By Michael Snyder – The Economic Collapse Blog
Is the strongest and most powerful nation on the planet headed for an apocalypse which will bring it to its knees? We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable, and apocalyptic themes have become very common in books, movies, television shows and video games. It is almost as if there is an unconscious understanding on a societal level that something very big and very bad is coming, even if the vast majority of the population cannot specifically identify what that is going to be. Last week, the Global Challenges Foundation released a new report entitled “Global Catastrophic Risks 2016” in which they discussed various apocalyptic events that they believe could wipe out more than 10 percent of the population of our planet, and they warned that these types of events “are more likely than we intuitively think”…
Sebastian Farquhar, director at the Global Priorities Project, told the Press Association: “There are some things that are on the horizon, things that probably won’t happen in any one year but could happen, which could completely reshape our world and do so in a really devastating and disastrous way.
“History teaches us that many of these things are more likely than we intuitively think. Many of these risks are changing and growing as technologies change and grow and reshape our world. But there are also things we can do about the risks.”
According to this new report, we are five times more likely to die from the various apocalyptic catastrophes that they analyzed than we are from a car accident.
In this article, I want to discuss some of the most important threats that they analyzed, in addition to adding some of my own to the list. But first I want to mention that I do not believe that the Global Challenges Foundation is correct to identify climate change as one of the most significant catastrophic threats that humanity is facing. Our climate has always been changing, and I do believe that we will see wild climate shifts in the years ahead. However, human activity plays an exceedingly small role in all of this, and there is not very much that we can do to prevent what is going to happen either. Most of the climate change that we are going to see in our future is going to be as a result of other catastrophes in this list, so I have not included it as a separate item.
With that being said, let’s quickly examine some of the potential threats identified by the Global Challenges Foundation…
Supervolcanoes
In various locations around the globe, there are gigantic supervolcanoes which could dramatically change the course of human history in a single moment by erupting. In the United States, the Yellowstone supervolcano is becoming increasingly active, and a full-blown eruption could potentially be up to 2,000 times more powerful than the eruption of Mount St. Helens back in 1980. As I mentioned the other day, major metropolitan areas such as Salt Lake City and Denver would be essentially destroyed, food production in this country would be virtually wiped out, and a “volcanic winter” would cool global temperatures by up to 20 degrees for up to several years.
About the author:
Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years.
Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream.
Read his new book Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming.
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