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.
That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.
Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, 'There goes some of the primordial universe.'
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.
If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.
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