Return to site

Saving Earth: Don’t Fall Into Climate Change Fatalism

Peter Gleick's Huffington Post Column

· Climate change,CommunicatingScience

[Photo credit: Maya Suslin, Getty Images, Swedish fires 2018]

You reap what you sow. The chickens have come home to roost. The ship has sailed. The s**t has hit the fan. The English language has no shortage of idioms describing lost opportunities and the consequences of failing to act. And we’ve failed to act on human-caused climate change. It is here, with a vengeance.

We see it in massive wildfires sweeping across the western United States, Scandinavia, Canada and Siberia; the brutal heat waves and rising seas; dying coral reefs and acidifying oceans; the destruction of the Arctic and melting of Antarctica; crop failures and supercharged hurricanes...