What has gone wrong with mitigation?

To most obervers, the recent intensification of heat and drought alternating with torrential downpours and floods, destroying crops and infrastructure, is clear evidence that the climate system has become unstable, and that we’re entering a roller coaster of state changes that we will hardly be able to cope with. Meanwhile, mankind keeps racing at full speed on the highway that traverses the technological promise land full of illusions of an even easier and more affluent existence.

This book analyzes in retrospect in what mental state we have dared to step on the edge of this fatal abyss. What assessments, frameworks, and motives have made us believe that global warming could be confined within the 1.5 degree leeway, and have led us to underestimate the current crash of essential climate conditions?

The author (1949) has been a social scientist in the field of decision-making and planning (Radboud University) and a farmer (cattle, vegetables, energy). Since 1999, he evaluated systematically (in more than 35 articles) the feasibility and coherence of global decisionmaking on climate change.