Abstract

Boiling Point

The article addresses the issue of global climate change, and the failure of environmental organizations, presidential administrations, and others to face the challenge. Climate change is not just another issue. It is the overriding threat facing human civilization in the twenty-first century, and so far our institutions are doing dangerously little to address it. When new findings indicated that the warming is indeed significant, the spokesmen for the coal and oil industries then put forth the argument that global warming is good for us. But the central argument that big coal and big oil have spent millions of dollars to amplify over the past decade is that the warming is a natural phenomenon on which human beings have little or no impact. That argument has been repeatedly discredited by the world's leading climate scientists. Under the auspices of the United Nations, more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries have participated over the past fifteen years in what is most likely the largest, most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history. In 1995 the UN-sponsored panel found a "discernible human influence" on the planet's warming climate.