Interesting stuff although you might want to adapt the title slightly. I read it hoping to discover a smart way to explain risk multipliers, and a good run-down on probability in lay language. I really haven't found anything that gives people a clear idea of what on earth all these IPCC socio-economic scenarios are about and how they combine with climatological predictions. My lay attempt to cut through people's disinterest is to ask whether they know why people are scared of lions but not climate change. Always hits the mark, but doesn't actually say much - a lion in savanna:
is visible (there it is!)
has historical precedence (it ate your brother last week!)
is immediate (there is the lion - act now or be killed!)
has direct impact (the lion is going to eat you!)
has simple causality (the lion is going to eat you and you are going to be dead!)
is caused by an enemy (the lion!)
I think Daniel Kahneman was right - humans are perfectly adapted to ignore climate change.
For example, some assessments decry government entities not spending enough time on emissions reductions, but politicians and budgeteers have a primary responsibility to their specific jurisdictions. This means that budgeting for local protection against storms, fire and flood—which immediately affect their constituents—has priority over spending money to cut emissions which affect the entire planet but only benefit the community in a negligible way. And beside which, handing out contracts for construction projects is a time-honored way for politicians to solicit, um...campaign contributions.
For those reading these comments, I'd like to note that I've described the historical development of ideas about impacts in perhaps excessive detail at https://history.aip.org/climate/impacts.htm
... 2025 version, the 2026 annual update will be posted in a few weeks.
A great breakdown of "climate risk" Andrew! We are not headed into an iceberg but it is headed unto us.
When I saw hazard, I immediately, subconsciously, prefixed the adjective "moral". Then prefixed"moral" to all of climate risk and it's components. In the end we'll lose at climate craps unless we care alot more.
I just got back from a backcountry skiing and avalanche safety course. The instructor literally went off the same risk framework for avalanche safety: Hazard, Vulnerability, Exposure.
It's serendipitous to see the exact same model applied to a different arena. Thanks Andrew!
Thank you for sharing this chapter. We have a farm in south Central Kansas and the effects of climate change to 2 degrees centigrade will make food production almost beyond vulnerable. Crops and cattle are so stressed already from excessive heat, drought, and seasonal shifts that I do not see a future in farming as we know it. When the baby boomer generation is gone, the next generation of farmers will have to farm by completely different means since plants and animals can’t evolve fast enough to sustain life in the extremes. Never mind the wealthy coastal elites, mind the farm producers and who will be able to feed the world of 9-10 billion people. Food vulnerability is on the verge of collapse at 1.5 degrees increase. We are inundated with people wanting to buy our land not for farming but for energy production.
I also garden to regenerate the land and to increase insect diversity and soil health. In 53 yrs of gardening, insect decline and other flora and fauna decline is devastating. The willful ignorance that prevails not just in the Republican ranks but in city dwellers is devastating since we have gone beyond the point of saving the environment to the point of trying to salvage life in general.
Say it ain’t so and then please tell me how to save our grandchildren from the hardship to come in a very few years.
NB: The Lower Ninth* flooded after a barge that was allowed to stay in the Industrial Canal broke loose during the storm and rammed through the wall (not levee), causing massive, high-powered flooding of the neighborhoods behind the wall. Many of the nearby homes were just washed off their piers, and the giant barge was left sitting on top of several houses and trees for a long time.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the IC, the levees that failed →below their rated specification← did not result in as physically violent an event.
________________
*"Lower" means it was further downriver, and doesn't refer to elevation. As in the rest of the city, the parts of the Lower Ninth Ward right along the Mississippi River didn't flood at all, but that whole residential area was considered low priority anyway. In New Orleans, people who had to struggle with recovering from the flooding referred to those higher-elevation neighborhoods as "The Isle of Denial."
Well done! The vulnerability reduction at the global scale is even more profound, most notably in Bangladesh with cyclone resilience causing a manyfold drop in fatalities from comparable storms in recent decades. If students ever need a vivid statement to crystallize the risk formula, I recommend what longtime IPCC-er Diana Liverman told me on Sustain What: "When we talk about climate risk, some people still just think it's the probability of the heat wave. But we need to think about risk not as the probability of the heat wave, but the probability of harm." Video is here: https://revkin.substack.com/i/79692389/shifting-the-focus-to-climate-risk
Is it worthwhile to discuss compounding and cascading risks? Not sure how in-depth you the book is going to be. These concepts are useful, and have a fair amount of literature. The chapter does get into some of the ideas that underly these concepts. But it could be a bit more explicit. The term 'threat multiplier' is nice catch phrase that gets peoples attention.
Looks pretty good Andrew. I laughed about the comment wrt Florida but, yes, it has to go.
My main comment is wrt rainfall and precipitation. These are inherently intermittent. Most commonly when rainfall is referred to it means rainfall amount. You do touch on intensity but not duration. It is important to recognize these characteristics: amount, intensity, frequency, duration, and type (snow vs rain etc). When referring to amount, please say so.
In fact what is happening is that intensity increases (because of more water vapor in the atmosphere) but frequency tends to decrease, so the total amount is more stable, because that is governed more by the surface energy budget and evaporation. Duration also relates to lifetime of the phenomenon causing the precipitation. [The governing factors are Clausius Clapeyron for intensity vs surface energy budget for amount]
These matter for TCs as you sort of discuss, but it could be clearer. With extra energy one expects more activity, which can mean more intensity, more events, longer lifetimes, and greater size. In fact numbers may go down in terms of totals (depends on threshold) but intensity, size and lifetimes increase.
One way this happens is via eyewall replacement. As storms spin up and become more intense the spiral arm bands and eyewall become more circular and eventually shut off flow of essential moisture into the eye, which dies, and a new eyewall forms at a greater radius. This can then intensify and the result is a stronger bigger storm. In the past eyewall replacement may have led to the demise of the storm, but with warmer oceans, nowadays, many recover and can undergo several such events. The storm lasts longer also as a result.
It depends on how stats are computed also. The lifetime at one spot is very different than the lifetime tracking the storm. No good stats exist on size or lifetime.
You may find this useful:
Ma, Z., L. Cheng, S. Camargo, K.E Trenberth, I.I. Lin, G. R Foltz, D. R. Chavas, D. Zhang, E. A Ritchie, J. Fei, C. Pasquero, K. J. E. Walsh, Z. Tan, R. L. Sriver, H. Ye and L. Zhou, 2026: Interactions of tropical cyclones with global energy and water cycles. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, doi:10.1038/s43017-026-00770-6.
We are experiencing a very non linear increase of local and regional climate-related impacts surprising many scientists by how soon they are occurring: floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, stronger storms, etc, long before feeling the full effects of a rise in temperature of around 1.3°C above preindustrial times due to lags in the system.
Here are two near term global impacts which may already be locked in. But that we can try to minimize.
The first would be that within a decade or two we are projected to experience droughts worse than the Dust Bowl, severely impacting the breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline.
Shortly thereafter we'd be faced in that weakened state with retreat from the coastal areas where most of our large cities are located as the inherently unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet begins a rapid retreat with the collapse of Thwaites Glacier and the rate of sea level rise accelerates dramatically along with increasing maximum storm strength.
It is difficult to imagine the planet being governable under those conditions. It is difficult to imagine us walking into this with our eyes open, but here we go.
Just look at the level of denial in the business and finance community at how bad the Iran War is already and how much worse* for the world economy it's likely to be: A lot of those business show interviewers are asking for forecast numerical oil prices and market risks and whether it will recover in the next business quarter or two, while all of the military analysts and the shipping and the oil-flow experts are having kittens about how bad it already is. They spend their careers pushing words and numbers around and have no idea about the physical reality behind them.
________
*The Dunning-Kruger Trump administration still think they're finessing Iran with threats to send ground troops into a country that has a half million active-duty personnel defending their home.
There is a 4th ellipse missing in your Venn Diagram, namely "Consequences of false prophecies" which has been a concern for all civilizations over the past 10,000 years. In fact, ancient civilizations had death penalties for false prophets, such was the risk of false prophecies.
Luckily we don't prosecute false prophets anymore. Many of the Y2K false prophets that I know personally, are now climate profiteers, seeking government subsidies for renewable energy investments, without which, those renewables would be unprofitable. It appears that the Prophets just follow Profits.
Perhaps natural variation explains the original cause of the start of warmings or coolings, and feedback loops are the reasons that these temperature trends last for decades. If the feedback loops are both natural (eg. degassing of CO2) and anthropomorphic (eg. land clearing, heat sink from urbanization, fossil fuels, cows etc), and if human are coping very well with climate variations, then isn't it unwise to adopt too many policies that will cause economic damage that risks destabilizing the world's economy?
It is a very large risk factor - the risk of being wrong. In my industry, all scientists include the risk of being wrong in all our risk assessments. We accept that the science is never settled and humans have made bad choices all throughout history.
You can always make an argument that the science is uncertain. The tobacco companies certainly tried: "We're not sure that cigarettes cause cancer!" So did the DOE Climate Working Group. Because you can ALWAYS make that argument, that argument by itself should carry zero weight. You have to make more specific arguments: 1) is the Earth warming? (yes, 100%), 2) are humans releasing CO2? (yes, 100%), 3) does CO2 trap heat? (yes, 100%), 4) is the warming we are experiencing consistent with CO2? (yes, nearly 100%) ... So please come up with better arguments.
5) Fatalities from climate related disasters are down 95% over the last 100 years despite a tripling of population, 6) global malnutrition and mortality rates are at all time lows, 7) global life expectancy is at an all-time high, 8) there are 10 times more cold related deaths globally than heat related deaths.
Seems like things are headed in the right direction.
Maybe my diagram/post might help convince reluctant skeptics like Ian about how anthropogenic driven climate change is different than Earth's natural climate variability over the last 66 million years. If not, I don't know what will!
I like to refer to climate change risk as the Great Equalizer between the developed countries and the developing countries. And this isn't a good thing. The 'developed' nations have long felt pretty insulated from climate driven disasters. Not that they don't occur, but that the built environment was resilient to past hazards, and the ability to respond was robust given government finances and private insurance. Our systems were adequate for the challenge (with many shortcomings acknowledged). Climate change is causing these systems to be overwhelmed (for private sector systems like insurance to lose profit margins) and developed countries and its citizens to experience the environment like the rest of the world, one that instills fear and uncertainty. I'm of the view that many developing countries are in a better place to adapt to climate change as they don't have to cast off large intrenched systems such as insurance and large scale energy infrastructure. They can change faster given the goods provided mainly from China like solar and wind generation. Add in the cascading and compounding influence of the current forever disruption to the energy distribution systems based on oil and the future promises a great deal of change coming.
Many seem to be very worried about the rapid 15% greening of the earth over the last 3 decades. If this continues at this rate then asphalt could be in severe jeopardy. Perhaps 40 Cities could fund some research on this.
What are those benefits, for the millions of involuntary third parties to your private consumption who've already paid for your socialized climate-change costs with their homes, livelihoods and lives? And what of the millions more who will yet pay before the trend of GMST is capped? Shouldn't they weigh in on your 'balanced' discussion?
Any such discussion, of course, must balance the 'sacred' (/sarcasm) freedom of carbon capitalists to profit beyond historical dreams of avarice, by selling their product for all the traffic will bear while socializing the marginal climate change costs; against the multiple options for democratic collective intervention in the global marketplace, to limit tragedies of the commons.
AFAICT, there's no reason for governments not to eliminate the price advantage fossil fuels obtain by socializing global warming, and let the otherwise-free market build out the carbon-neutral global economy. No reason, that is, but the $billions invested by said capitalists in disinformation, to forestall collective intervention in their $trillions of annual profits. Indeed, 'Smokey' may well be paid by them.
You did an encompassing and detailed review on climate risks and their factors! It's insightful.
This is, overall, why I'm strongly supporting Adaptation from this account. Despite the fact that mitigation is the way to stop cumulating risks for the future, Adaptation is the way to reduce vulnerability for which it's now unavoidable: the consequences of decades of GHG emissions.
Thanks, you have a new subscriber; I hope to exchange opinions in the coming future!
Interesting stuff although you might want to adapt the title slightly. I read it hoping to discover a smart way to explain risk multipliers, and a good run-down on probability in lay language. I really haven't found anything that gives people a clear idea of what on earth all these IPCC socio-economic scenarios are about and how they combine with climatological predictions. My lay attempt to cut through people's disinterest is to ask whether they know why people are scared of lions but not climate change. Always hits the mark, but doesn't actually say much - a lion in savanna:
is visible (there it is!)
has historical precedence (it ate your brother last week!)
is immediate (there is the lion - act now or be killed!)
has direct impact (the lion is going to eat you!)
has simple causality (the lion is going to eat you and you are going to be dead!)
is caused by an enemy (the lion!)
I think Daniel Kahneman was right - humans are perfectly adapted to ignore climate change.
could you be a bit clearer on what you're looking for? how scenarios are produced? or how they are used to come up with hazard probabilities?
I like this description: "Climate change is the mother of all collective action problems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
For example, some assessments decry government entities not spending enough time on emissions reductions, but politicians and budgeteers have a primary responsibility to their specific jurisdictions. This means that budgeting for local protection against storms, fire and flood—which immediately affect their constituents—has priority over spending money to cut emissions which affect the entire planet but only benefit the community in a negligible way. And beside which, handing out contracts for construction projects is a time-honored way for politicians to solicit, um...campaign contributions.
Both clear and comprehensive, good work!
For those reading these comments, I'd like to note that I've described the historical development of ideas about impacts in perhaps excessive detail at https://history.aip.org/climate/impacts.htm
... 2025 version, the 2026 annual update will be posted in a few weeks.
A great breakdown of "climate risk" Andrew! We are not headed into an iceberg but it is headed unto us.
When I saw hazard, I immediately, subconsciously, prefixed the adjective "moral". Then prefixed"moral" to all of climate risk and it's components. In the end we'll lose at climate craps unless we care alot more.
I just got back from a backcountry skiing and avalanche safety course. The instructor literally went off the same risk framework for avalanche safety: Hazard, Vulnerability, Exposure.
It's serendipitous to see the exact same model applied to a different arena. Thanks Andrew!
Thank you for sharing this chapter. We have a farm in south Central Kansas and the effects of climate change to 2 degrees centigrade will make food production almost beyond vulnerable. Crops and cattle are so stressed already from excessive heat, drought, and seasonal shifts that I do not see a future in farming as we know it. When the baby boomer generation is gone, the next generation of farmers will have to farm by completely different means since plants and animals can’t evolve fast enough to sustain life in the extremes. Never mind the wealthy coastal elites, mind the farm producers and who will be able to feed the world of 9-10 billion people. Food vulnerability is on the verge of collapse at 1.5 degrees increase. We are inundated with people wanting to buy our land not for farming but for energy production.
I also garden to regenerate the land and to increase insect diversity and soil health. In 53 yrs of gardening, insect decline and other flora and fauna decline is devastating. The willful ignorance that prevails not just in the Republican ranks but in city dwellers is devastating since we have gone beyond the point of saving the environment to the point of trying to salvage life in general.
Say it ain’t so and then please tell me how to save our grandchildren from the hardship to come in a very few years.
Yvonne Kolarik
73, farmer, gardener, Master Gardener, reading tutor, wife, mother, and grandmother
NB: The Lower Ninth* flooded after a barge that was allowed to stay in the Industrial Canal broke loose during the storm and rammed through the wall (not levee), causing massive, high-powered flooding of the neighborhoods behind the wall. Many of the nearby homes were just washed off their piers, and the giant barge was left sitting on top of several houses and trees for a long time.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the IC, the levees that failed →below their rated specification← did not result in as physically violent an event.
________________
*"Lower" means it was further downriver, and doesn't refer to elevation. As in the rest of the city, the parts of the Lower Ninth Ward right along the Mississippi River didn't flood at all, but that whole residential area was considered low priority anyway. In New Orleans, people who had to struggle with recovering from the flooding referred to those higher-elevation neighborhoods as "The Isle of Denial."
Well done! The vulnerability reduction at the global scale is even more profound, most notably in Bangladesh with cyclone resilience causing a manyfold drop in fatalities from comparable storms in recent decades. If students ever need a vivid statement to crystallize the risk formula, I recommend what longtime IPCC-er Diana Liverman told me on Sustain What: "When we talk about climate risk, some people still just think it's the probability of the heat wave. But we need to think about risk not as the probability of the heat wave, but the probability of harm." Video is here: https://revkin.substack.com/i/79692389/shifting-the-focus-to-climate-risk
Is it worthwhile to discuss compounding and cascading risks? Not sure how in-depth you the book is going to be. These concepts are useful, and have a fair amount of literature. The chapter does get into some of the ideas that underly these concepts. But it could be a bit more explicit. The term 'threat multiplier' is nice catch phrase that gets peoples attention.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll think about whether it makes sense to add something about that in this chapter or another one.
Looks pretty good Andrew. I laughed about the comment wrt Florida but, yes, it has to go.
My main comment is wrt rainfall and precipitation. These are inherently intermittent. Most commonly when rainfall is referred to it means rainfall amount. You do touch on intensity but not duration. It is important to recognize these characteristics: amount, intensity, frequency, duration, and type (snow vs rain etc). When referring to amount, please say so.
In fact what is happening is that intensity increases (because of more water vapor in the atmosphere) but frequency tends to decrease, so the total amount is more stable, because that is governed more by the surface energy budget and evaporation. Duration also relates to lifetime of the phenomenon causing the precipitation. [The governing factors are Clausius Clapeyron for intensity vs surface energy budget for amount]
These matter for TCs as you sort of discuss, but it could be clearer. With extra energy one expects more activity, which can mean more intensity, more events, longer lifetimes, and greater size. In fact numbers may go down in terms of totals (depends on threshold) but intensity, size and lifetimes increase.
One way this happens is via eyewall replacement. As storms spin up and become more intense the spiral arm bands and eyewall become more circular and eventually shut off flow of essential moisture into the eye, which dies, and a new eyewall forms at a greater radius. This can then intensify and the result is a stronger bigger storm. In the past eyewall replacement may have led to the demise of the storm, but with warmer oceans, nowadays, many recover and can undergo several such events. The storm lasts longer also as a result.
It depends on how stats are computed also. The lifetime at one spot is very different than the lifetime tracking the storm. No good stats exist on size or lifetime.
You may find this useful:
Ma, Z., L. Cheng, S. Camargo, K.E Trenberth, I.I. Lin, G. R Foltz, D. R. Chavas, D. Zhang, E. A Ritchie, J. Fei, C. Pasquero, K. J. E. Walsh, Z. Tan, R. L. Sriver, H. Ye and L. Zhou, 2026: Interactions of tropical cyclones with global energy and water cycles. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, doi:10.1038/s43017-026-00770-6.
Kevin
Thanks, Kevin, this is exactly the feedback I’m interested in.
We are experiencing a very non linear increase of local and regional climate-related impacts surprising many scientists by how soon they are occurring: floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, stronger storms, etc, long before feeling the full effects of a rise in temperature of around 1.3°C above preindustrial times due to lags in the system.
Here are two near term global impacts which may already be locked in. But that we can try to minimize.
The first would be that within a decade or two we are projected to experience droughts worse than the Dust Bowl, severely impacting the breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline.
Shortly thereafter we'd be faced in that weakened state with retreat from the coastal areas where most of our large cities are located as the inherently unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet begins a rapid retreat with the collapse of Thwaites Glacier and the rate of sea level rise accelerates dramatically along with increasing maximum storm strength.
It is difficult to imagine the planet being governable under those conditions. It is difficult to imagine us walking into this with our eyes open, but here we go.
Just look at the level of denial in the business and finance community at how bad the Iran War is already and how much worse* for the world economy it's likely to be: A lot of those business show interviewers are asking for forecast numerical oil prices and market risks and whether it will recover in the next business quarter or two, while all of the military analysts and the shipping and the oil-flow experts are having kittens about how bad it already is. They spend their careers pushing words and numbers around and have no idea about the physical reality behind them.
________
*The Dunning-Kruger Trump administration still think they're finessing Iran with threats to send ground troops into a country that has a half million active-duty personnel defending their home.
Excellent writing Andrew.
There is a 4th ellipse missing in your Venn Diagram, namely "Consequences of false prophecies" which has been a concern for all civilizations over the past 10,000 years. In fact, ancient civilizations had death penalties for false prophets, such was the risk of false prophecies.
Luckily we don't prosecute false prophets anymore. Many of the Y2K false prophets that I know personally, are now climate profiteers, seeking government subsidies for renewable energy investments, without which, those renewables would be unprofitable. It appears that the Prophets just follow Profits.
Perhaps natural variation explains the original cause of the start of warmings or coolings, and feedback loops are the reasons that these temperature trends last for decades. If the feedback loops are both natural (eg. degassing of CO2) and anthropomorphic (eg. land clearing, heat sink from urbanization, fossil fuels, cows etc), and if human are coping very well with climate variations, then isn't it unwise to adopt too many policies that will cause economic damage that risks destabilizing the world's economy?
It is a very large risk factor - the risk of being wrong. In my industry, all scientists include the risk of being wrong in all our risk assessments. We accept that the science is never settled and humans have made bad choices all throughout history.
You can always make an argument that the science is uncertain. The tobacco companies certainly tried: "We're not sure that cigarettes cause cancer!" So did the DOE Climate Working Group. Because you can ALWAYS make that argument, that argument by itself should carry zero weight. You have to make more specific arguments: 1) is the Earth warming? (yes, 100%), 2) are humans releasing CO2? (yes, 100%), 3) does CO2 trap heat? (yes, 100%), 4) is the warming we are experiencing consistent with CO2? (yes, nearly 100%) ... So please come up with better arguments.
5) Fatalities from climate related disasters are down 95% over the last 100 years despite a tripling of population, 6) global malnutrition and mortality rates are at all time lows, 7) global life expectancy is at an all-time high, 8) there are 10 times more cold related deaths globally than heat related deaths.
Seems like things are headed in the right direction.
Maybe my diagram/post might help convince reluctant skeptics like Ian about how anthropogenic driven climate change is different than Earth's natural climate variability over the last 66 million years. If not, I don't know what will!
I like to refer to climate change risk as the Great Equalizer between the developed countries and the developing countries. And this isn't a good thing. The 'developed' nations have long felt pretty insulated from climate driven disasters. Not that they don't occur, but that the built environment was resilient to past hazards, and the ability to respond was robust given government finances and private insurance. Our systems were adequate for the challenge (with many shortcomings acknowledged). Climate change is causing these systems to be overwhelmed (for private sector systems like insurance to lose profit margins) and developed countries and its citizens to experience the environment like the rest of the world, one that instills fear and uncertainty. I'm of the view that many developing countries are in a better place to adapt to climate change as they don't have to cast off large intrenched systems such as insurance and large scale energy infrastructure. They can change faster given the goods provided mainly from China like solar and wind generation. Add in the cascading and compounding influence of the current forever disruption to the energy distribution systems based on oil and the future promises a great deal of change coming.
Many seem to be very worried about the rapid 15% greening of the earth over the last 3 decades. If this continues at this rate then asphalt could be in severe jeopardy. Perhaps 40 Cities could fund some research on this.
Snort! "CO2: it's what plants crave!" (/sarcasm).
The rapid reduction in cold related deaths is an issue of concern as well
Now list the benefits of a slightly warmer earth 75 years from now and a balanced discussion can be had.
What are those benefits, for the millions of involuntary third parties to your private consumption who've already paid for your socialized climate-change costs with their homes, livelihoods and lives? And what of the millions more who will yet pay before the trend of GMST is capped? Shouldn't they weigh in on your 'balanced' discussion?
Any such discussion, of course, must balance the 'sacred' (/sarcasm) freedom of carbon capitalists to profit beyond historical dreams of avarice, by selling their product for all the traffic will bear while socializing the marginal climate change costs; against the multiple options for democratic collective intervention in the global marketplace, to limit tragedies of the commons.
AFAICT, there's no reason for governments not to eliminate the price advantage fossil fuels obtain by socializing global warming, and let the otherwise-free market build out the carbon-neutral global economy. No reason, that is, but the $billions invested by said capitalists in disinformation, to forestall collective intervention in their $trillions of annual profits. Indeed, 'Smokey' may well be paid by them.
I don't know, maybe like more plant food in the air?
There's always a post: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/is-co2-plant-food-why-are-we-still
Yeah but crop yields have been rising worldwide for decades so all the doom and gloom in the post isn't happening at scale.
30 year old: "I've been smoking since I was a teenager and I'm fine. Thus, smoking can't be bad for me."
There is a little bit of Paul Erlich in everyone
You did an encompassing and detailed review on climate risks and their factors! It's insightful.
This is, overall, why I'm strongly supporting Adaptation from this account. Despite the fact that mitigation is the way to stop cumulating risks for the future, Adaptation is the way to reduce vulnerability for which it's now unavoidable: the consequences of decades of GHG emissions.
Thanks, you have a new subscriber; I hope to exchange opinions in the coming future!
Footnote 1 is inconsistent with the figure to which it refers.