The following is the foreword to Jeffrey St. Clair’s & Joshua Frank’s new book, The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.
“The world is turning, I hope it don’t turn away.” — Neil Young
When the overnight low (109F in Oman) would be a record high in most places on Earth, you know your planet is in trouble. The evidence of our warming climate is all around us. At times it feels as if our world is unraveling. Ice shelfs melting. Seas rising. Rivers flooding. Wildfires broiling. Hurricanes destroying. Droughts devastating. It’s not as if these events haven’t been around since the dawn of time, but man-made global warming is undoubtedly making matters much, much worse. There’s little hope that we can stem the rising tides and turn back the damage carbon has wrecked on our little blue planet. But there is plenty to keep fighting for.
It doesn’t matter that the odds aren’t in our favor. We’ve all seen the numbers. 2016 was the warmest year on record. 2017 the third warmest. In fact, seventeen of the 18 warmest years on record, ever, have occurred since 2001. NASA predicts that by 2020 global temperatures will have risen more than 1 degree Celsius over the past 140 years. Of course, this is directly correlated to CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels are higher today than at any point in the past 800,000 years, and the rate is going up.
Many climate scientists, including James Hansen, believe the CO2…