These are the conclusions:
And a warmer Earth may not be any worse than a colder one, certainly not for the longer growing seasons it would allow in the world's temperate zones. None of this justifies passing, for the first time, limits on greenhouse gases that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs on American energy production.
The US lifestyle is not negotiable. Unfortunately, neither is physics.
That's about how much attention is given to the threat of catastrophic climate change--a dramatic change in the course of one to two decades that moves the climate from the extreme of one equilibrium basin into the range of another. Such a change could easily dwarf all the standard projections of changes in degree per century. Yet, it is barely mentioned in most discussions, despite increasingly strong evidence that it presents a real danger.
Googling for "catastrophic climate change" yields ~ 13,700 hits, and for "abrupt climate change" ~ 81,600 hits, for a total of 95,300 hits. For "climate change" ~ 24,000,000 hits and for "global warming" ~ 12,900,000, for a total of 36,900,000. Thus the two terms for the rapid, catastrophic change are < 0.3% of the the more general terms. That's hangnail territory.
