Conscious Climate: Introduction
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Over the last two centuries greenhouse gases from land-use changes and the burning of fossil fuels have so augmented the natural heat-trapping effect of Earth’s atmospheric blanket as to alter the energy balance of the entire planet, causing global temperatures to rise at rates exceeding anything seen within the last several hundred thousand years.
Scientists now warn that a business-as-usual response risks triggering a cascade of natural feedbacks that could accelerate warming far beyond our ability to reign it in, and towards a catastrophic and irreversible new climate equilibrium, in a process marked by disappearing glaciers and ice-sheets, rising sea-levels, devastated ecosystems, shifting disease ranges, massive extinctions, extensive crop failures and severe-weather calamities - in short, towards a planet vastly different from the one that made us.