| Summary: | Time is running short! When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first scientific report in 1990 on the possibility of humancaused global warming, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) was 354 ppm. When I began writing this book about four years ago, the concentration of CO2 was 387 ppm. It is now 397 ppm and rising. In spite of Kyoto, in spite of Copenhagen and Cancun, atmospheric CO2 continues its inexorable upward path. And the earth continues to warm. The United States and the world are not yet serious about changing policies to stop this spiral. Too many politicians and others have their heads buried in the sand and refuse to acknowledge the continuing deluge of data showing that the world is indeed warming. 2010 was the warmest year—and the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the warmest decade—for at least the last 100,000 years. A serious debate is ongoing among geologists to decide if the earth has formally passed out of the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years into the Anthropocene epoch, in which 7 billion humans are the primary factor driving climate. Sea levels continue to rise, the oceans are acidifying, glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt, the Arctic will likely be ice-free during the summer sometime this century, and weather extremes have become commonplace around the earth. Plant and animal species are migrating to higher latitudes at 17 kilometers per decade on average, and alpine species are moving to higher altitudes at 11 meters every decade. Changes like this have occurred in the past, but over time spans of thousands to tens of thousands of years, giving species time to adapt. There are those who argue that species have always had to adapt to a changing climate or die and therefore they will handle the current changes. While there is some truth to that, it ignores the fact that many species are already under great pressure from the impact of humans on habitat.
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