Climate change on a live Earth

Abstract

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are taken by world leaders as authoritative, so much so that their predictions are used to frame legislation and policy. However, the IPCC has not overestimated climate change, they have, instead, underestimated the severity of global heating mainly because they paid too much attention to our emissions of carbon dioxide and not enough to the Earth's response. For the past 44 years I have worked on a differentway of looking at the Earth, seeing it as a dynamic system that actively regulates the climate and the atmospheric composition to keep the planet habitable. The Earth does not passively accept what we do to it. It responds to climate change and that response is far more deadly than the small change that we are making. Gaia theory teaches that the Earthsystem can act as an amplifier and small changes either to heat or cold are intensified and this could be the cause of the erratic shifts of temperature. In this article I will try to show that stopping climate change may be more difficult than our governments believe. Our task, should global heating continue, is to adapt and prepare to survive.