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Click here for a larger view of the image below.
graphic from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change
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included, have the similar notion that climate change will be a one-time adjustment from a relatively stable environment to another different, but still relatively stable environment2.
We’re wrong.
FUNDAMENTALS
We cannot regard climate change as the increase in Earth’s surface temperature to an absolute number of degrees by a certain year, clarified Dworkin. To do so would be ignoring what Dworkin identifies as “four fundamental and vital points”:
- “Things will keep on changing after whatever year is plugged into our predictions
- The most important shift is from stability to volatility…with things being both warmer and colder in various places at various times and shifting more rapidly back and forth between them
- The ‘predictions’ of some event at some time are, when done by serious analysts, not really predictions…they are statements about the mid-points of some ranges of more or less probable outcomes: it is just as likely that the events will happen faster than predicted as that they will happen more slowly
- The most commonly stated assumptions are based on assumptions of relatively gradual change…they do not explicitly work in the potential for abrupt climate shift2.”
Simply put, the assertion that climate change poses a threat to life on Earth
because it
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