Why are we being such idiots about climate change?

Veteran environment writer John Carey looks at the reasons we don’t seem to make meaningful progress on climate change — and issues a rousing call to arms for us all to step up and play our part.

When I started covering climate change more than thirty years ago, the underlying science was already clear. Heat from the sun warms the Earth. Gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then act like a snuggly blanket or greenhouse to trap much of that warmth, keeping much of the heat from radiating back out to space.

For humans, this greenhouse effect is a vital — and fortuitous — physical phenomenon. Without it, the Earth would be in a deep freeze. Life as we know it couldn’t exist. We would have no mighty civilizations, no vast fields covered with amber waves of grain. No smart phones or keeping up with the Kardashians.

But like most good things, we can have too much of this greenhouse effect. Spew extra carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, as humans have been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Age, and it’s like pulling an extra cozy comforter over the planet. We get warmer. Ice sheets and glaciers melt. Sea levels rise. The extra energy in the atmosphere means more powerful and extreme storms, bringing tempests that wash away Vermont towns and send walls of water into subway tunnels in Manhattan. “Suddenly, climate change isn’t about the polar bears or the distant Sea levels anymore,” a Nashville, TN, flood victim told me for a story I wrote for Scientific American on the growing number of droughts, floods and other Sea levels events, “It’s about the mold on your baby’s crib.”

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