Bill McKibben's Most Important Work: Climate Change Numbers That Can't Be Ignored

Frequent Mountainfilm in Telluride guest Bill McKibben recently wrote a piece for Rolling Stone Magazine that he considers the most important thing he has written in 20 years. The piece re-contextualizes the way we look at the carbon we put in the air and how it affects our climate.

McKibben’s article on climate change is underscored by the brutally hot summer that we are experiencing here in North America. The high temperatures have resulted in intense wildfires across the West and a massive drought across the U.S. (and around the world) that will make food prices spike ferociously. In 2011, this country had a record dozen “extreme” climate events — tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires — compared to the previous all-time high of five.

These intense temperatures and other events such as the enormous and unprecedented melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet have made even climate skeptics change their tune (they most likely have not seen Chasing Ice about photographer James Balog’s work on glaciers). Richard Muller of Berkeley, California, whose work has been funded by the ardent climate change deniers, the Koch brothers, announced this week that he now agrees with most scientists in this area of study that the earth is warming and that the cause is man-made.

Now, the question is: What do we do about it?