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.
Faced with the evidence, many deniers have started to admit that global warming is real, but argue that humans have little or nothing to do with it.
Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.".
The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.
The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.
Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.
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