Word: risk
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...least for a day. Between the recession, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the problems with Iran - even the fact that it hasn't been a dramatically warm year for much of the world - climate change had dropped somewhat on the international agenda. That will always be a risk for this most long-term of challenges, where the penalties and payoffs of policy changes will unfold over decades. "The true test of leadership is to take the long view," Ban said...
...article in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature says the safe climatic limits in which humanity has blossomed are more vulnerable than ever and that unless we recognize our planetary boundaries and stay within them, we risk total catastrophe. "Human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state," writes Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Environmental Institute and the author of the article. "The result could be irreversible and, in some cases, abrupt environmental change, leading to a state less conducive to human development." (See TIME's special report...
...believe, should be enough to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, which should be safely below a climatic tipping point that could lead to the wide-scale melting of polar ice sheets, swamping coastal cities. "Transgressing these boundaries will increase the risk of irreversible climate change," writes Rockstrom...
...impact of breaching only one of nine planetary boundaries that Rockstrom identifies in the paper. Other boundaries involve freshwater overuse, the global agricultural cycle and ozone loss. In each case, he scans the state of science to find ecological limits that we can't violate, lest we risk passing a tipping point that could throw the planet out of whack for human beings. It's based on a theory that ecological change occurs not so much cumulatively, but suddenly, after invisible thresholds have been reached. Stay within the lines, and we might just be all right...
...Certainly, H1N1 is a serious risk—this is not to discount it as a threat. Those with pre-existing medical conditions are at a higher risk of danger than the average population, and unfortunately several students nationwide have died of complications. Advisory campaigns to supposedly minimize our risk, however, are ineffective. It’s common sense and the responsible self-reporting of symptoms that will protect us—not refusing to shake hands with people juggling clean plates...