All of us are feeling the local effects of climate change. Diminishing water supply, honeybees and other pollinators that are growing increasingly out of sync with plants, families and business across the country disrupted by ever-more-severe storms, flights that can’t take off from Sky Harbor due to extreme heat, hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money going to infrastructure repair, nearly all our public forest lands closed throughout the summer.

Less of us know about the massive stores of methane being released from beneath the melting permafrost and the catastrophic slowing of heat-distributing ocean currents. Even fewer are aware that researchers have identified the appearance of totally new microbes emerging which are starting to release carbon from the soil – Earth’s greatest repository of carbon!

Far fewer realize there is now an agreement among International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists (see my recent book, “Climate Deadline 2035,” for primary literature references) that in the mid-2030’s we will cross a deadline beyond which global warming will accelerate exponentially, leaving our children on a one-way ride to a probable extinction-level event – not in some unimaginably far-off future, but by the end of this century.

We threw away the chance we had 40 years ago to stop climate change with a shift to solar and wind energy, etc. Now our only hope is removing carbon directly from the atmosphere. Fortunately, just in the past few years the technology has become available – we can save our children’s future!

With a little push we can shift Arizona from “climate change ground zero” to “climate repair ground zero,” but we need to raise public awareness of the plan (called Ocean Assisted Carbon Capture and Reflection – OACC&R) and get moving on it.