Nicholas Goldberg: Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up
The world’s climate scientists agree: our planet is changing. Scientists say there are now 100 different forms of life on Earth, including humans. The average sea level has risen by six feet during the past century. Storms can blow sand and boulders over the beaches where generations of children have played.
But Americans don’t see it that way. To the extent that our government’s climate-change agenda is at all relevant, it’s to convince Americans that global warming is not happening, and that action must be taken now to save our planet.
That’s the essence of the story I tell here, which I call “The Real Science of Climate Change,” which is really my story. I will be live-blogging the event here on CNN.com and on CNN TV, but I want to start with some of the context here.
I grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, and have lived in Hawaii and Costa Rica, and for more than a year and a half, I’m on the road with my new book in New Orleans.
And speaking of New Orleans — I’ve been in New Orleans for the past two years on business, reporting for a series of articles here on NPR and reporting for the Washington Post and elsewhere. And I’m here to promote my book about climate change — “The Real Science of Climate Change,” to be published this fall.
So I’m here to tell the story of why Americans don’t care about climate change, and how you can help them see through this hoax. So I want to share some background on climate change and why it matters.
So, let me start off with a simple fact. The Earth has no atmosphere, no atmosphere, no atmosphere. In fact, the earth has no atmosphere. That’s one of the reasons it’s so tough to breathe.
The climate system is made up of gases,
