Takeaways from Climate Change Class

If you don’t want to spend the time on the course, here are some things worth knowing.

  1. We are at the beginning of a long period of sustained climate change.
    1. Plan for change.
    2. The climate will not behave as it used to behave.
    3. The emerging signal of a changing climate offers us opportunities to learn and to prepare for the future.
    4. Even if we were to achieve all of the emission reduction goals of the Paris Agreement, we will still have decades of climate change.
    5. Our climate will not be stable.
  2. We must reduce and manage carbon dioxide emissions to maintain our ability to adapt
    1. We need to reduce emissions, mitigate.
    2. We need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
      1. Biological sinks
      2. Carbon dioxide capture and sequestration: Manufactured sinks
  3. The changing climate will be characterized by:
    1. Increasing average, global surface air temperature, and the accumulation of heat in the environment.
    2. Rising sea level
    3. Melting of historically stable masses of ice on land
    4. Changing weather
  4. What we experience in 10 or 20 years is likely to be different, qualitatively, than what we experience in 90 or 100 years. For example, it might be wet in 20 years and dry in 100.
  5. There is no one, uniform outcome of climate change. For example, hurricanes behave in many ways today. They will behave in those same ways in the future. All types of behavior will be affected by a warming planet.
  6. We should expect the weather to be more variable, and there will be new extremes of behavior.

 

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