End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?. Professor Barnosky Anthony

goods we’re so fond of contribute mightily to changing Earth’s climate.

      We’ll say more about climate change and its part in the tipping-point recipe in Chapter 4. But for now, suffice to say that there is a tight bond between climate change and our current love affair with stuff, because every new item that is produced adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It’s those greenhouse gases – primarily carbon dioxide but also nitrous oxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons – that are essentially giving Earth a fever, causing not only more killer heatwaves, but also more droughts, floods, ocean acidification and so on. Greenhouse gases come from burning the fossil fuels we use to manufacture and transport all our material goods, a mode of energy production that people have exploited since the Industrial Revolution began some three centuries ago. And what that means in terms of manufacturing and transporting goods is that each and every thing you buy is part of the climate-change problem, as well as part of the raw materials problem.