A global temperature rise of 3 °C could mark a tipping point for producing drought, famine and mass extinctions (Image: View China Photo/Rex Features)
AFTER decades of debate and acrimony, science and society seem to have reached a consensus that greenhouse gases are increasing global temperatures. What is less clear to most people, however, is this: starkly put, even if we stop soiling our atmosphere with greenhouses gases, Earth could still get hotter. It is an inevitable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics.
This is the famous but elusive “entropy” rule which stipulates that order tends to crumble and…
