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.
In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.
The gravest threat faced by the world is of an extremist group getting hold of nuclear weapons or materials.
The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.
Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding - such is the role of a scientist.
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.