Famed asset manager Jeremy Grantham called upon the world to wake up to the threat of global warming, pollution and the depletion of the world's natural resources in a new white paper that concluded human civilization is in a race for its survival—and is losing.

"Thirty years ago, the dire predictions of leading climate scientists were laughed at," wrote the founder of Boston-based asset manager GMO. "Now we watch these predictions coming true and ignore the data or pretend to. So, as the world starts to burn up, we twiddle our thumbs and talk about 'just another heat wave!' God help us."

The white paper, entitled "The Race of Our Lives Revisited," was released Wednesday and represents an expansion of a warning Grantham originally put forth in one of his quarterly investor letters in April 2013 and, more recently, at Morningstar's annual investment conference in June.

In his latest warning, Grantham goes into more detail on the global threats, using 35 pages of data and charts to lay out why human society should be urgently acting to address global warming, population growth and environmental destruction, and how these problems may soon contribute to a worldwide food shortage.

The root of the problem, as Grantham sees it, is that people have never been good at dealing with "long-term, slow-burning problems" and are instead more concerned about how to "stay alive and well-fed today."

"Beyond that we have a history of responding well only to more immediate and tangible threats like war," he wrote, adding that, in a bad turn of luck, today's political environment is trending in a way that only adds to the problem.

"We face a form of capitalism that has hardened its focus to short-term profit maximization with little or no apparent interest in social good," Grantham wrote. Making matters worse, he added, is that corporate influence over government "has grown so strong that only the biggest, most powerful corporations and the very richest individuals have any real say in government.”

"The timing could not be worse," he continued. "It is likely we in the U.S. will lose—indeed, we are losing already—the stable and reasonable society that we have enjoyed since the Great Depression."

Grantham argued that the environmental threats are accelerating and reaching a critical point, despite the fact that green technologies are booming and accounting for an increasingly larger share of the world's power consumption. But even as solar, wind and other green technologies surge, he wrote, it is expected that 50 percent of energy consumption will still be driven by fossil fuel by 2050.

Meanwhile, he argued, global warming is accelerating, as is the damage it is causing to the environment and human society. For example, he wrote, since 1950 the number of floods is up by 15 times; there have been 10 times as many deaths from droughts; wildfires are up sevenfold; and extreme temperature events are 20 times what they were.

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