If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.

If higher summer temperatures become the norm in the future, people will adjust. Perhaps they'll take naps more frequently in the afternoon and convert their houses accordingly. The good thing is that all of these changes will not happen overnight, but in the space of decades. We still have enough time to react.

The reasons are likely rooted in religion. Playing around with God's creation is simply not allowed. Incidentally, in the past it was precisely the deeply religious people who said: Of course we're playing with God's creation, in fact we're perfecting it. This sort of thinking is frowned upon today.

Unfortunately, some scientists behave like preachers, delivering sermons to people. What this approach ignores is the fact that there are many threats in our world that must be weighed against one another. If I'm driving my car and find myself speeding toward an obstacle, I can't simple yank the wheel to the side without first checking to see if I'll instead be driving straight into a crowd of people. Climate researchers cannot and should not take this process of weighing different factors out of the hands of politics and society.

It is in fact necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. There is no reason why we shouldn't spend our vacations on (the North Sea island of) Sylt instead of in the Seychelles, or drive more economical cars - for the sake of preserving increasingly scarce resources if nothing else. But that won't enable us to stop climate change. As long as China, India and the United States continue the way they have been, what we Germans do is more or less irrelevant.

There is no last word in research, and that includes climate research. It's never the truth that scientists offer, but only our best possible approximation of reality. But that often gets forgotten in the way the public perceives and describes our work.

The fear of climatic catastrophes is an ancient one and not unlike our fear of strangers. In the past, people believed that the climate almost always changes for the worse, and only rarely for the better - God's punishment for sinful behavior.