evidence: Humans—more specifically, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that human activity generates—are the leading cause of the earth’s rapidly changing climate today. Greenhouse gases play an important role in keeping the planet warm enough to inhabit. But the amount of these gases in our atmosphere has skyrocketed in recent decades. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, our current concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide "are unprecedented compared with the past 800,000 years." Indeed, the atmosphere’s share of carbon dioxide—the planet’s chief climate change contributor—has risen by 46 percent since preindustrial times. Learn more about the human causes of climate change. [...] And though climate change affects everyone in some way, it’s indisputable that its most negative impacts are borne disproportionately by certain groups: women, children, people of color, Indigenous communities, and the economically marginalized. Climate is a human rights issue. [...] The responsibility to reverse this worrying trend lies with us. At least 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists endorse the consensus position that humans are the lead drivers of climate change. As the IPCC has stated—with its highest degree of confidence—"It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together."