Why Looking at Average Temperatures Is a Bad Way to Think About Climate Change: Part 2

What averages hide: Where, when, with what consequences?

Image laboriously hand-crafted by the author in Powerpoint (public domain clipart from Clipart Library and Clipground).

In Part 1 of this post, I discussed why extreme temperatures distributed unevenly across the planet are more important than global average temperatures for understanding the effects of climate change on human civilization over the rest of this century and beyond. In this post, I want to consider how these asymmetries are likely to impact our responses to climate change: where, when, and with what consequences. I recently broke this post into two parts. The second part is now here.

The distribution of temperatures, not the average temperature, will determine how deeply we fall into a hotter and more dangerous world.

The uneven distribution of extreme temperatures around the planet is more important than average temperatures because they determine asymmetries in how climate change impacts will vary across different regions and countries, even different cities and towns. Where there are asymmetries in access to life-sustaining resources and services, humans have two choices: they can either cooperate and share the resources equitably, or they can fight over them…