And yet, fundamentally, this is a self-limiting natural phenomenon that we have experienced on a global scale three times since the late 1950s: even without any vaccines, every viral pandemic eventually subsides once the pathogen infects relatively large numbers of people or once it mutates into a less virulent form. In contrast, global climate change is an extraordinarily complex development whose eventual outcome depends on far-from-perfectly understood interactions of many natural and anthropogenic processes. As a result, we will need, for decades to come, more observations, more studies,
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