climate change

Climate change came on my personal radar in 1989 when I was a science/lifestyle writer at a newspaper in Connecticut and I interviewed Bill McKibbon about his book “The End of Nature.” He explained the significance of a NASA scientist’s recent congressional testimony about the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s climate and the need to wean society from fossil fuels within decades to avert catastrophes like super hurricanes, severe droughts and rising sea levels. Scary stuff, but it seemed so far off.  Surely things would work out...

For a species that literally owes its remarkable evolutionary success over time to its social behavior and its many innovations (we have rightly been called “The Self-Made Man” by the anthropologist Jonathan Kingdon), we have been very slow to recognize, much less respond to what can fairly be called an existential survival crisis.  Some 99 percent of all the species that have ever evolved are now extinct. We may soon join them. Unless…