Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Yale E360 post, former U.S. chief climate negotiator Todd Stern talks about the need to accelerate progress on decarbonizing economies and what it will take to generate the public willpower.

• How can the philanthropies play a part in this fight? Which green energy programs will have the biggest impact in reducing emissions and slowing the effects of climate change?

• The private sector is crucial as well. Here's how businesses can take action on climate change.

Climate change is on the front pages again. In the space of three weeks, Florida and North Carolina were battered by severe hurricanes whose destructive power was surely intensified by hotter ocean waters and a warmer atmosphere, which holds more moisture. Between those two violent storms, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a four-alarm warning about the profound dangers of holding global warming even to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, which not long ago was considered a safe zone. Meanwhile, climate negotiators are currently wrangling with each other to finalize the guidelines and procedures needed to turn the Paris Agreement into an operational regime, a struggle made harder by the absence of U.S. leadership.

These developments serve as a reminder that we are in a race against time. We are making dramatic progress in decarbonizing our economies, but dangerous climate impacts are also coming at us faster than predicted. We need concerted action now, in all major economies, to accelerate the transformation of a world that currently relies on fossil fuels for more than 80 percent of its primary energy and will have to reach net-zero emissions in the next 50 years or less to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement ...

But the key ingredients that are in short supply are the human factors: political will and the rapidly evolving norms and attitudes about climate change that can generate that will.

Read the full article about how to change attitudes and win the climate battle by Todd Stern at Yale E360.