Here’s the climate movement’s biggest mistake since the 1970s, according to the climate scientist who won the Nobel Prize alongside Al Gore

A volunteer searches for family heirlooms on Maui (Credit: Mario Tama—Getty Images)

The world is finally waking up to climate change not as a slow increase in temperatures but as a cascading series of devastating events, occurring not just with more frequency but also with ever more extreme effects. Numerous regions have experienced entirely new types of weather. The world is palpably different—and not in a good way.

Decades of living in denial have left us both unprepared for these conditions and facing the far more difficult tasks of adaptation to the new climate and decarbonization. Had we started when it first became clear in the 1970s that climate change was a scientific reality, our work would have mostly consisted of mitigation.