A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.

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.

The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.

That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century.

Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.