We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change.

In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.

We've abnegated the Kyoto treaty, we've instituted a voluntary program that's obviously not been working, we've taken every effort to excise references to global warming from official documents, to try to undermine international conferences that work on environmental issues, and on and on and on.

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.

[Political actions] has to happen on the local and state level; we have to convince our cities to join the growing number of more than 200 American cities who have signed on to the mayor's climate campaign.