Comment on NYT article "How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?"

Climate is a court that judges us every day, and issues sentences. In the past, that court would process its work at a slow-ish pace over centuries. These tipping points - and there are surely more that will become apparent once the mechanisms of the climate are put more out of balance - mean that the judgements will come to pass faster.


The imbalance will put us in situations that have never happened in human history : hurricanes that swing around the central Atlantic and don't peter out right away. Stretches of hot weather that destroy human infrastructure and of course the natural world. And the inability of the one natural mechanism for CO2 remediation, photosynthesis, to stop working at a scale that it needs to.


Greenland doesn't have to melt completely. The Himalayan glaciers don't have to completely disappear for irreparable harm to happen to otherwise dependable foundations of society: the right to clean air, potable water, stable land, sustainable food. Carbon pollution is subsidized, its harm externalized.