The Climate Learning Tree
As a paleoclimatologist, I often find myself wondering why more people aren’t listening to the warnings, the data, the messages of climate woes—it’s not just a storm on the horizon, it’s here, knocking on the front door. In fact, it’s not even the front door anymore. You are on the roof, waiting for a helicopter to rescue you from your submerged house.
The data is clear: The rates of current carbon dioxide release are 10 times greater than even the most rapid natural carbon catastrophe1 in the geological records, which brought about a miserable hothouse world of acidic oceans lacking oxygen, triggering a pulse of extinctions.2
Despite the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, views about the severity and impact of global warming diverge like branch points on a gnarly old oak tree (below).
The first split is between deniers and acceptors; only the denial branch doesn’t go anywhere—it’s just a dead stump, no longer sustained by the nutrients of evidence. The next bifurcation is on the root cause of climate change. Naturalists say “the climate has always is a diversion tactic for derailing meaningful conversations by stating the obvious. Of course, the climate is always changing; the relevant variable is the rate at which it does so.
