Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing us today. It involves many dimensions of which science, economics and society, politics, moral and ethical questions – and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will be around for decades and centuries to come. Carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that has driven recent global warming, lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and the planet takes a while to respond to warming.
So even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, global warming and climate change will continue to affect future generations. In this way, humanity is “committed” to some level of climate change.
Therefore responding should involve mitigation, which includes reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, either by reducing sources of these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat or transport) or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests and soil).
The goal of mitigation is to avoid significant human interference with the climate system, and “stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change.