Michael Oppenheimer:

Well, the blaring headline message is that climate change is here, it's happening, it's now. Americans are already paying for it. They're already suffering from it. It's not an abstract problem that may come on us at some time decades into the future.

The second point about that is, well, you can look on your TV screen and see it almost every day, California burning up due the wildfires, over the last couple of months hurricanes wreaking havoc on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Those were problems made worse by climate change already, and it's only going to intensify as we go into the coming decades, unless we get emissions of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide under control.

Another clear message is that the world is interconnected. If the U.S. suffers from crop yield declines due to too much warming, then people go malnourished in Africa. If an electronic component supplier in Thailand is disrupted due to flooding, then our electronics industry that has to assemble the parts into a commercial product suffers and money is lost.

The third message, which is really the most important one, is that we are way behind the eight ball, we're not doing enough to cut these emissions and bring the problem under control, and we're not doing enough to build our resilience to the inevitable impacts of climate change. In other words, we're doing little to adapt to the risk.

This is a big problem. There's a big gap between what governments promised to do, for instance, in the Paris agreement, and what they're implementing. And even what they promised to do in the Paris agreement, well, there's a gap between that and what we — the countries would have to do to really bring the problem under control. So we're way behind the eight ball on all fronts right now.