Artificial evolution due to climate change

World has moved from saying that climate change is a threat to humanity to now saying it is directly killing people

The world has gradually moved from saying that climate change is a threat to humanity to now saying, with scientific proof that climate change is directly killing people. Nowhere is this truer than in India and Pakistan, the two nations that are trying to annihilate each other using nuclear weapons. They might both vaporise with heat before the nuclear war is triggered. And that is not a hyperbolic statement at all.

Pakistan is the epicentre of a worldwide wave of death and disease stemming directly from climate change. The Washington Post conducted an analysis of the climate data, leading scientific studies, expert interviews and journalistic reporting from some of the hottest places on Earth. The analysis of the heat related diseases proved how countries such as Pakistan are ill-prepared to deal with the monumental task of providing healthcare for climate patients, if you will.

One of the worst results of climate change is extreme heat. In order to document that, the Post and CarbonPlan, which is a non-profit organisation, analysed climate data based on a measure called wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), which takes into account humidity, how hot the air is, radiation and wind speed. This allows scientists to determine how heat stresses the human body. According to their findings, Pakistan experiences some of the most intense heat globally experienced anywhere. Cities such as Jacobabad and Hyderabad would soon become so hot that people will find health risks even in the shade.

The analysis also showed that such extreme heat would be experienced by 500 million people by the year 2030, which is only about 7 years away. And 190 million of those people would be from Pakistan. The entire population of the country stands at around 250 million. Do the math. And about 270 million would be from India in that unfortunate extreme heat demographic, if you will.

In Sindh, healthcare experts of women and children say that they are seeing a rise in miscarriages, low birth weight of babies and decreased production of breast milk. Extreme heat affects the heart and kidneys.

I was watching a movie titled The Titan. In it, a science project injects certain chemicals inside the bodies of a few astronauts so that they can become resilient to the environment of the Titan, which is the largest moon of the planet Saturn. The idea behind the bold scientific experiment is artificial evolution where instead of waiting for millennia for humans to adapt to their environment, what if we could evolve them faster in order to make them resilient enough where they can live on another world and find another home for earthlings.

We may be doing the same without realising it. Climate change is human caused. It is not impossible that humans might adapt to live in this extreme heat that is going to knock on their doors very soon, if it already hasn’t, or else they’d vanish. But we are the species that got here because we fought our way here. We survived the extremely harsh mother nature because we are the fittest. Either we’d have to fit in by developing body features that would help in preventing our bodies from overheating. Maybe we would develop larger lungs, larger noses, skinnier physiques and larger pores to allow cooling off of the body faster or maybe just maybe, we must stop the use of fossil fuel and completely achieve zero carbon emissions and keep our cute physical features.

Either that or another generation of the same or similar human race would come after us, which would be driven by total rationality. It would be capable to realise that the use of fossil fuel is driving us all toward our annihilation and therefore, we must never use it. But such a rationality based human race would mean they would be anything but us. That would most certainly be an evolution brought about not by natural causes but by human caused climate change.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 22^nd, 2023.

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