Our First Response to Climate Change

We badly need renewables to combat climate change, but we need ramped-up efficiency measures even more.

"Time is passing very quickly,” Irving Mintzer wrote in his 1987 study A Matter of Degrees, which I reviewed for the very first edition of World Watch. Two decades later,Mintzer’s words, like his report on ways to reduce the risk of global warming, seem understated.

It was later than it seemed. Even those of us who have long been alarmed about global warming did not expect the rapid changes we have seen.

We have watched the northern polar ice cap melt over an area the size of Alaska.We have seen glaciers shrink on every continent while the depth of snow in the Swiss Alps fell by half. We have experienced twice as many hurricanes per year as our parents, and measured them growing stronger year by year.We might have known, when World Watch was launched, that New Orleans was vulnerable to flood, but we have all been shocked by the devastating force of Hurricane Katrina...