The threat from climate change is more total than from the bomb. It is also more pervasive. In a 2018 paper, forty-two scientists from around the world warned that, in a business-as-usual scenario, no ecosystem on Earth was safe, with transformation “ubiquitous and dramatic,” exceeding in just one or two centuries the amount of change that unfolded in the most dramatic periods of transformation in the earth’s history over tens of thousands of years. Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from Arctic permafrost that may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates
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