| Summary/Abstract |
At the time he attended the 2004 European Open Science Forum in Stockholm, German physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber had been speaking out publicly since the late 1990s about climate change impacting what he termed “the Achilles heels of the Earth system.” Using science-speak, he talked of “switch-and-choke points” and “large scale discontinuities” to describe the possibility that key natural systems whose stability we take for granted—like the Atlantic Ocean’s jet stream and a mechanism called the thermohaline circulation, which circulates warm water globally—could abruptly change under climate change stress.
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