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On 10/13/2014 10:16 AM, Savinainen Antti wrote
<http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/67/10/10.1063/PT.3.2548>
Yes, that's a really nice paper.
I particularly like this passage:
We simply don’t know — and probably can’t know — precisely how climate
will change or how resilient our society will be to the impacts that
result.
We need to start talking in regional terms, not just purely global
terms. The sources of the problem are highly variable from region
to region, and then the CO2 spreads globally, and then the effects
are highly variable from region to region. The disconnect between
cause and effect is part of the problem.
For example, Bangladesh is not emitting all that much CO2. On the
other hand, it is safe to predict that Bangladeshi society and
culture will not survive. They are going to get wiped out by sea-
level rise.
Again:
We simply don’t know — and probably can’t know — precisely how climate
will change or how resilient our society will be to the impacts that
result.
History tells us that it is very hard to predict how a society
will respond to stress.
By way of analogy, it is easy to point to a stand of trees
and say "they were killed by beetles". That may be true in
some narrow sense, but it at the same time it completely misses
the point, because if the trees had not been stressed by climate
change they would have been able to fight off the beetles.
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