Why Does the Temporal Lag in the Effects of Carbon

question 827

Multiple Choice

Why does the temporal lag in the effects of carbon dioxide emissions make it hard for us to respond to climate change, according to Krakoff?

• A) Because humans are inherently selfish, we are not motivated to take actions that will mostly benefit people who live in the distant future.
• B) Since climate change results from everyone's carbon dioxide emissions anywhere in the world, no individual person has a strong reason to reduce his or her own emissions.
• C) The temporal lag means that we cannot observe the effects of our emissions and so we have no way of knowing whether our emissions really will harm people in the future.
• D) The temporal lag makes it hard for us to perceive the problem and forces us to respond to the problem based on predictions of future effects rather than direct observation of those effects.

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Definitions:

Intermediate Phenotype

A phenotype that represents a blend or a combination of two extreme phenotypic traits or forms found in a population.

Color Blindness

A genetic condition where a person's ability to perceive colors is altered or diminished due to abnormalities in certain photoreceptor cells in the eye.

Recessive

A genetic term describing an allele that is masked by the presence of a dominant allele in a heterozygous combination.

Hemizygous

Possessing only one allele for a particular locus; a human male is hemizygous for all X-linked genes. Compare with homozygous and heterozygous.