The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System w/ Nobel Prize-winning Scientist KEVIN TRENBERTH - Highlights

"The whole social fabric that we have is based upon the past climate, and so once we cross that threshold, it's what I call the Straw that Breaks the Camel's Back Syndrome. And so you have a relatively modest change, which I estimate to be in the neighborhood of 5 to 20 percent, typically. And that is enough to nudge us. Instead of 1 billion dollars in damage from a hurricane, we end up with 100 billion dollars. There are many other cases, but the sort of things that happen are indeed that something floods, the amount of water can no longer be tolerated, something completely dries out, there's a drought, and subsequent wildfires when buildings burn down, and so on. Suddenly you've gone from something to nothing. That's an extreme non-linearity. And another extreme non-linearity is, of course, when people die, you don't recover from that."