“Global warming is a misnomer. It implies something gradual, uniform, and benign. What we’re experiencing is none of these,” says Prof. John Holdren, recently president and board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We are already experiencing ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ with the climate system,” Holdren said. “The question we have now is whether we can avoid catastrophic interference.”

Speaking at the Kennedy School of Government on November 6, 2007, Dr. Holdren said the disruption and its impacts have grown more widely than anyone ever expected a few years ago. “To fix the problem, society has only three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We’re already doing some of each, and will do more of all three.” A video of Dr. Holdren’s talk, and his slides, is posted in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum archive.

John P. Holdren is Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. He is the director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and just completed a term as board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

See our February 24 post: John Holdren: US public opinion is near a tipping point on climate change despite deniers’ strategy