(OPINION) EcoWatch – Deforestation coupled with the rampant destruction of natural resources will soon have devastating effects on the future of society as we know it, according to two theoretical physicists who study complex systems and have concluded that greed has put us on a path to irreversible collapse within the next two to four decades, as VICE reported.

The research by the two physicists, one from Chile and the other from the UK, was published last week in Nature Scientific Reports. The researchers used advanced statistical modeling to look at how a growing human population can cope with the loss of resources, mainly due to deforestation.

After crunching the numbers, the scientists came up with a fairly bleak assessment of society’s chance of surviving the climate crisis. “Based on the current resource consumption rates and the best estimate of technological rate growth our study shows that we have a very low probability, less than 10 percent in the most optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse,” the authors write in the study abstract.

From all the issues that the climate crisis raises like rising sea levels, increases in extreme weather, drought, flooding, and crop failures, scientists zeroed in on deforestation since it is more measurable right now. They argue that forest density, or its current scarcity, is considered the cataclysmic canary in the coal mine, according to the report, as The New York Post reported. READ MORE