Climate change is an existential threat to the human race. That would require the countries of the world to live up to the most ambitious of the goals of the Paris climate change agreement, and keep the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. A rise of even half a degree above that, to 2C, will have effects that are very much worse. This kind of twisted rationality exacerbates the dangerous physical effects of climate change. It is not the direct effects of climate change alone but their indirect effects on the political and economic structures of the world that make it a genuinely existential threat.

Source: The Guardian October 08, 2018 17:26 UTC