What would it take, then, to prevent the Earth's temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees — 2 degrees Celsius — above its level before the industrial era, which is generally considered the limit beyond which global warming risks violent and unpredictable environmental upheaval to the world we all share?
Given that most Africans are subsistence farmers, that will not be possible without a vast social upheaval, with unpredictable consequences.
But government officials, including Sarney, warn that too much austerity could provoke a popular upheaval with unpredictable consequences for democratic development.
"The economic upheaval makes this exercise more unpredictable than it's ever been," said Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, who was over the weekend conducting a training seminar in Providence, R.I., for 250 state lawmakers from around the country on drawing new maps and, if need be, shrinking the number of House districts.
This time, the choice has been made even tougher by history, geography and the peculiar circumstances of Libya's upheaval: a famously ruthless and unpredictable leader willing to do anything to cling to power, in a conflict that seems as much an African civil war as an Internet-fueled youth revolt of the kind that forced out Arab dictators in Egypt and Tunisia.
Management by chaos works, if it does, by exploding previous trust and established procedure, hoping against hope to come out of an instant of explosive upheaval with a better, if unpredictable outcome when the dust settles.
But recently, Rand McNally's future in map-making has become unpredictable, clouded by technological shifts in the industry and upheavals at the company.
The Kuwaiti cabinet said that as a result of the global economic upheaval and falling oil prices, there could be "unpredictable consequences to any global firm" and that the Dow deal would bring an unacceptably high risk.
Some banks will be particularly hard hit by weak trading in the quarter, as the stock market sagged on Middle Eastern political upheaval, a Japanese earthquake and tsunami sent the yen to record highs and markets were broadly unpredictable.
