As I write today, I am very aware of the strange weather patterns we have had in our country over the past few months.

It is another sunny, hot day. We have broken records for the heat, dryness and the length of time between measurable precipitation. When it finally did rain last week, we had an inch of rain in one day.

We are all old enough to know what to expect. Here, summer weather doesn’t really start until after the Fourth of July, right? It’s just as bewildering all over the country. The drought in California has been going on so long, my cousins have planted all succulents and drought-tolerant plants in their yard, eliminating their grass entirely. Others pay to have special water trucks come to water their fruit trees to keep them alive, using reclaimed water from sewage treatment plants. And this is not in the desert of Southern California — it’s in the San Francisco Bay area!

We think often about the climate changes we are going to experience in our lifetimes. This is no longer a phenomenon that will be happening sometime in the future; it is happening now.

If you live anywhere near glaciers, or visit glaciers on a regular basis, you know how quickly they are melting. The melting of vast portions of ice — glaciers and sea ice — and the warming of the seas are what are going to raise the levels of the oceans enough to flood huge coastal cities all over the world. There will be 100 million people in Bangladesh alone who need to move elsewhere.

The most frightening thing is that this is all happening much more quickly than even the climate scientists predicted.

We were recently made aware of an article about those scientists and their insane existence. “When the end of human civilization is your day job, it can be hard to sleep at night,” is the subtitle of the article. That about sums it up. The author interviewed several Americans who work all over the world in climate sciences, monitoring or predicting climate changes. They are not a happy bunch. (You can read it at goo.gl/JqjNlL.)

It is frightening that these scientists are strictly prohibited by their employers from telling the full extent of the climate-change impacts they are witnessing and documenting. Daily, they are seeing the increasing documentation and physical evidence that global warming is human-induced and changes are affecting all of our lives. Arctic air temperatures are increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the world, and estimates are that the Arctic could lose all of its summer sea ice by next year, which is 84 years before the models predicted.

But they are supposed to say nothing about it.

These scientists “have been the targets of an unrelenting and well-organized attack that includes death threats, summonses from a hostile Congress, attempts to get them fired, legal harassment and more … all amplified by a relentless propaganda campaign nakedly financed by the fossil-fuel companies.”

Some are experiencing the depression and mental anxiety of PTSD, and some are moving to other countries to escape the political climate of the U.S.

What keeps them going? If they are seeing the potential demise of Earth, at least of the human inhabitants, why do they keep doing what they are doing? How do they raise their children? For years, we believed that if humans could make significant lifestyle changes, and if our technology could assist in that, it was still possible for Earth and humans to survive. We have had to believe that, right?

But these folks who know the dire predictions and see the negative response can’t convince themselves that easily. After moving his family to Denmark, one of them commented that the U.S. has to quit listening to the “deniers” who either dismiss the reality of global warming, continue to run their businesses as if it does not matter, refuse to fund alternatives to fossil fuel consumption, or deny funding for research and advancements in climate science.

He predicts major human suffering and possibly a catastrophic event that will finally get people’s attention. It may have to be even more dramatic than the drought-induced agricultural shortages we have been experiencing, or the repeated intense weather storms. It may have to be wars over water and food. “Climate change is a conflict multiplier.”

What keeps us going? Sometimes, focusing on what you can change, what you can protect, is all you can do. As we work at Stillwaters to protect our critical estuary on Puget Sound, providing healthy habitat for salmon and other wildlife neighbors, we also contribute greatly to the education of our future scientists now in college, and contribute to research on Puget Sound estuaries and salt marshes.

At the same time, we must persuade our human neighbors to join us in creating more sustainable lifestyles of their own. We all need to do all that we can — if it means changing some light bulbs, giving up some car trips, buying local food and used clothing, defeating politicians who are climate-change deniers, giving up air travel, having fewer children — we have to do whatever each of us can to do reduce our carbon footprint. But the one thing we cannot do is sit back and say to ourselves, “It’s hopeless; there’s nothing I can do!” and give up.

(Information for this column sourced from Stillwaters Environmental Center and “Ballad of the Sad Climatologists,” Esquire, August 2015.)

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— Naomi Maasberg is director of Stillwaters Environmental Learning Center. Contact her at  naomi@stillwatersenviron mentalcenter.org.