Introduction

The 2013 Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] confirmed that humans are destroying the earth’s climate, but it also revealed something that should be even more alarming: Twenty-five years of human effort to protect the climate have failed even to slow that destruction down. On the contrary, annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have risen 60 percent since the release of the first IPCC report in 1988.1 In April 2014, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached their highest level in 800,000 years.2