Cooling down the climate discourse: communicating about collapse

Extract

Ripple and colleagues (2024) argued that “climate change could contribute to a collapse” of civilization “by increasing the likelihood of catastrophic risks such as international conflict or by causing multiple stresses, resulting in system-wide synchronous failures.” The article and figures therein have been widely shared online by those concerned by the possibility of modern societal collapse from climate change. In particular, Ripple and colleagues’ figure 5f, which is a histogram titled “Risk of Societal Collapse,” has received great attention. However, there is a mismatch between the main text description of figure 5f and its title.

The main text of Ripple and colleagues (2024) states that figure 5f shows evidence that “the number of published articles using climate change and societal collapse language has been dramatically increasing.” It is therefore unclear that figure 5f justifies its title “Risk of Societal Collapse.” Whether or not the rising number of papers containing climate change and societal collapse language is evidence of increasing risk of societal collapse depends entirely on the nature of the papers being cited. Are these papers quantitative? Are they scientific? Are they in support of the possibility of collapse, or do they argue against it? Do they refer to modern society or instead to past societies?