Quora Answer: What is Something That Would Cause Terror in the World Right Now?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is something that would cause terror in the world right now?”

If people are smart enough, climate change should be enough.  Most have not understood the consequences, politically, economically, and in terms of basic survival.

Coastal Cities and the Water Table

Many coastal cities will become uninhabitable due to rising tides.  The World Meteorological Organisation projects the population exposed to a 100-year coastal flood could roughly double if global mean sea level rises 0.75 metres, and the IPCC estimates over one billion people globally will be exposed to coastal-specific climate hazards by 2050.  Shanghai, Dhaka, Bangkok, Jakarta, Lagos, Cairo, London, New York, and Los Angeles all sit on the WMO’s own list of major cities under direct threat.  Rising tides do not merely flood streets.  Saltwater intrusion contaminates freshwater aquifers, and Bangladesh’s Bhola Island offers a documented preview: half the island was submerged in 1995, leaving 500,000 people homeless in a single event, with scientists projecting Bangladesh will lose 17% of its land to climate-driven flooding by 2050.  A drowned aquifer does not merely displace people from their homes.  It removes their drinking water at the same time.

Food, Migration, and Conflict

Changing weather patterns will adversely affect food supply, driving up the price of staples and producing shortages.  Increased desertification in continental interiors will accelerate displacement of both animals and people.  Estimates for climate-driven displacement by 2050 range from the World Bank’s 216 million internally displaced to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s worst-case figure of 1.2 billion people at risk under combined climate and civil unrest pressure.  Even the World Bank’s Groundswell Report, its most conservative published estimate, projects 143 million people displaced, 86 million from Sub-Saharan Africa alone.  Displacement at this scale strains the resources of even the wealthiest nations, and it accelerates conflict over water and arable land directly.  A 2007 to 2010 drought in Syria, among the worst in the country’s modern history, drove large-scale rural-to-urban migration that fed directly into the tensions preceding the civil war, according to research cited by the Climate Change Academy.  Climate change does not need to cause a war on its own.  It only needs to remove the food and water buffer that was previously keeping an existing tension contained.

Water, Weather, and the Compounding Disasters

Climate change will affect ocean salinity and alter currents, reshaping weather patterns worldwide, producing drought in some regions and devastating floods in others.  As ice melts, atmospheric water content rises, increasing precipitation intensity.  Heavier rainstorms and snowstorms mean more flash floods, avalanches, and landslides.  A 2022 drought in East Africa alone left 37 million people facing food insecurity, worsened further by reduced wheat imports following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a direct illustration of how climate stress compounds with unrelated geopolitical shocks rather than arriving in isolation.

This is not the extinction of humanity.  It is a measurable rise in death and suffering, concentrated disproportionately among the nations least equipped to absorb it, with South Asian economies alone projected to lose 1.8% of GDP by 2050, rising toward 8.8% by 2100.  The greater loss sits beyond the human ledger entirely, in the biodiversity this trajectory is already quietly erasing, and biodiversity, once gone, does not come back on any timeline that matters to the people currently deciding whether to take any of this seriously.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code