Giving Compass' Take:

• Clayton Aldern and Emily Pontecorvo highlight seven charts that depict and illustrate what has happened with climate change in the past decade. 

• How can donors help spread awareness about our climate? How might an optimistic perspective help people cope with the current state of climate change?

• Here are ten key climate change terms and definitions you need to know to be prepared to advocate on behalf of the plane.

As this hottest-on-record, godforsaken decade draws to a close, it’s clear that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations but one that’s already displacing communities, costing billions, and driving mass extinctions. And it’s worth asking: Where did the past 10 years get us?

The seven charts below begin to hint at an answer to that question. Some of the changes they document, like the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the number of billion dollar disasters that occur each year, illustrate how little we did to reduce emissions and how unprepared the world is to deal with the warming we’ve already locked in. Even though more people believe in human-caused climate change now than 10 years ago, a growing chasm in political partisanship makes it more difficult than ever for Congress to pass climate legislation.

But by other measures, we might one day look back on the 2010s as a turning point in our civilization’s approach to climate change. The growth of renewable energy and rapid retirement of coal-burning power plants this decade illustrate that crucial changes to the world order are currently well underway.

  1. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by about 25 parts per million. Let’s start with the big picture, which is to say: the bad news. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not only continued to rise over the past 10 years, but it is also now rising at a faster rate than ever before.
  2. Climate change got expensive. One of the best-established consequences of global warming is that it makes natural disasters, like fires and floods, more frequent and severe. In the 2010s, the costs of this consequence came into sharp focus as billion-dollar disasters struck the United States again and again.
  3. More people accept the basic premises that it’s getting hot and that it’s our fault. When it comes to climate change, there’s plenty to argue about. Should we open new nuclear plants? Would a carbon tax work? Does cap and trade have a net benefit? But if there are two things that nobody should be arguing about, they’re the facts that the planet is getting hotter, and that it’s because of human activity.
  4. But there’s a widening partisan divide when it comes to worrying about the environment. In 2008, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sat on a couch together and proclaimed, “Our country must take action to address climate change.” Three years later, Gingrich would write off the bipartisan television spot as “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” What happened?
  5. Coal continued its death spiral. Even though there was no slowing of the Keeling curve’s relentless climb this decade, the mix of sources producing all of that atmospheric carbon on the ground changed quite a bit.
  6. Solar skyrocketed, but fossil fuels still dominate. Despite coal’s rapid decline, fossil fuels continued to make up the vast majority of the U.S.’s energy mix this decade.
  7. While coal flatlined, the price of renewables dropped precipitously. Natural gas wasn’t the only energy source that got cheaper this decade. Renewables also became more competitive on price.

Read the full article about the last decade of climate change by Clayton Aldern and Emily Pontecorvo at Grist.