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

[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/

[XemaSab]

1. Ice in the Arctic continues to thin and disappear, even faster than anticipated.

[txlibdem]

2. Is it "what big business doesn't want to hear?"

Or is it "what big business doesn't want US to know that they KNOW... and that they don't give a damn?"

Money, money, money... in a rich man's world.

[wtmusic]

3. Probably both.

Some of the comments after the Forbes article give the impression that readers want to believe it's all politics, a manipulation by Big Government.

The Randians who can understand science are being forced to re-examine their beliefs.

[txlibdem]

5. The readers of Forbes may want to believe in magic ponies as well

But their faith in Republicans to do anything but destroy America is misplaced.

A large percentage of them with the ability to remember the state of things 3 years ago should damn well be re-examining their beliefs, I wholeheartedly agree with you. Any one of them that has the ability to read and comprehend at a 9th grade reading level should be jumping all over their leaders to end the use of fossil fuels. But I am not holding my breath on that last one.

[hatrack]

6. Wow, Randroids posting on the Forbes website . . .

You'd think there would be enough of Teh Stupid concentrated at the site of such activity to fold space-time.

[pscot]

4. Forbes seems to have had an epiphany of sorts

There've been a half-dozen recent posts citing articles or cplumns in Forbes, all of which made sense on some level.