ABSTRACT

The chapter begins by laying out in detail the state of the Earth system in the age of climate change. Our best science informs us that the climate is set to jump back to the radical instability that defined most of the past 100,000 years. The difference is that this instability will be in a much hotter register than it was before. We are entering the age of climate chaos. The rest of the chapter explains why this is so threatening. It is not that the species might be wiped out, but that existence could become so hardscrabble that our most fundamental values will be abandoned. This possibility depends on the idea that these values are luxury goods, always the first thing to go when scarcity starts to pinch.