In July of this year, during record-smashing heat waves and forest fires, a group of scientists published “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” exploring the risk that climate feedbacks could lead to runaway heating and a “Hothouse Earth.” Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, and Katherine Richardson — from the Universities of Stockholm, Australia, and Copenhagen, with colleagues from Stanford, Cambridge, Potsdam, The Netherlands, and elsewhere — published the paper in the US
If your colleague or child does well and you give her or him positive feedback, that’s good.
If climate change causes a cascade of impacts that result in additional climate change — which scientists call "positive feedback" — that’s bad, and maybe catastrophic.
“The Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions. … Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System."
Can the global climate be stabilized before runaway change creates conditions that are too hot for human civilization and deadly for most species?
Victor Wallis’s new book is an important contribution to the growing ecosocialist movement, a passionate call to organize and act against capitalist ecocide