William Calvin: Climate Will Change Everything | Edge
Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way - and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks. ...The big working models of fluid dynamics used to simulate ocean and atmospheric circulation will themselves be game-changing for other fields of dynamics, such as brain processing and decision making. They should be especially important as they are incorporated into economic research. Climate problems will cause economies to stagger and we have just seen how fragile they are. Unlike 1997 when currency troubles were forced by a big El Niño and its associated fires in southeast Asia, the events of 2008 show that, even without the boat being rocked by external events, our economy can partially crash just from internal instabilities, equivalent to trying to dance in a canoe. Many people will first notice climate change elsewhere via the economic collapse that announces it.
Source: Edge World Question Center, 2009
