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Interesting comment (http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid...): Rex Tillerson, ‘We’ll adapt to that.‘ Tillerson also said that; …we have spent our entire existence adapting. This is in fact the very opposite of the truth of the matter. Humans have spent the last 12 thousand years enjoying the remarkable climatic stability of the Holocene epoch, where mean global temperature has fluctuated not more than one half of a degree celcius from the mid-20th century baseline. It is during this time that all the advances of human civilisation have occurred, as Grist’s Rob Davies so succintly pointed out in his recent TED talk. We haven’t spent any of our civilised existence adapting to climate changes, as we (and our cultures) are already adapted to an exquisitely and uniquely stable climate. In fact, what humans have done is to adapt the environment to their own specific requirements, and the very existence of heating and cooling to provide that remarkably indulgent concept ‘room temperature’ goes to show just how we adapt local environments to reflect our underlying and very tight pre-exisiting adaptation to a narrow climatic envelope. . The trouble is that we now face the prospect of being thrown way beyond the boundaries of our bioclimatic envelope, and our agriculture and other primary industries along with us. Dreams of geoengineering aside, there is no way that humanity can “adapt” the planet back to a stable global ecosystem conducive to human societal integrity if we pass much further than 2 degrees celcius, and if we push much further than about 3 degrees increase in mean global temperature, I doubt that humans would being anything more than an endangered and declining species. If we can’t engineer the planet to remain within our bioclimatic optimum whilst we had the chance to keep it there, we sure as squirrels eat nut will not be able to bring it back if that optimum is lost. Rex Tillerson is of that clique of... more... - Todd Hoff