Why bother?
The problem with climate change is that it is happening on a scale that humans aren't used to dealing with. Climate changes over decades, centuries and millennia, not typically within the timeframe of a single generation. Different changes also occur in different areas - some places get warmer, others colder. Combine these and you get a system that is slow, unimaginably complicated and global in scale, all-in-all the perfect ingredients for denial and scepticism.
There is also the tendency for humanity to 'live for the moment'. It's very easy to say that we shouldn't burn oil, or that we shouldn't chop down the Amazon, but in reality saying is a lot easier than doing. We're all guilty, whether you like it or not, of complaining about climate change whilst contributing to the problem. It's very easy to criticise and forget that in all likelihood you own a car, buy products shipped thousands of miles and sit in a room wondrously lit at least in part by fossil fuels. But that might be unfair - after all, how can we live in the modern world and still embrace a sustainable lifestyle?
The short answer is; not easily. Fortunately, however, human ingenuity has often triumphed over tough challenges. By studying environmental change, and looking at what might be done, we can more easily understand the problems and come up with ways of dealing with them. As the research and picture becomes clearer, people will start to knock at the door of policymakers and, with it, the current barriers of major change - capitalism and globalisation - can start to be used in a progressive and constructive way.
Scepticism isn't the problem
An important thing to remember is that being sceptical of something isn't bad. Scepticism encourages more robust science, it critiques research and raises some good questions. The problem are deniers, the people that either cherry-pick their way through the science, picking out things that seem contradictory or controversial and ignoring things that they don't agree with, or those that down-right don't believe in it. But the good thing about science, as Neil deGrasse Tyson so eloquently notes, is that 'its true whether or not you believe in it'.
ClimateReach aims to take some interesting aspects of climate change research, the environment and sustainability, and write it up into easy-to-understand articles. The Twitter feed,
