How much longer can we keep pushing the plate?

There were so many facts in this section of the memoir!! The amount of numbers that were mentioned were driving me crazy. “The average temperature is now increasing by 0.36ºF every decade”, “The average global temperature should increase between 3.6 and 10.8ºF compared to the preindustrial- age level”, “Stabilization at 650 PPM gives a 60% to 95% probability of exceeding an increase of 5.4ºF.” SOO MANY NUMBERS!!!!!! I don’t even know what they mean, but I’m assuming they are all bad.

The one part of this section that interested me was on page 111, when Squarzoni uses the metaphor of pushing the plate. If he pushes the plate several times, an inch at a time, the plate will move an inch, but there will come a point when it will reach a threshold and the contents of the plate will spill, but that won’t happen since Squarzoni is paying attention to how much he is pushing the plate. Now if Squarzoni has his eyes closed and he pushes the plate, the contents can easily spill out because he isn’t paying attention. This is like us; we are pushing the planet and causing climate change. Eventually we will hit that threshold and major problems will occur. But the issue is we don’t know how close we are to hitting that threshold; we don’t know how close we are to tipping that plate over.