clair031

Summary .   The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) has issued four climate Assessment Reports between 1990 and 2007, warning about the perils of emitting greenhouse gases and the resulting global warming and its impacts on human society.   These phenomena originate largely from humanity’s burning of fossil fuels.   The dangers include higher global temperatures, regionally dependent worsening of heat waves and drought, or rainfall and flooding, and sea level rise with attendant worsening storm surges. The Assessment Reports and a recent article by Stocker point out that embarking early on mitigation measures makes it easier to constrain the overall warming and its attendant harms to humanity, whereas delay removes the easier paths of mitigation from consideration and requires more stringent, more expensive mitigation to be undertaken  later to make up for the opportunity lost by not starting earlier. It is concluded that an important way forward cou...