In the Face of Climate Change, We Must Act So That We Can Feel Hopeful—Not the Other Way Around
August 13, 2021 at 01:07AM In the 1850s, an American scientist named Eunice Foote deduced, based on experiments she’d conducted, that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were higher, the planet would be warmer. And in the 1890s, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius calculated, by hand, exactly how much the earth would warm as carbon dioxide levels. By the 1990s, the influence of human activities on the planet was obvious. The first United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report not only tracked the observed increase in carbon dioxide and its impact on global temperatures, melting ice and sea level rise; it also quantified a range of potential future scenarios that depended on human choices. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] This past Monday, the IPCC published the first volume of its latest Assessment Report . It’s the sixth in a series of assessments that have each been more exhaustive and comprehensive than the last. This ne...