Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath in The Breakthrough:
Is climate change more like an asteroid or diabetes? Last month, one of us argued at Slate that climate advocates should resist calls to declare a national climate emergency because climate change was more like “diabetes for the planet” than an asteroid. The diabetes metaphor was surprisingly controversial. Climate change can’t be managed or lived with, many argued in response; it is an existential threat to human societies that demands an immediate cure.
The objection is telling, both in the ways in which it misunderstands the nature of the problem and in the contradictions it reveals. Diabetes is not benign. It is not a “natural” phenomena and it can’t be cured. It is a condition that, if unmanaged, can kill you. And even for those who manage it well, life is different than before diabetes.
This seems to us to be a reasonably apt description of the climate problem. There is no going back to the world before climate change. Whatever success we have mitigating climate change, we almost certainly won’t return to pre-industrial atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, at least not for many centuries. Even at one or 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the climate and the planet will look very different, and that will bring unavoidable consequences for human societies. We will live on a hotter planet and in a climate that will be more variable and less predictable.
More here.