Elizabeth Kolbert’s reporting on global warming took her to places where houses have been torn apart, roads rippled and trees toppled. There, in the Arctic, where permafrost is melting and ice is retreating, is “some of the most vivid and incontrovertible” evidence of climate change, she says.

Elizabet Kolbert spoke about climate change at UCSB on Thursday. Photo by Anna Davison / SBN

 The problem is, she told Santa Barbarans Thursday night, that these changes were set into motion decades ago. If we want to see how the planet will react to the greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere right now, she says, we’ll have to wait a while – and by then it could be too late.

 “There is absolutely no time to lose,” she said during an appearance at UCSB as part of the university’s Global Warming Science & Society Event Series.

 While in her book and articles she’s “encouraging people to be outraged,” Kolbert said she didn’t dwell on the huge changes some scientists say may be necessary to avoid catastrophe.

 “I wanted the book to be taken seriously. I didn’t want it to be dismissed,” she said. “If you write about it (climate change) honestly, there’s real danger you’ll be dismissed as someone who wants everyone to live in huts and wear grass skirts . . . And I don’t have one,” she added.

 Several thousand copies of Kolbert’s book have been given out free to UCSB students as part of the first “UCSB Reads for Earth Day” effort. Students and others in Santa Barbara are being encouraged to read the book, and a series of community discussions on climate change have been held around Santa Barbara over the past month.

Interim university librarian Gene Lucas remarked Thursday that he thinks Kolbert “is becoming the rock star of the global warming issue here in Santa Barbara.”

While some critics dismiss climate change as alarmist talk based on uncertain science, the overwhelming majority of scientists — and now, they say, increasing numbers of non-scientists — believe that climate change is a real phenomenon, and a real concern.

Although Kolbert said she’s pleased that “the tenor of discussion on Capitol Hill has changed” and politicians are increasingly looking for ways to address the problem, she reminded her audience Thursday that “the public is much bigger than any group of politicians.”

 “We seem to ourselves,” she said in closing, “a special kind of organism, one that’s conscious of what it’s doing and therefore capable of changing its behavior."