview about Climate Change

While the interview is fictional, the information contained in it is not. A lot of the fictional EPA official's information was based on a study co-conducted by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. When the fictional EPA official stated that people alive today would likely die from catastrophic planetary failure, that was based a real analysis of data.

Although the study based on HANDY is largely theoretical - a 'thought-experiment' - a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.

Source.

But unlike the ACN interview, the NASA report does offer a faint glimmer of hope:

Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.