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and perhaps damp down undue optimism about a technical 'quick fix' of our climate.

but combating its effects by geoengineering.

the sooner will their prices fall so they become affordable to developing countries – where more generating capacity will be needed -- where the health of the poorest billions is jeopardized by smoky stoves burning wood or dung -- and where...

only 2 percent of publicly funded R and D is devoted to these challenges. Why shouldn’t the percentage be comparable to spending on medical or defence research?

and won't gain much resonance by advocating unwelcome lifestyle changes now – when the benefits accrue mainly to distant parts of the world

this may not happen fast enough to prevent CO2 concentrations rising to dangerous levels.

and calculated that it would hit the Earth in 2080

I’d note one policy context when an essentially zero discount rate is applied – radioactive waste disposal

for instance applies commercial-style discounting -- and in effect writes off what happens beyond 2050. So

for different assumptions about future rates of fossil fuel use. For each such assumption there’s a spread bevause it remains unclear how much the climatic effects of CO2 are amplified by associated changes in water vapour and clouds – the....

mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels .

climate change is certainly not under-discussed – though it is under-acted-upon

preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right

the greater will be all pressures on resources

San Paulo and Delhi will have populations above 30 million. To prevent megacities becoming turbulent dystopias will surely be a major challenge to governance.

and it’s there that the world’s human and financial resources will become concentrated—ending 4 centuries of North Atlantic hegemony.

world population was about 3 billion. It now exceeds 7 billion. The growth’s been mainly in Asia and Africa

the aliens could confidently predict that our biosphere would face doom in a few billion years when the Sun flares up and dies. But could they have predicted this unprecedented runaway fever -- less than half way through the Earth's life?

a few thousand years - the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signalled the start of agriculture. Changes in land-use accelerated as human populations rose.

what would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time