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\nGlobal warming, we're often told, is an issue we must address for the \nsake of our grandchildren. We need to cut carbon because of our moral \nobligation to future generations.\n

\nBut according to Bill McKibben, that's a 1980s view. As McKibben writes \nin his new book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, the \nincreasingly open secret is that global warming happened already. We've \npassed the threshold, and the planet isn\u2019t at all the same. It's less \nclimatically stable. Its weather is haywire. It has less ice, more \ndrought, higher seas, heavier storms. It even appears different from \nspace.
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\nAnd that\u2019s just the beginning of the earth-shattering changes in store\u2014a\n small sampling of what it\u2019s like to trade a familiar planet (Earth) for\n one that's new and strange (Eaarth). We'll survive on this sci-fi \nworld, this terra incognita\u2014but we may not like it very much. And we may\n have to change some fundamental habits along the way. \xa0
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\nEaarth, argues McKibben, is our greatest failure.
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\nBill McKibben is a former staff writer for the New Yorker \nmagazine, and author of the famous 1989 book The End of Nature, \nas well as over a dozen other works. He is currently a scholar in \nresidence at Middlebury College in Vermont, and founder of the global \nwarming grassroots organization 350.org, which lobbies for tougher \nclimate policies. In 2009, the group conducted what CNN later called \n\u201cthe most widespread day of political action in the planet\u2019s history.\u201d \n