The headline of this article should be a no-brainer. But there are still too many people who think otherwise, causing little action to be taken, and who are thereby dragging the rest of us into hell—a problem recently made fun of in the movie Don’t Look Up. How do we move that needle? Today I’m going to survey the quickest route toward establishing, through simple evidence-based reasoning, that the problem exists and there are substantial steps that could be taken that wouldn’t ruin everything. That we should take those steps I believe will then be self-evident to any rational human being.

I will start by default to the consensus position of climate scientists: that global warming is happening, is serious, and is human-caused. Which means you can deny either of three things:

• You can deny global warming exists; so there is no problem even to address.
• You can admit it exists, but deny humans are causing it; so (maybe?) there is no problem we can address.
• You can deny it’s serious; so, yes, humans are causing global warming, but it’s a piffle, we don’t need to enact any urgent policies over it.

So if you want to deny the expert consensus, in any one of those three senses, the burden falls on you to establish that there is enough evidence to warrant doing that. Otherwise, you should be on board with the seriousness of this issue, and keen to look for actions to take. Whether there is any rational ground to deny any of this, I will get to last. We can talk about that then. For now, let’s get at why you aren’t going with the consensus of experts on this (if such you aren’t).

Are You a Rational Person?

I’ve just spoken of what’s self-evident to rational human beings. But, it’s true, most human beings aren’t rational, and few give any honest heed to evidence-based reasoning. For them I have no advice. You cannot persuade a lunatic; least of all if they have committed to rejecting the very means needed to be honestly persuaded of anything. But if you or anyone you meet has sincerely pledged to believe what the evidence logically entails, and still does not believe we should be doing anything about global warming, this is the article for you. It’s also true that most of my readers don’t need any persuading here. But many of my readers still encounter those who do, and thus could use this article in their own efforts to change minds. Which leaves one last category of person: those few of my readers who still are climate-action deniers. To you I say this: you must here make a choice. Base your beliefs, and your decisions for action, on logic and evidence—or admit, out loud, that you don’t believe in doing that. Your call.

One might still ask—who are these people? Because if someone has committed to abandoning evidence-based reasoning, odds are they have turned to tribal, desire-based reasoning, the next most common kind: they just agree with whatever dogmas are promulgated by their “in-group,” or “identity-group” (the sort of person they think they are), whoever that may be, and thus side with what they “want” to be true rather than what actually is, and then rationalize-away all evidence to the contrary. And this is where things get interesting. Americans overall rate global warming a more pressing problem than “immigration,” comparable even to “jobs and the economy.” Whereas only a third of Americans think global warming doesn’t exist or that we should do nothing about it. And surprise—these are not “all Trump voters.” So if you are reading this, and you are pro-Trump, guess what: you should be on board with my position on global warming. Because enough of your peers are to warrant you joining us.

That’s right. There is substantial support for taking action on global warming even among Trump voters. Roughly half of his supporters not only agree global warming is happening, but that America should even “participate in the international agreement to limit global warming,” which contradicts the usual perception that Trump voters are against government regulation and global cooperation. Even more astonishing: only a third of Trump voters don’t believe in global warming—the same percentage as the general population (another one-fifth are “undecided”). Whereas the exact converse—two thirds of Trump voters—support “taxing and/or regulating the pollution that causes global warming,” while only a fifth think we should do neither. Over two thirds also support “generating renewable energy (solar and wind) on public land,” the same number who support “more drilling and mining of fossil fuels on public land.” They similarly support “funding more research into clean energy and providing tax rebates to people who purchase energy efficient vehicles and solar panels.” And roughly half of Trump supporters want to “eliminate all federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry” and to require “fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax” and accept “strict carbon dioxide emissions limits…even if the cost of electricity to consumers and companies would likely increase.” A third think “transitioning from fossil fuels toward clean energy” will even “improve economic growth” while a fifth think at least it won’t hurt, for a full half being on board with the idea one way or another.

Okay. So Trump voters are no more irrational about global warming than everyone else. They are already substantially on board, with near or actual majorities backing real action on global warming as a problem—forty percent even put it on their priorities list. Climate science deniers are fringe even in that community. And this is still true. While those proportions were for supporters of Trump in the 2016 election, by 2020 he lost many supporters, resulting in a concentration of extreme views among those remaining. And yet still a substantial number of them are on board with global warming being a problem. A recent study by the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis found:

More than 90% of Biden supporters rate climate change to be a crisis or a major problem and believe that human activity is to blame. Just less than half of Trump supporters consider climate change to be a crisis or major problem. Even among Trump supporters who consider climate change to be real, only half attribute it to human activity. Among the 43% of Trump supporters [now] who deny that there is solid evidence for climate change, a majority endorsed the statement “the advocates of global warming are deliberately misleading us for their own political reasons,” rather than the statement that “the scientific evidence is incomplete or misleading.” [And] “that adds up to about one-fifth of Trump supporters who are deniers and blame what they see as deliberately misleading environmentalists,” Smith said.

This is framed negatively, but read carefully and you’ll see some surprising things there: “Just less than half of Trump supporters consider climate change to be a crisis or major problem” means more than half consider it at least a minor problem. So a majority are on board still. And even nearly half agree it’s a serious issue. The third of deniers in 2016 did jump to two-fifths by 2020, but not because more people doubt global warming, but rather, because more people who admit it’s a problem abandoned Trump, increasing the ratio of deniers in his remaining base. The Trump base is becoming more extreme only because moderates are leaving. And yet still only half of those two-fifths embrace a conspiracy theory to explain away all the evidence, the most irrational of positions—you really have abandoned all evidence-based reasoning once you have to invent wildly improbable global conspiracies just to maintain your belief. And that’s only one fifth of Trump voters, even in 2020.

The Wikipedia article on “Climate Change Denial” surveys data showing that denialism is relatively rare even in the United States. Old people are more likely to be denialists—whereas a clear majority of even conservative Millennials agree global warming is happening. Christians are more likely to be denialists—whereas only 10% of atheists are. The gender gap is small. But it’s a belief that’s most typical of white conservatives. And yet still only two thirds or so of white male conservatives are denialists of some form or other. One can thus say climate denialism is predominately a “conservative white man” problem—like most world problems. And I have noticed that conservatives, men, and white people are the three groups most prone to not wanting to hear any evidence against their preconceived beliefs. They think everyone is out to get them, and everything is a scheme to take away their toys and privileges. In my experience they are the least likely to listen to reason. But the evidence shows that a third of them can. So if you are reading this and are a conservative white man (or woman, for that matter) who denies global warming is a problem, it is still possible for evidence to rationally persuade you. Are you willing to let it?

What Do You Want?

That there is global warming is a different question from whether humans caused it (or how serious it is). After all, one can believe humans didn’t cause it but still we should do something about it, which obligates you to figure out what is causing it so you can counteract it. If the alien overlord Ming the Merciless were increasing global warming with his Disaster Machine on Jupiter, we might support funding a Jupiter invasion force. That would be the most direct approach. Go right at what’s actually causing it. But suppose that were impossible; Ming’s defense forces are just too powerful. We could take steps here to counteract Ming’s attack. While he beams malevolent Warming Rays at Earth, we could reduce other causes of warming, and take steps at cooling, and thus negate his attack, even reverse its effects. So denying humans caused global warming should have little effect on your feeling of urgency to do something about it. In my experience, though, realizing this often causes a denier to radicalize: they then start denying global warming even exists. Because they don’t like the consequences of admitting that it does. And once cornered, the only way to get the conclusion they want is to deny it altogether.

Admitting that global warming exists but denying humans caused it might be an attempt to avoid taking responsibility—maybe it threatens your pride—but it seems more often an attempt to deny we can do anything about it. After all, if fossil fuels didn’t cause it, then, one might reason, reducing their use won’t fix it. So, I find that in any conversation about anything controversial, really one should start with the question, “Why do you care?” For example, if someone wants to go on about how transwomen aren’t women, I will start with, “Why do you even care?” What does it matter what words we use for whichever categories of people? Why is it so important to oppose calling transwomen women? What does that accomplish that you care about so much? Once we get at the actual desire motivating the belief, then we can start critically examining whether that’s actually a sound reason to hold that belief in the first place. (See my article Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed for another example.)

Since there are predominately two epistemologies embraced in the world—rational, evidence-based reasoning, and tribal, desire-based reasoning—such that abandoning one typically leaves one in thrall to the other, it becomes imperative to deconstruct the desire-based framework first. Challenge the reasoning even behind wanting the world to be a certain way, and you’ll then have more success persuading someone with evidence. Yes, everyone should have accepted the evidence from the start. But sometimes you have to remove the obstacle—the reason they don’t want the evidence to be as you say it is. So, ask of any denier of global warming or its human causes, “Why do you care?” Why is it important to you that global warming not exist? There must be a reason, or else you would simply go along with the mainstream consensus. Some desire must be motivating you to go the other way. What is it? Likewise if you admit it exists, but deny humans are causing it. Why is it important to you to deny humans are causing it? Almost all scientists agree the world over that humans are causing it—so what desire is motivating you to go the other way? Why do you need that to not be true? And the same goes for admitting it exists, and humans caused it, but denying it’s serious. Why don’t you want to believe it’s serious? Almost everyone else believes it’s serious. So why are you still holding out? What desire is motivating you to go the other way?

Most people are uncomfortable asking themselves these questions. It can be alarming to admit you have desires motivating your beliefs. But it is crucial to all critical thought that we always be aware of our own biases. And desires are a bias. If you don’t want global warming to be true, then this is going to get in the way of your being able to know whether it is true. And if you are committed to being a rational person, this is important to know. Any obstacle to your ascertaining the truth about the world is something you know you need to remove or get around, and not allow yourself to be influenced by. This applies all the way down the line: if you are comfortable with global warming being true, but uncomfortable with the idea that human commerce and industry is causing it; or if you are comfortable with that, but uncomfortable with the idea that it is serious enough to warrant substantial actions on your part, as well as of your collective society. If there are desires getting in the way of your arriving at true beliefs on these things, you need to know what they are, you need to know they are there, so you can take steps to not be undermined by them.

I will put that responsibility on you. Question yourself, regarding these motives or desires; make an honest assessment; take that assessment into account. Perhaps you will deny you have any motives here, that you have no skin in the game, it doesn’t matter to you what’s true here. But that’s unlikely. Because if you deny global warming exists, humans caused it, or that it’s serious, you are going against the overwhelming majority of experts, and even most of your peers—even half or more of your own in-group. That is not possible unless some desire were motivating you to do that—even if you are right, there still must be a desire that got you there. Get at what that desire is—why, perhaps, do you want these things to be false. Only then can you step back and assess the evidence objectively, so as to come to an impartial, unemotional, and rational decision about what really is the case.

Because the fact is, global warming is going to hurt you; and your country; and everyone you love and care about. And billions of other people, now and for a century or more on. If you believe a moral person should compassionately care about how their behavior will harm other people, and if you understand that future populations count as “other people,” then you should care about global warming for that reason alone. Leave the world as well as or better than you found it, right? Moral Decency 101. It’s what you’d have wanted past generations to do for you. So you should be the person you want them to have been. But even if you are completely selfish, and don’t care about anyone you hurt as long as you never have to meet them, you should still care about global warming. Because it’s already coming for you and yours. Any of which facts could be why you want global warming not to be true, or not caused by you and yours, or not serious—because then you could rest easy with the fact that you are keen on doing nothing about it. But what if it is all true, and you should do something about it?

That It’s a Thing

The easiest thing to prove is that global warming is occurring. Because all that requires is a simple look at the data:

Try as you might, there just is no way to get around the data. You can’t make it go away; you can’t change it. On average, globally, temperature has experienced a steady, notable rise since the dominance of a fossil-fuel commerce and industry. Sometimes the average goes down after it goes up, but the overall trend, over time, is up. Yes, there was a heat spike in the early 40s that faded in the later 40s, yet the overall trend remained: that spike has been so far exceeded since then that in the last twenty years, the Earth has never been that cool again. Yes, cool. That “heat spike” in the 40s would actually feel like a substantial cooling of the Earth compared to today.

So global warming is definitely happening. You can argue about what’s causing it, but that won’t get it to go away. Sure, the average low-information voter in America might ignore this data and try to cherry-pick counter-evidence, but all that does is put their innumeracy on display, their basic (maybe even willful) failure to understand how math works. Which is a product of the failure of the American education system, which is also something people should care more about. But we don’t have time to fix the entire national education system and then wait for its improvement in voter numeracy to impact their ability to think competently across all voting demographics so as to await it dawning on them then that global warming is a problem. That would take over fifty years—even if we actually fixed everything wrong with American math literacy today, which we aren’t.

So, let’s skip that step and just get right to Math 101: the problem is not what the temperatures will be on any given day at any given place on Earth; the problem is the overall average of all those temperatures. It’s that average that’s going up. This means you can have a blizzard in Texas, while a heat wave thrashes Europe; what we want to know is, what happens when you average those. If the net temperature on that weird day is still higher than it was ten years ago, the Earth has gotten hotter. So pointing to this or that snow storm or cold snap does not count for anything. You still have to calculate the overall average, across the whole Earth, before you can know whether the Earth is cooling or warming (or neither). Likewise across time. One year might be cooler than the last; but is the average over a decade cooler than the one prior? Look at the graph above: 2021 was cooler on average than 2020; and yet 2020 was hotter on average than every prior year in human history—but one, and that one year was just a few years before that. So you have to look at the trend over time, not put blinders on and cherry pick years to get the result you want. If you are cherry picking, you have already admitted the evidence disproves your conclusion—and you’re just trying to avoid saying that out loud.

Likewise, geography: the Southern half of the Earth is experiencing its summer when the northern half is experiencing its winter. In the very same month, winter blizzards in the U.S. will be occurring at exactly the same time as deadly summer heat waves in Australia. Likewise South America, Asia, Africa. So you can’t just look around you, see it’s unusually cold wherever you are (or anyone else is), and deny the Earth is warming. You have to look everywhere, and you have to do the math. That’s what tables like the one I presented above are showing you. You also have to account for global effects of these changes: even if you don’t feel the heat where you are, the polar ice caps are, and as they melt, sea levels will rise across the entire planet. Likewise, agriculture can be anywhere affected, and that means food supply, which affects cost of living and economic prosperity. If Africa loses food production because of global warming, this will increase demand on globally imported foods to make up the loss, which will raise costs at your local corner grocery. You might even be drinking water that comes from another region—whose drought conditions threaten your water supply. The world is deeply interconnected even as an ecosystem; even more so as an economic system.

This is why the global average matters. It affects everyone. But global warming is so pervasive a problem now that even if you are so carelessly narrow-minded that you only notice what’s going in your own local area, and not how it’s connected with everything else, the picture still doesn’t change. The data come out the same. Here is a visual representation of the rise in average temperatures for the United States, as a whole and state-by-state:

That looks bad. Don’t you think? Well, maybe you don’t think it’s “bad” yet. But can you at least admit it’s real? Average temps are in fact rising, and have been across even just the U.S. alone, in every state of the union (including Hawaii and Alaska), over the last 120 years.

Let’s narrow the picture even. What about where you live? Well, that could be anywhere. But since it’s usually conservatives who won’t listen to the evidence, I’ll just pick the most conservative city in the United States: Lafayette, Louisiana. Well, that state itself concluded, “cities in Louisiana are experiencing at least two more weeks of extremely hot days compared to 50 years ago,” and Lafayette was one of the worst, experiencing on average now “20 additional days” above 95°F than half a century prior. And while in Louisiana the worst impacted of 159 cities nationwide is New Orleans, Lafayette still ranked 19th. If the trend continues at the same pace, “Louisianans will suffer three full months where the heat index is over 105 by the end of the century.” You will struggle to find any city or town, anywhere you can live, that doesn’t show the same trend—and even if you find one, it will be so rare as to have no significant impact on the average overall.

The Earth is getting hotter. And it’s getting hotter as a whole, and in every significant part. This is simply irrational to deny.

If you still aren’t convinced, you can use the proper principles of critical reason (see A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning) to verify for yourself that there are multiple lines of independent corroborating evidence for this conclusion, and all the false claims that have been made to deny the data have been empirically refuted. See Stage One of How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic for more on that point. In general, there should be one simple rule here: whenever someone questions our sources of information, make sure, and then point out, that our information is the only actual information there is. All scientific sources, from multiple independent and multiply corroborated efforts, reports essentially all the same findings. Their differences are all within expected error margins and make no difference to the overall conclusion. There are none that give “shockingly different results.” The only “different results” you’ll ever find, are from people who have no comparable data. There is no one out there with a different thermometer giving them different readings. So you have to decide: do you listen to the only real information there is, or to people who have no real differing information to give? Do you follow the people with tons of evidence, or the people who have no comparable evidence?

That We’re Causing It

Okay. So global warming is real. But are we causing it? Could human activity actually be having such a dramatic, worldwide effect? It’s possible other things are contributing to global warming; but that would not matter so much to the point. If human activity is making the effect worse, if it is contributing to global warming, then it still matters. So the question we want to know the answer to is whether human activity is substantially causing this observed global warming. If there are other contributing causes, they also matter, so we’d want to know that, too, but the interventions those would require generally have the same effects and thus would be useful or warranted even if global warming were entirely caused by human activity. So it’s a distinction with little difference.

If volcanoes are pouring more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than usual, we still have to get rid of it. So carbon sequestration is still something we need to do. If the sun is getting hotter, then building space-blinds to reduce solar radiation on the Earth is still something we need to do. Increasingly affordable techniques for accomplishing this are being developed, to the point that there is almost no argument left for not implementing them anyway. So we should do these things even if the sun isn’t getting hotter and volcanoes aren’t spewing any more than usual. So trying to blame global warming on other things doesn’t really change how we should react to the fact of global warming. It hardly matters what is causing global warming. The same interventions are needed.

So usually the reason people settle on denying humans are the cause is because they don’t want to admit to one of the most obvious and directly targetable solutions to global warming, our invasion fleet directly launched at Ming the Merciless: simply reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Solving this problem actually has enormous economic benefits (new technologies, new products, scientific and technological advances, and more jobs to implement them all). So really, the only parties with an interest in making you not realize this are the people who actually have something to lose: Big Oil (along with all their bought politicians). Honestly, someone who claims to be a climate skeptic, should be an even bigger skeptic of everything coming from all those guys. They clearly have a lot to lose, and thus every reason to try and muddy the waters and manipulate public belief—vastly more obviously so than world scientists, or whoever you have to imagine is conspiring to move public opinion in the other direction. Moreover, whereas there is no evidence of that conspiracy, there is quite abundant evidence of the other one. The oil industry has been actively manipulating public opinion on this since the 1980s. Do you really want to be that big of a dupe? That certainly would not bode well for your judgment, would it?

The facts are actually relatively simple here, regardless of what propagandists and oil apologists will tell you:

More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps more heat.

That’s it.

Really. That’s all there is to it.

This is a well-demonstrated, well-understood, completely unavoidable fact that cannot honestly be denied. The complexities don’t change that simple truth. Carbon monoxide, the principal output of fossil fuel combustion, converts to carbon dioxide in a matter of months (from atmospheric chemistry and some biological processing). And while methane is much worse in its heat-trapping effects than CO2, it doesn’t survive in the atmosphere much beyond a decade, so if we stopped increasing its production, we would stop its heating effect—and if we reduced its production (and yet even still kept pumping it out), we would actually start cooling the planet. Nothing else is commonly produced enough at present to impact global warming as significantly. So it really comes down to CO2.

That a CO2 quantity in the atmosphere causes heat retention is not only basic empirical science, you can even demonstrate it yourself with household experiments (see How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? and The Science of Carbon Dioxide and Climate). It has been proved through multiple independent lines of evidence. One of which being the obvious:

Like they say, if there’s smoke…

Or zoom out if you really want to see it:

Yep. That’s how closely atmospheric carbon dioxide quantity aligns with global average temperatures. No frakking way that’s a coincidence. And yet we aren’t just concluding “it can’t be a coincidence” anyway. Science fully understands why CO2 has this effect, down to the molecular and even quantum mechanical level. Observing the effect in practice like this only confirms what we already knew. The graph above matches the CO2 quantity found in trapped bubbles of air at each level of ice cores taken back hundreds of thousands of years, each layer of which also contains a chemical signature in the ice of the average temperatures experienced. So the two could be compared. They match. And this is exactly as predicted by the chemistry and everything else. And yes, these results have been multiply replicated. And no, that these rises in CO2 were caused by initial orbital warming events does not change the fact that most of the resulting heat can only have come from the CO2 quantity, as it continues to track that long after the orbital events had faded. And we know why—because this is what CO2 inevitably does.

There is in fact no way known to prevent increasing CO2 from increasing planetary temperature—other than to mitigate the effect with something else. Which is why we need to mitigate the effect with something else. And that will be far cheaper to do, and far easier to do, if we stop making more of the damned stuff. Imagine someone trying to put out a forest fire, while simultaneously continuing to light even more fires than they are putting out. You would correctly call that person insane. And yet you just described the human race: we are trying to keep the world from burning by putting out fires, while continually lighting even more fires than we are snuffing. Don’t you think that’s kind of dumb? We really need to reduce the fires we’re even starting, before any project of snuffing out those fires will do us much good. Mitigating the effect is thus barely of any use, if we aren’t also reducing the cause. And ideally, we should as near to eliminate the cause as we can. If we want to keep the world from burning, starting reckless fires should be unusual, not standard practice.

Okay. So, CO2 is rising, and it’s causing the global warming. Those are facts. They are not rationally deniable. Maybe, then, you want to claim it’s all coming from some other secret place than tail pipes and chimneys. Well, good luck. Search all you might. You won’t find anywhere near the volume of observed CO2 coming from anywhere on Earth other than from human commerce and industry: all the CO2 we are producing from burning fossil fuels, to drive cars, sail ships, fly planes, run factories, generate electricity, smelt metals, heat homes, and so on. Honestly. We can do the math. The CO2 quantity we are dumping into the air from all this is vastly beyond any natural source over the last million years:

And the pace of this monstrous CO2 rise in just the last two centuries matches the rate of increase in fossil fuels consumed during exactly the same period:

And we can do the math to confirm this, too. Because we know exactly how much CO2 ends up in the air for every unit of each kind of fuel burned. It matches precisely what we find. So, yes, humans are causing this. And it’s fossil fuels in particular that are the culprit.

That It’s Fossil Fuels in Particular

Yes, you’ll hear things like “the meat industry is one of the greatest contributors to global warming,” but that’s actually not true. As I’ve explained before, those false claims are based on conflating different causes of greenhouse emissions. One third of what is attributed to “livestocking” is actually the effect of clearing forests to raise the animals, not the animals themselves, and that is only a product of development in third world countries. It therefore has an end-point already. Just as no one cut down a forest today to feed you Iowa beef, eventually no one will be cutting down forests to feed you Argentinian beef. So that is a problem that solves itself. And even still, the problem there is deforestation. The most obvious mitigating policy for this behavior is to simply plant more forests to re-sequester all that released carbon, which we should be doing anyway.

Another third of attributed “livestocking” emissions comes from associated fertilizer production, which we would be producing anyway—get rid of the animals, and you have to replace them with agriculture, which will use even more fertilizer. So there really isn’t any solve for that, any more than there is for humans (and all of Earth’s animals) breathing out CO2 all the time, and having to constantly kill plants so as to eat them, thus releasing the carbon those plants had sequestered. Normally all of this is already taken care of by the carbon cycle: we eat plants, then grow new ones, and the net carbon in the air stays the same; we breathe out, plants breathe in, and the net carbon in the air stays the same. So this emissions component isn’t something we can solve by reducing anything.

Everything else after that in animal farming is a product of inefficient third world husbandry—and is predominately just methane. It’s those infamous “cow burps” (likewise burping sheep and pigs and so on). Western livestock farming is three times more greenhouse efficient (contributing less than 2% to greenhousing, as opposed to 6% elsewhere), and becoming even more so (recent legislation in the U.S. is already funding new developments in greenhouse efficiency on American farms). So maybe we should fund the spread of our husbandry techniques and infrastructure to the rest of the world? Honestly, we should be doing that anyway, because of its value to peacekeeping and global trade and economic productivity. But in any case, this is the methane problem. And that doesn’t work the same way.

Biogenic methane is actually produced by consuming CO2 already in the atmosphere (unlike methane released from fossil fuel mining, refining, and consumption). And methane disappears in a matter of years. So for animal farming, the net gain in greenhouse effect is minimal; and becomes zero once we stop increasing production. It even becomes negative—animal farming starts to help us cool the planet—once we start reducing its methane output. For example, Americans are now funding an additive that when fed to cows will reduce their methane output by 30%. The UK and Europe have already done this. This could be globalized. Claims that it’s toxic have been refuted. And its benefits will have a limit (once everyone is doing it, there won’t be any more gains in planetary cooling), but once we reach peak production, no further warming will come from this sector of the economy.

So there is really only one villain in this story: fossil fuels. There is nothing on Earth producing such vast quantities of carbon dioxide than that; and no other greenhouse gas is being produced on anywhere near that rising scale either. Animal husbandry was indeed the next largest source, and as I just pointed out, it’s tiny by comparison, and already capped and slated for decline. We’re essentially already taking care of it in the first world, and could, if we had the will, fund its being taken care of everywhere else, too. But the rise in greenhouse effects from the use of fossil fuels is literally five to ten times greater, and yet we’re doing far less about it. Which reflects the oil lobby’s goal. They don’t want anything done about this. But you don’t have to sate their desires. You can act in your own self-interest, rather than theirs. The world will be better off—and this means for you, too—with less fossil fuels being burned; and absent that, then with their being burned more efficiently. And we can approach both goals simultaneously: aiming to develop increased efficiency (the more work we can get out of a single unit of petroleum, the less we burn) while we also aim to wean ourselves off the drug altogether (the more energy we can generate without fossil fuels, the less we burn).

And this is beneficial all around. Don’t you want to get more miles out of your car on less petrol? The money you save alone is worth that. Likewise electricity—if a power plant can get more of it out of a gallon of propane, then the cost to you goes down. Right? Converting to new power systems—expanding wind and solar, geothermal and hydroelectric, even nuclear—creates jobs and leads markets in trade and innovation, and reduces our dependence on fascist oil regimes abroad. Getting off oil is thus even a matter of national security. Likewise, coal is a dying industry. So why not re-employ coal miners in wind-solar manufacturing, or reforestation or other carbon capture industries? That would be smarter investment planning; way smarter than trying to cling to an industry whose death is already inevitable. (“How would we pay for it?” I’ll get to shortly. But maybe, you know, remaining coal profits could help.)

Getting off oil won’t happen overnight. Burning it isn’t even the only way we use it (plastics largely come from petroleum products, for example). But every incremental step in that direction benefits you, and us all. It just so happens that this also slows down the continual increase in atmospheric CO2, and thus puts at least some meaningful breaks on global warming, a necessary first step to reversing it. And yes, we should aim to reverse it. If recent regional droughts, wildfires, and deadly heat waves in America alone haven’t already convinced you by now, surely you must agree we should get our planet’s climate at least back to its peak net economic output in the West, certainly with respect to water supply and natural greening (reducing floods and wildfires, and boosting agricultural production)—which was sometime between 1850 and 1950. We shouldn’t be blowing a single buck terraforming Mars when we still have to re-terraform Earth, to fix all the damage we’ve done to her atmosphere, and all the costs this damage is now imposing on us.

That It’s Serious

So, what costs? We are already witnessing the beginning of those costs, and every single example will only grow in coming decades. The only question is how much worse they will get, which will be a function of how much we dial back on increasing global warming (hence, fossil fuel reduction) and how much we dial up on global cooling initiatives (from carbon capture to solar shading). We even have the opportunity to reverse global warming. But we can only do that if we begin the process of dialing it back.

This will all take many decades, but that is precisely why it needs to begin now. We have already waited so long that our costs are already mounting. We could have saved a great deal more money if we had begun addressing this sooner—a folly we fall for far too often. As with Hurricane Katrina: by “skimping” on spending money to prepare for it, the cost of all the damage it did far exceeded what we would have spent in the first place. We saw this foolish error again with the recent destructive cold snap in Texas: preparing against it would have cost far less than all the damage avoiding that cost eventually cost. The same can be said of extraterrestrial impact threats. Global warming is like any other looming threat. The longer we wait to address it, the more it’s going to cost us. We need to start cutting costs now.

Those costs can all be measured in dollars of course. But they also have other metrics: lives lost, disabilities and injuries and disease, property destroyed, beautiful landscapes and historic sites—our cultural heritage—degraded or erased forever, people cast into poverty, fewer people able to climb out of poverty or into affluence, and countless public benefits lost to the opportunity-cost of paying to repair the damages (because we will have less money to invest in the military and health care and law enforcement, when we have to divert countless billions to fighting wildfires and floods and droughts). Eventually, the breadbasket of the Americas will move northward, as the American heartland becomes a tumbleweeded desert, and the Canadian provinces explode with agricultural production. America’s global decline will almost be inevitable by that point. We will be a third world country.

So don’t just think about the dollar value of these costs. Think of all the other ways they cost as well—to you personally, to your life and pride and welfare and prosperity, and to the shared wealth you’d like to continue to enjoy (like public safety, parklands, infrastructure), and likewise to all of us in turn. But also consider the conclusions of The Deloitte Report (2022), that “Inaction on climate change could cost the US economy $14.5 trillion by 2070,” our economy thereby losing 4% of its GDP, or it could “gain $3 trillion over the next 50 years,” an increase to GDP of 2.5%, if we choose a path of low-emissions growth. Global warming is expected to kill 900,000 jobs each year; whereas ramping up an industry to slow and reverse this could create a net one million jobs by 2070. This is for the United States alone. The same findings follow, in their own particular ways, for every other nation on Earth.

What are we measuring here?

• “Over the past 50 years, the US has [already] suffered a total of $1.4 trillion in economic losses due to weather, climate, and water hazards,” which is “more than one-third of the cost of all global economic losses due to disasters,” and this cost will not only continue, but increase. “In 2021 alone, there were 20 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the US.”
• The average family (you and yours) will suffer “a lifetime income loss of nearly $70,000” due to these costs and their repercussions across the American economy if no action is taken.
• These costs are not limited to the already-observed phenomenon of increasing disasters (wildfires, floods, hurricanes, heat waves) but to ongoing property and health losses—including loss of life, and increases in lifetime hospital and health expenses, including an increase in disabilities.
• This damage will be caused by ever-increasing “heat stress” on “human health,” labor productivity, and infrastructure (roads, bridges, electrical grids, and beyond), “sea level rise,” costing either in lost capital (destroyed homes, businesses, and land) or the costs to prevent these losses with hydrological engineering (or both); and even “lost tourism.”
• Another major impact is going to be “reduced or disrupted agricultural yields,” which is a problem both because we need food to eat, and because our economy needs food to sell. So the threat is double: both to our own food security (and resulting rises in costs of living to survive), and to our national and thus personal prosperity.

And that’s just the short list. The report goes into minute detail, tracing every kind of losses already being suffered (and costs already mounting) and projecting them forward in a reasoned analysis of expected outcomes as average temperatures rise. This is already plainly visible in the massive increase in wildfires nationwide (and worldwide), and their devastating, accumulating costs; a cumulative increase in destructive hurricanes and floods (likewise); the increasingly severe (and now unending) droughts that are already devastating agriculture and posing serious threats to population security in the United States alone; rapidly crumbling infrastructure due to heat stress (and neglect); impacts on labor productivity and citizen health (from illness, injury, and disability to outright death); and beyond.

Take just the singular global impact of rising sea levels, as polar caps melt. Yes, climate extremists are lying when they claim “the global sea level will rise twenty feet in our lifetimes.” But readjust to the truth, and it’s still bad. The amount of sea level rise actually predicted, of many inches, has already occurred. That this observed annual increase is accelerating (the amount it’s increasing is itself increasing every year) is well documented empirically. It is inevitably going to rise quite a lot more even on the most generous estimates of current rates of global warming. It’s already bad enough that entire nations now are being threatened. So even though in actual fact Earth’s oceans won’t likely rise more than two feet in the next two lifetimes, this is actually still really bad and something we really do need to do something about. The only question is: do we do the most expensive thing possible (which is: nothing); or do we do the most affordable thing possible (which is: slow and reverse global warming).

“Two feet” or even just “one foot” doesn’t “sound” scary enough—because people don’t appreciate what this actually, physically means in terms of impact—so environmental extremists will lie, exaggerate the number, leading people to dismiss all alarmism about sea level rise, and thus discrediting even the truth they could have told instead. But a rational person will find that even after dismissing their lies, the scientific truth remains—and remains worrying. The financial costs will be extreme. The physical losses will be real. Pick any coastal region or city, and you’ll find data already confirming this: it’s happened, it’s bad, and it’s going to get worse. Example: “New York’s Sea Level Has Risen 9” Since 1950 and It’s Costing Over $4 Billion.” And no, this two or three foot rise is not “as far as it could go.” If we are truly reckless, there is enough ice on the planet the melting of which would cause seas to rise hundreds of feet. So let’s not be reckless. Let’s be smart.

Even despite all the disinformation and propaganda you will hear from Republicans, for example, when it really matters, they will admit to the truth. Every Republican-run state in the union has generated their own climate report detailing the fact of global warming and its very real, and increasing costs. Because they have to govern their actual state, they have to make decisions in the real world, and thus will actually have to work against these rising disasters, and the resulting hit to their economies. When it comes to actual, on-the-ground decision-making, even conservatives well know, and well fear, the reality of global warming and what it is bringing to their doorstep. Pick any state, and look, and you’ll find this report. It might not match what they say in public, in campaign speeches, and the like, but they can’t hide these things. That’s illegal. So you can easily locate and read them—and get the real story.

To demonstrate this point, I’ll just pick the “three most Republican states” of the Union: Wyoming, Utah, and Oklahoma. Check it out. Wyoming’s most recent report is ten years out of date and framed in politically-correct rosy words that to a naive reader might conceal the facts, yet read it with care and you’ll see they admit to every challenge global warming is bringing to their state. Look around more, and you’ll find more specific reports, like Wyoming’s crisis report on river and wetlands management, that are even starker and less evasive. Wyoming knows it’s fucked. And it knows it needs to do something about it. But it is unwilling do what needs to be done, attempting fruitless bandaids instead. That’s irrational. Utah is being smarter about it, but only barely. Oklahoma is acting more like Wyoming: admitting the problem is real, and catastrophic; but proposing no effective response. Do you think any of this behavior is rational?

Imagine you are one of the people alive in 2070. What would you wish people in our time would have done? Which choice would you hope they had made? That would require acting rationally: accepting early losses to obtain future gains. Taking accelerating action on global warming will only “see net economic gains by 2048,” but that actually does means gains, while even the net costs up until then will be vastly lower than the eventual costs of doing nothing. Just like any business: you always start in debt, capitalizing the business, and then grow into profit. Rational behavior. Without which, practically no industry or commerce would exist in the world, and certainly little in the way of innovation and resourcefulness. You have to spend to invest; and it will take years to see a full return on investment. But that is the only way to get returns on investments that exceed the initial costs. Even if you bought into an index fund—which has experienced an average return of over 10% since the 1950s—it will always take you years even just to recover what you invested, much less start accumulating more. For huge scale enterprises like transforming the American economy and infrastructure, you can expect it to take decades. You will start making money right away; but your returns won’t exceed what you spent for a while—but exceed them they will. Alternatively, you can accumulate catastrophic losses. Which option is the one a rational person would select? Are you a rational person?

That It Can Be Solved

Okay. So all sources of data, all sources of real evidence, confirm global warming is real, we are causing it, and its consequences are already severe, and will get worse. An irrational person confronted with all that might try to evade the consequences of these facts by denying anything can be done about it, or by insisting any proposed solution is “too expensive” or “too difficult,” or some such thing. We sent men to the moon. Six times. So you might want to rethink this. Worse, as I just explained, it will cost more to do nothing, so “it’s too expensive” isn’t actually even a valid reason to do nothing. That option’s just right out from the start. We have to spend the money; our only actual choice is how much we have to spend. But as I also just explained, this complaint isn’t even true. Not only are the massive investments needed totally within our national (and global) means, but they will actually earn us a net profit within a couple of decades. We are looking at a difference in the U.S. alone of a net loss of 14 trillion dollars or a net gain of 3 trillion dollars, a difference of 17 trillion dollars in our favor, leaving us even in profit. So…what is a rational person to do? Nothing? Or invest in this better future?

I’ve already mentioned some mitigating actions we can take, that are affordable, effective, innovative, and ultimately jobs-and-growth creating, rather than a drag on the economy or anyone’s prosperity. There are many ways not only to increase biological carbon capture—reforestation, greenery initiatives, even industrial algae factories. Heck, even just more trees in cities has also been proven to reduce crime, as well as urban heat islanding, noise pollution, and even, just, pollution. Improved farm tech is a part of this project, capturing more net carbon than it releases, or releasing less, by simply employing different techniques, technologies, and land management; just as with expanding the use of those food additives that reduce animal methane production. We also now have geological carbon capture technologies ready to deploy; all they require is investment—and the leading tech in this field will even make money. So why on Earth are we not investing in this? Because it doesn’t even have to make money to save money, which is the actual primary reason we need to do this. Being able to pull a profit would just be a bonus.

Most talk of mitigating global warming, I’m sure you’ve noticed, hovers around replacing fossil fuels with wind-solar. This actually is the least useful prong in our war against global warming, but it gets the most press, so you might be mistaken for thinking it’s what fighting global warming is supposed to consist of. There is a definite place in our arsenal for this approach. It is foolish to not take advantage of free energy, and decentralized energy production, wherever we can, when it is affordable and practical. Why not have solar panels on every household roof in America? And a wind mill on every farm? Their efficiency and cost now are quite excellent. And it’s to the personal good even of the household—they certainly save, possibly even make money in the long run. But it also contributes to cleaner air for those households to breathe, creates jobs for those households to work, weans us all off of foreign oil propping up violent regimes (once we sort out the domestic and allied supply of panel tech and materials, which is already a federal priority in the US), and, yes, assists in reducing emissions and thus global warming.

Nevertheless, though investing in wind-solar in smart ways is necessary, this can be only a minor part of the solution. We cannot sustain our economy on wind-solar. Their energy return on investment is too low. As I explained before in The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear, there is only one source of energy that is sustainably scalable to the entire energy economy, effectively limitless in supply, the most efficient by far, and the least deadly to the world population: nuclear. There are legitimate concerns—corporate and government corruption leading to poor design and management, leading to increased dangers to the public—but we already have data on that: even with all that existing failure, nuclear power still takes vastly fewer lives per year than fossil, and even less than wind and solar (you heard that right; check out my article for the details). And that would be even more so if we started taking the steps we ought to already be taking to police and thus reduce that base-rate of corruption in the first place. The only proper solution to bad government is better government (see Sic Semper Regulationes). Corruption already contributes to deadly pollution and catastrophic risks from fossil fuel refineries, mines, and factories—and we ought to be addressing that too. But we’re already getting screwed by it far more when we rely on fossil rather than nuclear. Avoiding nuclear doesn’t make that problem go away; whereas embracing nuclear would decrease it. And them’s the facts.

We already have far more efficient, far safer nuclear power plant designs than all plants currently in service. We have designs that even convert nuclear waste into energy. The only thing preventing these from being normed across the world’s energy economies is an irrational public fear blocking investment. Freaking out over the relatively trivial outcomes of decades-obsolete nuclear plant failures as an excuse not to replace those plants with vastly safer designs is simply not rational behavior. And you are a rational person, right? We need to get on this. Reducing the global pollution of petroleum refineries alone is worth the accelerated investment in nuclear; but the impact on global warming will literally be orders of magnitude greater per dollar spent than any other mitigation option that exists. We have to go nuclear. It’s as simple as that. And we need to get on this now. I’ve already made the case for that, as have others, so I won’t belabor it further here.

The next most common talk you might hear is of the effort to convert petroleum vehicles to electric (we now even have practical electric jet engines). This actually won’t help global warming much if all it does is move the carbon signature from the vehicle’s tail pipe to the power plant’s chimney. If you are burning fossil fuels to charge that car, you aren’t really reducing emissions. So we have to clean the grid, too, to be able to tap the enormous advantage of electric transpo. Plug-in hybrid cars have a transition value there. But eventually we will need to go full electric. This could also be accomplished on a hydrogen economy (especially for cargo freight), and that might happen alongside grid- and battery-powered transportation. But either way, once we have a nuclear power grid, then transportation won’t be responsible for emissions at all. Problems with EV’s like weathering and charging time are already solved or on track to be within a few years (well enough in time for California’s now-realistic target of no-new sales of non-EVs by 2035, for example; 2045 for cargo haulers). And this will add other boons as well, like bidirectional charging, and cleaner air to breathe in all our cities. Going electric is something we have to do anyway. Thus frontloading investment now will help drive the needed advances and infrastructure development (e.g. nationwide charging stations; normalizing plug-ins in households and apartment complexes; and even-faster-charging, longer-lasting battery-tech) to make widespread transition eventually possible, as well as lower costs—and, again, reduce our dependence on funding fascists and terrorists with oil money. So this has to be part of the plan. And it’s not only affordable, it’s already growing jobs and the economy, and will eventually bring a net profit.

There are other minor contributing steps like this that must be part of our war plan, from increasing vehicle efficiency (fueled or electric) to increasing everyday appliance efficiency (from freezers to washers to microwaves—and lightbulbs!), and everything the like, which steps again also benefit the consumer, as they also end up paying less to operate them, and thus operate the economy, which is then cumulatively able to generate more output for less input, both in money and energy. There are also some huge improvements we could make that might be beyond American will to implement (like efficient and ubiquitous mass transportation options, thereby reducing emissions by increasing per capita efficiency; or the redesign of cities, and business culture, to facilitate a far greater use of bicycles and e-bikes). But there are some even bigger arrows in the quiver, with much larger effects, that are within the American will to achieve, yet that might seem trivial to you—and yet they are, again, not only affordable, but ultimately save every individual money, cost them little in time, and in the end earn us all a profit.

For example: heating efficiency. Weatherizing homes and businesses, so as to increase the efficiency of their heating and cooling systems, would have such a tremendous impact on global warming it really ought to be a major public initiative—it’s thus a prominent component of the new American Inflation Reduction Act, although what’s there is only a start. Far too much “global warming” comes from burning excess fuel to heat or cool our working and living environments, simply because too much of that work gets wasted as it floats outside through gaps in gaskets and insulation. We also have a superior cooling tech that operates more efficiently, the heat pump, which is so much more efficient than “air conditioners” that there is no reason we should even still have those anymore, other than “up front” cost (otherwise, in net cost, they always win). So we need to invest in replacing ACs with heat pumps, for all homes and buildings, which will in turn reduce the cost of installing heat pumps, and thus make them as affordable as “air conditioners” anyway (and they already double as heaters, eliminating yet another cost). Each of these steps, replacing ACs (and separate heaters) with heat pumps, and weatherizing buildings, also benefit every person paying the bills: they pay less to heat or cool their home or business. So it’s win-win. Why aren’t we getting on this?

Another unsung prong in the strategy is water efficiency. Because it takes energy to pump, heat, and treat water, the less water we waste, the less energy we waste as well. Conserved water also allows us to divert more water to other needed global warming projects, like increasing greenery, from forests to wetlands, to absorb carbon and secure other ecosystem benefits. So all our efforts at water efficiency are worthwhile as well, and should be ramped up wherever practical. Water recycling also increases this efficiency, as well as supply. We need to be doing more of that, and working toward improving the energy and recycling efficiency of the available processes—which are already superior to desalination, which is expensive (in money and energy) and pollutive (in toxic brine output). Although droughts are becoming so severe in the U.S. we might have no choice but to scale up desalination, we actually could scale-up recycling instead—it’s cheaper (in money and energy) and less pollutive (in fact it is almost negatively so, as it eliminates a significant amount of methane output from waste water). Irrational people cringe at the idea of drinking recycled water because of superstition. Rational people follow the science: it’s as clean or cleaner than the original water; and all water is, ultimately, recycled water—whether it’s the natural world’s plethora of shit and urine filtered through rocks, clouds, and plants, or our plethora of shit and urine filtered through an industrial plant, you are always drinking the world’s shit-filtered urine. Access to water is the leading disaster global warming is saddling us with; it needs a solution, stat. But taking all other steps to reduce and reverse global warming will also help us get back our water.

And then there is composting. By lazily and irresponsibly just throwing everything away, we contribute considerably to global warming through our very food waste and yard waste. It made sense to recapture metals and paper and glass through recycling (though plastic, not as much—we’d be better off developing biodegradable plastics); so it makes sense to target resources to sort our waste accordingly, and thus have it more efficiently directed to where we can make money off of what we throw away, and also increase our supply of raw materials. Mining a garbage heap is no different in this respect to mining a mountain—unless you aren’t doing it, then the difference is self-evident; the only question is how to increase the efficiency of the mining operation. This is now true, we know, of organic waste as well.

By composting organics rather than just throwing them away, we reduce the greenhouse emissions of an entire civilization, and reap numerous corollary benefits (compost produces a lot of useful stuff). California’s new mandatory composting law is the kind of policy that costs minimally compared to its impact—and that law could be substantially improved; and then expanded to all fifty states. All the usual objections to these sorts of things (such as that to some groups they are onerous or impossible to comply with) are already addressed in that law, and whatever already isn’t, easily could be (for example, as a single resident of a small rural apartment complex, I am not subject to the requirements; but large operations, and suburban households serviced by government waste collection, are). So that is not a rational objection to these kinds of policy moves. We need them. And they can be done well.

There are then, of course, even larger projects we could globally invest in—all nations contributing their scaled share toward a space sunshade, for example. As I already mentioned, this tech exists, and costs are feasible. It’s also scalable, adjustable, and reversible. It could not be used alone—because we still have to reduce the carbon in the air, whether of methane or CO2, to have the effects we want. But it can be dialed in as part of an overall scheme. There are other “outside the box” projects like this that could help (like roof brightening: though the global impact is small, its local impact might be significant); and some that won’t (like aerosols, cloud brightening, or ocean mirroring—which besides many direct downsides, burn too much energy to implement anyway; see Explainer: Six Ideas to Limit Global Warming with Solar Geoengineering). But the sunshade concept has the largest impact per dollar (and per unit of energy), and could be fully implemented in a matter of years. Its only downside is that it cannot solve the problem. It can help significantly. But there is ultimately no way of escaping the impact of greenhousing that does not involve reducing atmospheric carbon.

Finally, let’s talk about the scary monster in the room: cap and trade. The most powerful agent of transformation and progress is incentivized capitalism. This is why the entire world must move to a cap-and-trade economy. It not only makes money (which we can spend on more global warming mitigation) and shifts costs to those most directly responsible for causing them, but it also rapidly drives innovations that actually solve the very problem we want solved. If industry is incentivized to reduce—and indeed, even reverse—its carbon footprint, you won’t even be surprised by how quickly they come up with ways to do that. New techniques, new policies, new technologies, new investments. It’s a system that would fix itself. All you have to do is adopt a basic principle of fairness: True Cost Economics. In the fullest sense that would mean: you don’t get to sell anything without paying what it really costs to make and provide it. For example, you don’t get to pollute the air for free. Polluting the air puts costs on the rest of us, costs we shouldn’t have to pay. If you shit in my yard, you have to clean it up. If companies had to pay the true cost of things, they would come up with cleaner and less destructive ways to make or provide them—because it would be in their financial interest to do so. They would no longer be allowed to rob the American people by stealing capital from them, in the form of all the damages their manufacturing or services cause in the world at large.

But the fascinating thing is: you don’t even have to go all that way to get the same effect. You don’t have to set cap-and-trade rates to the actual true costs. You can set them far below the true costs, and still industry is incentivized to reduce those costs. Because doing so always makes them money—relative to not doing it. All you need is for the cost of “not” reducing the targeted harm to be higher than the average cost of the research, design, and implementation of harm-reducing techniques, technologies, policies, and investments. This is how cap-and-trade works. It can function even more efficiently than a carbon tax. With cap-and-trade, the state auctioning of allowances already functions as a tax—on companies that need or want to exceed their ever-shrinking free allowance caps.

Cap-and-trade starts small and scales up over years, so it can be dialed precisely so as not to prohibitively impact productivity or profits. California is running one such program already; and it has already proven to work. In fact, spectacularly: by 2016 we reduced emissions in our primary energy sector (“large electric power plants, large industrial plants, and fuel distributors,” e.g., “natural gas and petroleum”) to 1990 levels (yes, you read that right) in half that span of time (26 years of reduction in only 12 years of running the policy). And our economy is going like gangbusters. So much for claims of a negative impact. The rest of the country—and the world—should get a clue. This system can be expanded to more sectors of the economy, even transportation. Thus we don’t even have to “have solutions” already in the pipe. We can simply incentivize industry to find them.

So let’s give up trying to push the usual 6 Claims Made by Climate Change Skeptics and let’s give up The Five Corrupt Pillars of Climate Change Denial. These are only irrational attempts to evade the truth. Rational people accept the truth, and respond rationally to it. And surely you are a rational person. There are a lot of things we could be doing that would even reverse global warming in due time, and they are affordable, even profitable. And the cost savings, in quantity of avoided disaster, is through the roof.

Conclusion

The evidence is more than sufficient to warrant agreeing that global warming is happening, we are causing it, and it’s a serious problem we need to take substantial action against, right now—and we can take that action. It won’t break the bank; it won’t ruin your life. For other resources establishing these same points, see NASA’s Global Climate Change website, and articles at the Union of Concerned Scientists and Inside Climate News.

In comments before, I have met with both climate deniers who try to claim me on their side because I challenge climate extremism and, ironically, climate extremists who try to claim me on their side because I challenge climate denialism. By “climate extremists” I mean those who exaggerate the impact of global warming. I have always made clear that my being against climate exaggeration does not warrant being against climate reality (see Is Society Going to Collapse in 20 Years? and Did the Environment Kill Rome?). To the contrary, I have repeatedly warned that exaggerating the impact of global warming—claiming it will wipe out human civilization, exterminate the human species, bury New York under a hundred feet of water—is counter-productive. It actually makes our ability to work toward preventing real disasters worse.

The more climate extremists exaggerate and lie about the impact of climate change, the more people they cause to doubt anything need be done. Because people can easily ascertain the exaggerations are false, and thus that they are being lied to. They naturally then assume the whole claim is false; that there is no threat at all. This is what exaggerating and lying about the dangers of global warming actually does. Climate extremists are thus destroying their own cause with their own behavior. They need to stop. Climate realism is the only rational and correct position: global warming won’t end life on Earth (historically Earth life has thrived in vastly hotter climates than our civilization will ever produce), it won’t collapse civilization (we’ll adapt technologically, even make money off of it, as capitalism does), it won’t bury any major city in water (New York might one day resemble Venice—but Venice is still a functioning city), but it will cause countless severe problems worldwide, which will have consequences you most definitely will not like, and that will most definitely cost us all way more than doing something would.

Your urgency to solve any problem, I suspect, is not a function of whether it will erase life, civilization, or cities. Crime is a problem you probably want more and significant action taken against. But you don’t think that because you believe crime, if not better addressed, will leave Earth a lifeless wasteland ruled by motorcycle-riding barbarians. Yet you still deem it a problem worth major action and expense. Right? So, too, anything else you care about: the job market, the economy, wars, inflation; yes, even “immigration” or “the culture wars.” If you are at all rational, then you don’t think any of these things will end life on Earth; but if you think they matter at all, you still think they warrant serious and substantial attention. Behaviors must change. Money must be spent. Policies enacted. Regulations established. You still believe the consequences of inaction—or even making things worse—will still be bad enough to warrant all that effort to prevent those consequences.

So if you are a rational person, I don’t need to lie to you by claiming global warming will leave Earth a lifeless wasteland ruled by motorcycle-riding barbarians. I can appeal to your rational understanding of how the world always works: very bad outcomes nevertheless will occur, outcomes that could be reduced, avoided, or even reversed—if we substantially invested in bringing that about. There is a speeding car heading toward us. It won’t kill us, but it will cripple us, and it’s going to hurt. We therefore should do everything we can to dodge that car, rather than foolishly standing there in the middle of the street waiting to get hit. So let’s get on this. Let’s work together, look at the options, assess the evidence, find out what the most efficient ways are to fix this problem, to reduce and mitigate global warming, so as to dodge that bullet of worse outcomes—and even produce profits for us all, and a thriving future for ourselves and our descendants.