According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, since 1880, the Earth has warmed slightly over 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Increased carbon concentration has led to unprecedented warming. Since the Industrial Revolution, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) to about 400 ppm today. Will climate change bring about the sixth extinction? Ī sobering question, but meanwhile the human species, globally speaking, relies heavily on fossil fuels for power plants, for residential and commercial buildings, and for transportation, releasing carbon stored for millions of years. After all, if the grim predictions of climate change experts prove to be true, the Earth may not be fit for human habitation in the next century and beyond. Yet today it's not toxic waste or nuclear waste that gets the biggest billing-it's global warming. How do you safely store nuclear waste for one million years? Not that nuclear power hasn't been a significant concern-consider the notoriously contaminated Hanford Site and the thirty-year battle to site a nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Think of the Times Beach, Missouri, disaster in 1983.

More than nuclear, it was toxics that soon became the central environmental issue, with hundreds of hazardous waste sites dotting the country. Environmental issues entered the public discourse in a conspicuous way back in the 1970s with the media blitz on the dioxin contamination at Love Canal in 1978 and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

Joe romm climate