By now, the fatal consequences of a warming planet are common knowledge. And yet, our collective refusal to fully acknowledge this crisis—both in our daily lives and in the speed at which we operate—reminds me of my own experience before I admitted I had a real problem (Read my story here). I was afraid. Afraid of who I’d become, what I might lose, and what would be left of me once the illusions were stripped away.
I clung to my denial like a heavy winter coat—familiar and comforting but also suffocating! And it wasn’t even keeping me warm! I was terrified to look directly at the root of my problem because I didn’t know what would remain of ‘me’ if I did. What if letting go meant losing myself? What if the truth left me stranded in a life I couldn’t bear?
As I’ve shared, I chose to see the truth—because I realized that not seeing it came with a fatal cost.
As you’ll see, the warnings have been sounding for over 200 years—and more urgently in the past 45. What’s standing in our way isn’t just what we’re doing out there. It’s what we’re avoiding in here: ourselves. I mean, what else could it be? Haven’t we tried everything else?
The Warnings
It’s been 45 years since scientists and the U.S. government formally acknowledged the greenhouse effect and warned of its global danger.
1979, the year I was born, was a turning point in climate science. That’s when environmental activist Rafe Pomerance uncovered an alarming EPA report about the dangers of fossil fuels. He joined forces with geophysicist Gordon MacDonald to sound the alarm about the greenhouse effect. Their efforts led President Carter’s science team to commission a major review, led by Jule Charney. That July 1979, scientists, including James Hansen, gathered at Woods Hole to model the planet’s future. Their findings were clear: if carbon dioxide levels doubled, we could see around 3°C (37.4° F) of global warming. By the end of the year, their work was published as the Charney Report—one of the earliest and most influential documents confirming the climate crisis we now face.
Their story is told in Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich (published 2019) which chronicles the critical decade from 1979 to 1989, when a small group of scientists and politicians tried to change the course of history and prevent climate change.
Here’s what happened :
Let’s go back 82 years. In 1938, scientist Guy Callendar reached a conclusion: humans were releasing enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to raise the Earth’s average temperature. His was one of the earliest warnings.
Let’s go back even further—200 years. In 1824, French physicist Joseph Fourier made one of the earliest discoveries related to climate change when he proposed the concept of the “greenhouse effect.” He theorized that Earth’s atmosphere acts like a greenhouse, trapping the heat radiated from the planet’s surface and raising the overall temperature.
Here are some of the the top-selling books about climate change—
September 27, 1962: Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 250,000 copies sold in the first year of publication
November 1, 1993: The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, Paul Hawken
April 22, 2002: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough & Michael Braungart
April 13, 2010: Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben
October 15, 2013: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
February 11, 2014: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert
September 16, 2014: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein
April 18, 2017: Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, Paul Hawken
February 19, 2019: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells
September 21, 2021: Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, Paul Hawken
On Goodreads, the shelf labeled “climate-change” lists around 7,190 books of all types—nonfiction, fiction, and everything in between.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Keep it at 1.5°C
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988 by The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and The World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The IPCC has since become the world’s leading authority on climate science, producing landmark reports (every 6–7 years) that have directly influenced global agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.
You might remember the IPCC’s most recent report—the Sixth Assessment Report, released between 2021 and 2023.
It wasn’t a warning anymore; it was a statement of inevitability:
Warming is now unequivocal: humans are the primary cause of the 1.1°C rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times.
Climate impacts are already here: droughts, floods, sea-level rise, and biodiversity loss are accelerating.
Every fraction of a degree matters: keeping warming to 1.5°C drastically reduces harm compared to 2°C.
The window is closing fast: global emissions must peak by 2025 and be nearly halved by 2030 to stay on track.
Between 2021 and 2024, four global meetings of the UN Climate Conference (COP) have taken place, bringing together governments from around the world to confront climate change collectively. In that same span, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 climate-related books have been published globally—ranging from nonfiction and poetry to climate fiction. The clean-energy sector added roughly 4.7 million new jobs, bringing the total to about 35 million worldwide by 2022.
Below is the result of these actions:
Between 2021 - 2024: there was a a 1.0 GtCO₂ (≈2.7%) increase over three years, which is equal to:
1 GtCO₂ = weight of about 200 million elephants:
1 GtCO₂ = 39 billion paint buckets filled:
It’s not working
I mistakenly believed that after the 2021 IPCC Report, we’d finally say—what we’re doing isn’t working. That we’d take a hard look at ourselves, drop the lies, shed the delusion, and respond as if we were in a truly fatal situation.
But instead, we slipped into a strange split-reality—where we know what’s happening, yet still refuse to live like it’s true.
It’s like NPR warning me about the deadliness of climate change, then cutting to an ad for a suitcase—one likely made in a way that contributes to the very problem they just described:
How do we know our efforts to solve the climate crisis aren’t working? Because they’re not. The emissions curve keeps climbing—up and to the right. Despite decades of pledges, conferences, and technological breakthroughs, the core trend hasn’t budged.
So maybe the problem isn’t just what we’re doing. It’s who we are. The real issue lies underneath and within us: a deeper disconnection with ourselves, the people around us and nature.
