Climate change is happening faster than scientific models predicted. Artic sea ice is swiftly melting. Rising sea levels are rapidly swallowing South Pacific Islands. Severe storms are ravaging India, Burma, and other parts of Asia. Dire droughts have hit Kenya, Darfur, and the Andean villages of South America.

The head of the international panel on climate change (IPCC) recently stated that if there is no drastic re-assessment of international energy policy that ensures that global greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced to at least 25% of 1990 levels before 2020, then it will be “too late” to mitigate the effect of climate change. If temperatures rise 3.6 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels - with current emissions, the temperature is already slated to rise 2.3 degrees pre industrial levels - human civilization and life on earth will be severely threatened.

All of these facts sound pretty morbid. They sound inappropriately apocalyptic, even slightly histrionic. It is hard for me, and probably for a large portion of readers, to conceptualize that climate change is such a crisis. Right now I’m enjoying the sunshine and mild temperatures characterizing what in a pre-global warming era would have been a bitterly-cold Boston fall, and even if sea-levels did rise a couple feet, my dorm would still be drip-dry.

But the science and the news unfolding in the past year and a half have been shocking. Climate change has become, in the words of Bill McKibben, one of the premier environmental writers and activists who gave several climate change talks this week in Boston, “a big freaking emergency.”

Despite the doomsday forecast, there is a remarkable silver lining. The effects of climate change are so all-encompassing and far-reaching, that its resolution necessitates global collaboration which may alleviate various other problems, such as failing economies, along the way. Ulrich Beck, a preeminent German philosopher, calls climate change a “cosmopolitan moment”- a crisis that is pertinent and common to the whole world and therefore offers the opportunity for a new world order.

Just in this past week, I have seen inclinations that climate change has the potential to be an issue that involves people and disciplines from across the board and the globe. Bill McKibben discussed climate change in venues as disparate as the Center for International and Government Studies and the Divinity School, and was met by equally rapt audiences in both places. James R. Woolsey, the former director of the C.I.A. came to campus to stress the critical role that alternative energy will play in reducing threats to national security. A design team from the United Arab Emirates, hardly the paragon of an eco-minded nation, had a panel about their intensive plans to design the first carbon-neutral city in Abu Dhabi, a “model of sustainability for the rest of the world.”

Our sagacious President-Elect, by no means a born-environmentalist, firmly asserted earlier this week that his administration will make climate-change legislation a top priority. He said that “science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”- climate change it is one of the most “urgent problems” facing America and the world. His first climate bill will establish grants of up to 15 billion a year for clean energy innovations. Another will instate a strong cap and trade program that aims to cut the US’s emissions to 1990 levels by 2020-a bold move considering that current emissions are 40% higher than 1990 levels.

What this means is that our moment has arrived. Addressing climate change in the US has the potential to re-stoke the embers of a failing economy. It has the potential to inspire global collaboration-the first litmus test of which will be the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen that hopes to establish an international climate agreement. And it has the potential to inspire individuals to take action, whether that means pressuring politicians to adopt green legislation, blogging to spread knowledge, or making personal decisions to live more sustainably.

Click here to learn more about the Cap and Trade system.

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