I spoke at a transportation conference in Vancouver, Canada, not long ago, and one of the things I said was that some people were still skeptical that climate change was happening. Afterwards, the conference organizer came up to me and told me that the only skeptics were in the south, the temperate zones. Everyone in the Arctic knows that climate change is happening, because it has already dramatically changed their climate. Indeed, last Autumn, I attended an open house at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, and one of the leading oceanographic and geophysical research institutes in the world (and where I grew up, by the way). While there, I heard an oceanographer who specialized in the arctic regions say that they had observed changes in the past year that they hadn’t expected to happen for 30 years. And yet, I still get people who tell me, often quite aggressively, that all this climate change stuff is left-wing crap. (more…)

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