Curious Cook: A perfect storm that threatens human existence is brewing

The columnist says climate change has caused once-in-a-century weather events like droughts to happen almost annually. — AFP Relaxnews

Every time there is a disaster arising from man-made causes, my instinct is to look at the lessons we can learn from it and estimate the probabilities of avoiding the same types of disasters in the future. I suppose it is a way I can make myself sleep better. But over the years, it has become saddeningly clear there may have been significant miscalculations on my part.

The recent report in Nature Climate Change about the inevitability of a pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience is such a miscalculation. Normally, one expects degradation of huge environments to be slow-acting events and therefore there is a human tendency to kick the issue down the road for some future generation to fix. But that is not how mathematics and real-life work.