What is the difference between a 2°C world and a 4°C world? Human civilisation!
Interpretation
The quote highlights the significant impact of temperature increases on human civilization and the environment.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber emphasizes the profound consequences of climate change by contrasting a 2°C rise in global temperatures with a 4°C rise. The implication is that even small increases can lead to drastic changes in conditions that sustain human civilization, suggesting that climate action is crucial to preserving our way of life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a climate change awareness speech to emphasize the importance of limiting global warming.
Either the Earth System would undergo major phase transitions as a result of unchecked human pressure on nature's capacities and resources or a "Great Transformation" towards global sustainability would be initiated in due course. Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets.
The problem of neurology is to understand man himself.
When the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetical computation, the result will appear most astonishing to those...not in the habit of reflecting how many of the mightiest of operations in nature are effected insensibly, without noise or disorder.
In the development of antibiotics, the soil microbiological population has contributed more than its share. It is to the soil that the microbiologists came in search of new antibacterial agents.
If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space.
The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
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