The world is changing, but people’s opinions aren’t. Amongst a global pandemic, record breaking hot summers, fears of AI causing a global financial crisis, and even constant new discoveries in UFO conspiracies, the concept of human extinction becomes something that you’d simply rather not think about.
Despite everything we’ve been through as a species over the past decade, the general opinion on threats to humanity hasn’t changed much. We are continuously blinkered by the inexplicable human belief that we are untouchable. YouGov has conducted three surveys over the past eight years on public opinions of human extinction, and the data shows that we have learned very little.
Despite COVID-19, public opinion on a pandemic causing human extinction has only marginally changed in the past eight years. In 2016, 27% of people surveyed viewed it as a threat to the human population. This only rose to 30% in 2022 after the pandemic, and then fell again to 29% in 2023.
While most of the public do not believe that there will be any threat of human extinction in the next one thousand years, nuclear war ranks the highest among people’s concerns. The public fear of nuclear extinction has almost doubled in the last eight years, rising from 38% of people viewing it as a threat in 2016, to 43% in 2022, and 61% in 2023. As a John Hopkins University study into nuclear war has shown, there is little to no scientific evidence to support a nuclear threat to humanity.
In January 2022, five countries; the USA, Russia, France, the UK and China, pledged to prevent nuclear war and avoid an arms race. Somewhat suspiciously, the only countries with any major collection of nuclear weapons are the USA and Russia, with 5244 and 5889 respectively (in what could be described as a neck and neck… race), the next highest being China with 410 (as of October 2023).
As these countries stated, there is no winning nuclear war. If you wipe out one country, another will wipe you out. No nuclear weapons have been used since Hiroshima, and the money being funnelled into creating more seems to merely be some sort of display of who can ruffle their feathers up to make themselves look as big and scary as possible. People are more concerned with political conspiracies than with the imminent reality that the entire population is facing.
Unlike nuclear war, the threats being denied are those with solid scientific evidence behind them, and they are becoming closer to reality. Research shows the “wet-bulb” temperature, which would make Earth uninhabitable, is 35 degrees Celsius, only 12 degrees higher than our current global temperature. By 2050 the planet is expected to have warmed by another 1.5 degrees. At this rate, the planet could become inhospitable within 200 years, less than ten generations from now.
YouGov surveyed people from 25 different countries on their opinions of climate change. When comparing the list of the world's most polluting countries to the countries with the highest percentage of climate change deniers, the overlap is staggering. The USA, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia all sit in the top ten on both lists.
When we calculate the average percentage of climate change deniers across these countries, we get 11.64%. If you take this percentage and use it for the global population, that’s almost 950 million climate change deniers on the planet. Considering that historically, 71% of the world’s carbon emissions have been created by just 100 companies, this is certainly enough to cause irreversible damage.
Ironically, the country with the largest contribution to climate change scores amongst the lowest in terms of climate change denial. China produces 30% of the world’s CO2 emissions but only 7% of their population deny climate change, at least showing some self-awareness.
One of the lowest threats the public believes the government should have a contingency plan for is the bees dying. As our main pollinators, this would not only decimate crops, but therefore feed for livestock, leading to no meat or dairy, and unfertilized land. People fail to see the importance of this issue. Something so small, insignificant, and often viewed as a minor irritation, surely can’t represent the future of our planet. This brings us to Greta Thunberg.
The next generation are out on the streets protesting seemingly as soon as they start walking, they have decided to take matters into their own hands and save their own futures. Instead of filling deniers with a protective instinct to continue our race, they label these issues as children’s concerns, of no importance in the real world, and allow them to divide us further.
It’s as if we willingly deny the chance to unite for a shared cause. Both sides are guilty of getting more caught up in the debate over which threats are real and why than stopping to do anything about them.
We are not dinosaurs facing the threat of a meteor, woolly mammoths facing the end of the ice age, elephants facing humans, tigers facing humans, or rhinos facing humans. We are humans facing humans. We are blinded either by guilt or righteousness, and we cannot accept that what we have done to others we are now doing to ourselves.
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