Forbes breaks the news to its pro-biz readership: climate change is real, and it's caused by humans. [View all]

[wtmusic]

It's refreshing to see the #2 financial magazine in the country publish what much of big business doesn't want to hear.

"2011 Climate Change in Pictures and Data: Just the Facts

For readers of Forbes, the debate over climate change often takes the form of “tit-for-tat” blogs, conflicting commentary, and dogmatic ideological statements. Lost in this verbal debate are often the simple facts and data of climate change and the immense and definitive global observations of the ways in which our climate is actually changing around us.

So, without much commentary, here are just a few simple and clear pictures (and links) showing how the planet continued to warm and change around us in 2011. And these facts are just part of why all national academies of science on the planet and every major geophysical scientific society agree that humans are fundamentally changing the climate.

The heart of the climate problem is that our burning of fossil fuels along with other human activities have thrown the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases out of balance, and their concentration in the atmosphere is growing faster and faster. This classic record from Mauna Loa in Hawai’i shows the growth in the CO2 concentration in the past half century. But it’s worse than that: CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere are now higher than at any time in the past million years, and perhaps higher than in the past 15 million years."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/21/2011-climate-change-in-pictures-and-data-just-the-facts/