Cascading Climate Collapse

The single most likely “world-ending” pathway is not one sudden event, but a climate-driven cascade: accelerating warming destabilizes food systems, water supplies, ecosystems, coastlines, and economies at the same time. These pressures amplify migration, conflict, disease risk, and state failure, making coordinated global response increasingly difficult.

Unlike nuclear war or rogue AI, climate collapse is already underway, globally distributed, and self-reinforcing through feedback loops such as ice loss, forest dieback, ocean warming, and methane release. The most plausible end scenario is therefore a long breakdown of civilization: repeated crop failures, resource wars, infrastructure collapse, and political fragmentation until humanity can no longer sustain complex global society.