In a recent post, James Hansen, who first sounded the catastrophic climate change warning bells before the US Congress, notes the public’s increased literacy about the nature of growth curves and particularly the impact of early interventions. Regrettably, at this stage, we are late in the game of carbon mitigation and while the public may better understand the physics behind the exponential growth rates we are confronting, literacy about the social relations that drive the physics remains grossly inadequate. Hansen however cautions against despair, there are actions that can be taken. He notes, though, that the “present graph suggests that we have a lot of mitigation to do before we can flatten and bend downward the global temperature curve.”
