An Inconvenient Truth

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Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc; it is us.

Last year, the national academies of science in the 11 most influential nations came together to jointly call on every nation to “acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing” and declare that the “scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”

So the message is unmistakably clear. This crisis means “danger!”

Why do our leaders seem not to hear such a clear warning? Is it simply that it is inconvenient for them to hear the truth?

If the truth is unwelcome, it may seem easier just to ignore it. But we know from bitter experience that the consequences of doing so can be dire.

For example, when we were first warned that the levees were about to break in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina, those warnings were ignored. Later, a bipartisan group of members of Congress chaired by Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) said in an official report, “The White House failed to act on the massive amounts of information at its disposal,” and that a “blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision-making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror.”

Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization: a global climate crisis that is deepening and rapidly becoming more dangerous than anything we have ever faced.

And yet these clear warnings are also being met with a “blinding lack of situational awareness”— in this case, by the Congress, as well as the president.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech not long before his assassination: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”

But along with the danger we face from global warming, this crisis also brings unprecedented opportunities. There will be plenty of new jobs and new profits — we can build clean engines; we can harness the sun and the wind; we can stop wasting energy; we can use our planet’s plentiful coal resources without heating the planet.

The procrastinators and deniers would have us believe this will be expensive. But in recent years, dozens of companies have cut emissions of heat-trapping gases while saving money. Some of the world’s largest companies are moving aggressively to capture the enormous economic opportunities offered by a clean energy future.

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