So, my friends:
The more I speak and write about climate change and climate justice, the more I get asked if climate change i really real. The answer is yes.
Here are three important answers to that question.
One. Yes. The science has been known since about 1825. Basically: this is how the atmosphere works: Sunlight gets in. Gases trap the heat, making it possible to get warm enough for life on earth. Too much, too high concentration of gases that have a greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc), means too much heat will get trapped, and temperatures (mean global annual temperature) go up. Basic science. Done. My friend Chris Cuomo and Michael Dorsey reminded me of this fact.
[It also reminds me of the second grade class where we did the water condensation experiment: water, heated, turns to steam, then condenses on the pot lid as it cools and comes back down. The water cycle. By the way, about 1% of the water on Earth is freshwater that we can use to sustain life. We, human beings, industrial human beings, have polluted or contaminated or removed about half of that fresh water supply from the global water cycle. Some of it is stuff in aquifers, some of it is polluted, some of it is stored in plastic bottles in landfills. So we're down to a half a percent of water to sustain us and the rest of life on this planet. Freaky.]
Two. Yes. Politics. The disbelief, especially in the US, is manufactured, by, surprise, corporations. The question is actually, why are people in the U.S. so unbelieving about it when the rest of the world knows it's real? The United States is the site of a particularly weird and rabid disbelief in climate change (see: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686?paged=60). It is something that has been funded by a particular bloc of the energy (read, coal, oil, nuclear, etc) industries. And it is a bloc that is starting to break.
Three. Yes, and you (and we) should be really worried. It is more real, severe, widespread than any climate scientists thought. Back when I was a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology in the late 1990s and much of the climate science modeling was still new and developing, it seemed that a new model was being announced almost every week. [Side note: the modelers were trying to really include complex systems analysis and thought into the mathematical models, and actually, the human ability to understand complex systems and emergent effects greatly outstrips our ability to model those systems, effects and impacts through mathematical models.] A decade (almost a decade and a half) later, the glaciers have melted and much of the Andes and the Himalayas will be or are in danger of extended water shortage and drought, the Arctic ice cap is mostly gone for much more of the year than ever before, the storms and climate disruption on a global scale are much more severe than predicted by those models. Communities from those frontlines who have generally stayed out of engagement with modern society have come down to capital cities to say, this is happening and you-all who caused it need to take care of your mess.
The solutions require, really, important, dramatic, root-cause-level shifts in our beliefs, our relationships with each other and Mother Earth (see http://pwccc.blogspot.com), our consumption patterns, lifestyles, our policies and politics, our memories of who we have been (recuperation and excavation) and our dreams of who we can and should be (the prophetic).
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