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Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure: Executive Summary
This executive summary describes a book that sets out what is known about global change and the nature of the Earth System. It addresses a number of important but difficult questions. How does the Earth System operate in the absence of significant human influence? How can human-driven effects be discerned from those due to natural variability? What are the implications of global change for human well-being? How robust is the Earth System in the face of this new internal force of change? Can human activities trigger abrupt and potentially irreversible changes to which adaptation would be impossible? How serious is this inadvertent human experiment with its own life support system?
41 pages, ebook
Published January 1, 2004
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July 2, 2025
Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure: Executive Summary
(2004) is a shorter version of the much longer book
Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure
(2004) by Will Steffen et al. Both books were published by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. According to the English Wikipedia,
This summary holds up pretty well even after 20 years. The colorful two-column, "bookazine" layout probably looks good in the printed version, which I have not seen. I read the ebook version, where the two-column layout gets awkward. On a small tablet screen, I had to do a lot of four-way scrolling to follow the text flow. It's also hard to follow the body text when it splits in mid-sentence around a large infobox, but oh well. Back in 2004 tablet-style ebook readers had not become widespread yet, so publishers weren't designing books to work well on them.
A few things have changed since the book came out. An obvious change has been the rise of convicted felon Trump, a climate science denier whose goal is to destroy every action by his government which might give human civilization a chance of surviving. Thus the biggest pressure on our planet today might not be the physical threats documented in the book, as dire as they are. We have technical solutions or mitigation methods for many of them. The biggest threat right now is denialism, something the Summary book doesn't mention at all. Trump has shown that it doesn't matter what strategy a government picks to reduce mass climate murder - a single election can vaporize all of it for the next four or eight years. Thus the most important factor for either protecting or destroying our home (and, consequently, ourselves) is psychology. Yet the Summary book only mentions psychology in one place, and then only in connection to the human responses to climate change. That's a valid and vital subtopic within climate change psychology, but the more immediate psychological problem is to persuade people that it's real.
Imagine you're on the sinking Titanic, and a very loud person has convinced half the passengers to destroy the lifeboats. That's where we are right now.
Another change since 2004 has been awareness of ocean acidification. While Ken Caldeira was the first to publish about it in 2003, awareness had not spread to the book's ensemble of authors by the publication deadline. The book Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (2018) by Erle C. Ellis calls this a very significant omission (in this quote) as it illustrates humans inflicting a vast environmental harm without being aware of it for decades. To be fair, the Summary book talked somewhat vaguely about "changing the carbonate chemistry in the surface waters of the ocean" (quote) which in retrospect we can understand to refer to ocean acidification, but without any mention of the critical factor of pH. Ocean acidification is important because it operates on a completely different principle than the warming effects of CO2. Therefore it wouldn't be mitigated by the relatively cheaper geoengineering schemes involving solar radiation management. Only the carbon dioxide removal schemes could address both threats simultaneously.
One thing I did learn by reading the Summary book was just how close humans came to wiping themselves out in the 1970s. As Nobel Laurate Paul Crutzen explained (quote), humanity was saved by pure dumb luck. Had humans used the functionally equivalent bromine compounds in place of CFCs, we would have inflicted fatal damage on the ozone layer worldwide before chemists had the tools to understand what was going on. That's because bromine is about a hundred times more efficient at destroying ozone in the atmosphere than chlorine is. And if chlorine had happened to have that same potency, nobody would have known about it until people and animals began dropping dead or going blind from fatal UV exposures.
(IGBP) was a research programme that ran from 1987 to 2015 dedicated to studying the phenomenon of global change. Its primary focus was coordinating "international research on global-scale and regional-scale interactions between Earth's biological, chemical and physical processes and their interactions with human systems."Even though the IGBP has ceased operations, its publications are still available for free download. For example here is the PDF version of this Executive Summary.
This summary holds up pretty well even after 20 years. The colorful two-column, "bookazine" layout probably looks good in the printed version, which I have not seen. I read the ebook version, where the two-column layout gets awkward. On a small tablet screen, I had to do a lot of four-way scrolling to follow the text flow. It's also hard to follow the body text when it splits in mid-sentence around a large infobox, but oh well. Back in 2004 tablet-style ebook readers had not become widespread yet, so publishers weren't designing books to work well on them.
A few things have changed since the book came out. An obvious change has been the rise of convicted felon Trump, a climate science denier whose goal is to destroy every action by his government which might give human civilization a chance of surviving. Thus the biggest pressure on our planet today might not be the physical threats documented in the book, as dire as they are. We have technical solutions or mitigation methods for many of them. The biggest threat right now is denialism, something the Summary book doesn't mention at all. Trump has shown that it doesn't matter what strategy a government picks to reduce mass climate murder - a single election can vaporize all of it for the next four or eight years. Thus the most important factor for either protecting or destroying our home (and, consequently, ourselves) is psychology. Yet the Summary book only mentions psychology in one place, and then only in connection to the human responses to climate change. That's a valid and vital subtopic within climate change psychology, but the more immediate psychological problem is to persuade people that it's real.
Imagine you're on the sinking Titanic, and a very loud person has convinced half the passengers to destroy the lifeboats. That's where we are right now.
Another change since 2004 has been awareness of ocean acidification. While Ken Caldeira was the first to publish about it in 2003, awareness had not spread to the book's ensemble of authors by the publication deadline. The book Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (2018) by Erle C. Ellis calls this a very significant omission (in this quote) as it illustrates humans inflicting a vast environmental harm without being aware of it for decades. To be fair, the Summary book talked somewhat vaguely about "changing the carbonate chemistry in the surface waters of the ocean" (quote) which in retrospect we can understand to refer to ocean acidification, but without any mention of the critical factor of pH. Ocean acidification is important because it operates on a completely different principle than the warming effects of CO2. Therefore it wouldn't be mitigated by the relatively cheaper geoengineering schemes involving solar radiation management. Only the carbon dioxide removal schemes could address both threats simultaneously.
One thing I did learn by reading the Summary book was just how close humans came to wiping themselves out in the 1970s. As Nobel Laurate Paul Crutzen explained (quote), humanity was saved by pure dumb luck. Had humans used the functionally equivalent bromine compounds in place of CFCs, we would have inflicted fatal damage on the ozone layer worldwide before chemists had the tools to understand what was going on. That's because bromine is about a hundred times more efficient at destroying ozone in the atmosphere than chlorine is. And if chlorine had happened to have that same potency, nobody would have known about it until people and animals began dropping dead or going blind from fatal UV exposures.
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