Section 1 Managing Minds

**3**

the future for humans [6, 7].

**Chapter 1**

*John P. Tiefenbacher*

**1. Introduction**

Introductory Chapter: Climates,

Change, and Climate Change

*"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us."*

of human populations, causing further tumult [5].

Global warming is no hoax. It has been amply substantiated [1]. That is not to say that "science" knows everything there is to know about global warming, only that there is no doubt that it is happening and that it is indisputably due to human activities that have loaded unnatural levels of greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere over the last 200 years [2]. Global warming is generating many significant challenges that will affect humans' superficial comforts and threaten the foundations of our survival [3, 4]. Changing climates are only one of the complications that we will face. Some of the other complications are: rising sea levels; acidifying oceans; diminishing extents of components of our cryosphere, particularly glaciers, permafrost, Greenland's ice sheet, and the ice cap of Antarctica; changing distributions of fresh and saltwater; changes in habitat size (shrinking for native species and growing for invasive species) and distribution; the spreading of diseases that have been limited by climate conditions of the past; destabilization of ecological systems, particularly the loss of coral reefs; mismatches between soils and climates, hydrological patterns, plant and animal life, weather processes, and seasonality undermining global and local food production; and changing patterns of hazard related to and linked to all of these impacts that will dislocate and force relocation

While scientists have examined many analogs to the prospective consequences of global warming by studying isolated processes on isolated places at times when they were of rather limited concern, many of the emerging changes are challenging the limits of knowledge and understanding of how Earth's natural systems function. We often lack detail that might allow us to "predict" (we really need to be able to *project* the expected changes onto today's conditions and into) the future precisely and accurately so that we can design, plan, and direct our collective life-trajectories toward survival practices that are sustainable. The task is clear enough to know that most human beings have myopic, narrow, limited understandings and views of the consequences of global warming, and an even narrower and substantially superficial view of what climate change means to their lives, and what it means for

This chapter discusses the concepts behind understandings of global warming and climate change. It emphasizes the need to encourage change that not only mitigates the behaviors that are contributing to the problem of global warming, but also promotes a deeper, more profound understanding of climate change, so that we

Franz Kafka, c. 1920
