Denial and Greenwashing: The Legacy of Oil and Gas Companies

The fossil fuel industry knew about the dangers of climate change decades ago, according to a DeSmog Blog report. In 1954, the fossil fuel...
423 parts per million Rising
Carbon Dioxide
1.4C above pre-industrial
Global Average Temperature
1923.6 parts per million Rising
Methane
424 billion tons per year Lost
Ice Sheets

Welcome to Global Warming is Real

Global Warming is the defining issue of our era, with its profound impact on virtually every aspect of life, from the economy and sustainable human development to politics and our relationship with the natural world.

We owe our civilization to a relatively stable climate.  There have always been weather extremes, the climate has always changed, but for millennia, the boundaries were predictable enough to allow agriculture to flourish and civilizations to rise up.

At some epochal moment in our history, man’s quest for dominion yielded unimaginable results, and the Holocene became the Anthropocene. Humanity has moved the goalposts, the boundaries are shifting quickly.

Paul Crutzen first introduced his idea of an Anthropocene at a scientific conference in 2000. With a new Millenium came a new Epoch, Crutzen proposed. Attendees were reportedly “perplexed.” But the idea caught on in popular and literary circles and may soon become a formal geographical epoch.

We cannot claim the proceeds of our ingenuity without also taking responsibility and accepting the consequences. Ignoring them belies our hubris that we can live by algorithms alone, fundamentally disconnected from nature’s cycles of circularity, conservation, and regeneration.

Global Warming is Real covers the complexities and intersection of climate change, the environment, and human development.

As urgent and overwhelming a challenge as climate change is, it is also an opportunity to make the world new again, forge a new relationship with nature, and learn to thrive in the Anthropocene.

Guitars, Tonewoods, and Sustainable Forestry

Sourcing sustainable tonewood is a growing priority for guitar makers (luthiers) worldwide. We can make music and help conserve forests.

Climate Politics and Policy

Energy and Efficiency

Environmental News

Climate Solutions

It's Our Watch

If scientific climate models are difficult to understand, it is much easier to see what’s happening outside–the wildfires, floods, droughts, searing heat, drenching rain, and changing seasons. Global warming is real.

The climate change narrative evolves as human-caused climate change becomes ever more apparent. With each passing year, the environmental degradation, increasingly intense natural disasters, food and water insecurity, economic disruption, and conflicts ignited at least in part by climate change become harder to ignore.

Nonetheless, some say there is nothing we can do about global warming, if it’s even really a problem at all.

Between doomer, inaction, and denial, there is another path. We cannot dwell on the time lost, even as scientists from Exxon knew decades ago the dangers of disrupting the natural carbon cycle. We can only look forward.

Hope comes when we stop fooling ourselves.

Climate change is here. We must adapt even as we find new ways to thrive in the world we have made. It will not be easy. There is no silver bullet.

We stand at a crossroads in human history. Now is the time, on our watch. What we do right now will make all the difference in the world we choose to leave as our legacy.