The scary thing about this (well, one scary thing) is that we, as a worldwide community, needed to be making hard decisions about the climate two or three decades ago, to stave off the worst of the impact of climate change. We're several years too late to stop it, and we still have half of our government (in the US) utterly denying the problem even exists. The decisions that need to be made <i>now</i> to stave off complete disaster are too extreme for even the non-insane elements in our government to support, because there's a whole segment of the population that still believes in fairy tales spun by the oil and gas industry.<p>The human mind is just terrible at grasping problems on the scale and timeline of global climate change, and it's plausible that it'll be the end of life as we know it in another few decades. All the assholes who denied it was happening will be dead, already, of course...so they won't care. I just don't see any significant movement on solving these problems; despite cool stuff like electric cars and renewable power becoming cheaper than coal, emissions are still increasing worldwide, not decreasing (and, again, it needed to begin decreasing decades ago).<p>I'm an optimist in the general case, but when it comes to climate and the environment, I see little reason to be optimistic.