Imagine a world in which Rogue Waves made the oceans too dangerous for ships to sail, and we had to stop cruise liners and container ships from sailing. It would change our world as we know it.
It is an extreme and alarmist scenario, with one of the worst cases for the impact of climate change and global warming. It’s designed to keep us thinking about what needs to be done to mitigate the impact of extreme weather on our world.
TRANSCRIPT
The United Nations has just announced that it highly recommends that all ships move to the closest safe harbour and remain there for the foreseeable future. That’s right. It’s February 2052 and the oceans are too dangerous for us humans.
My name is Graeme Codrington. This is ThrowForward Thursday, where every week we jump into the future and see what’s going on there. Today we jump forward 30 years to a moment when climate change and extreme weather has not just affected the world that we live in, is not just giving us harder rainfall, more violent storms. In 2024, they’re even considering adding a category six to the severity levels of hurricanes that we measure. It’s not just hotter and drier summers with fires impacting us, it is now affecting our oceans as well.
As the top layer of water in oceans around the world heats up more, and that’s really where a lot of the heat gets retained on our planet. Then that colder water from the bottom layers of the ocean and from the two poles interact. These create significant shifts in the tides and in the currents of the big oceans. And it is very likely that this will result in bigger and possibly much more frequent rogue waves.
That’s what we call them at the moment, and they’ve been the curse and scourge of sailors throughout history. These massive waves that come from nowhere and just every now and again, we hear the legends of these and now that we’re measuring ocean surface movement, we’re able to see where they happen. But if rogue waves become more predictable and become more common on the oceans, they will make any form of shipping on the ocean, whether that is tourist liners, even the biggest, most stable tourist ships, or, of course, the shipping containers that move most of our goods around the planet. They will make all of these exceptionally dangerous and much more difficult to navigate. Not just in some of the more violent oceans that are already difficult, but almost everywhere across the planet.
Yes, it’s a fairly alarmist and dramatic scenario to ask us to imagine that we live in a world where no ships are capable of going out of any harbours and almost like a lockdown for ships and a quarantine for ships because the ocean is unsafe. Yes, alarmist and dramatic, and it’s designed to get you thinking about the impact of climate change and extreme weather on the way that the world works.
But it’s not a completely unrealistic scenario and it’s one that’s designed to get your attention and to ask you, along with all the other reasons to do something, to ask you to do something about changing the way we live on this planet so that we can keep living on this planet and not be impacted by extreme weather and climate change.
A message from the future to remind us of how precious our planet is and what we need to do to protect it. I look forward to seeing you next week as we jump back into the future, hopefully with something a little bit more fun and exciting and not so scary. I’ll see you then.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.