Quotes of the Week - “The impacts of human-caused climate change are no longer subtle”

“The impacts of human-caused climate change are no longer subtle – they are playing out, in real time, before us,” says Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University in the US.  “They serve as a constant reminder now of how critical it is that we engage in the actions necessary to avert ever-more dangerous and potentially irreversible warming of the planet.”

It was just last December when the world’s nations sealed a deal in Paris to defeat global warming but Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, says: “These [records] are very worrying signs and I think it shows we are on a crash course with the Paris targets unless we change course very, very fast.  I hope people realize that global warming is not something down the road, but it is here now and it affecting us now.”

“What is happening right now is we are catapulting ourselves out of the Holocene, which is the geological epoch that human civilization has been able to develop in, because of the relatively stable climate,” says Rahmstorf.  “It allowed us to invent agriculture, rather than living as nomads.  It allowed a big population growth, it allowed the foundation of cities, all of which required a stable climate.”

Read more at Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn by Damian Carrington, Guardian, June 17, 2016