Forgoing the Ontario council meeting, I walked to the Claremont McKenna Athenaeum on Tuesday night to hear Elizabeth Kolbert, the journalist who wrote “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” the book documenting and explaining global warming.

A staff writer for the New Yorker whose three-part series on climate change led to her book, Kolbert projected charts and graphs on a big screen, a la Al Gore, to make her terrifying case.

Permafrost in the Arctic Circle that goes back 10,000 years is beginning to thaw, which is scary enough. But as it thaws, carbon dioxide trapped inside will be released, which will only “amplify” the warming. So will having more open water instead of sea ice, since sea ice reflects heat while open water absorbs it.

Forces have been set in motion that we can’t stop. If greenhouse gas levels miraculously held constant beginning today, temperatures would continue rising for the rest of our lives.

“We’ve already determined the climate for our children,” Kolbert, a mother of three, said, “and now we’re working on the climate of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and many generations to follow.”

Gulp.

While change could be less dramatic than computer models show, she’s updating her 2006 book and everything has only gotten worse. Projections were that the Arctic could be ice-free by 2080; that’s been cut to 2040.

Kolbert said she’s often asked what we should do “to get out of this mess.” She said she doesn’t know, really.

“We need to cut emissions by 70 to 80 percent. It’s going to take everything we’ve got,” she said. Better land-use planning, conservation, a carbon tax and, perhaps, a very different lifestyle are the ideas she offered, and even they won’t be enough.

Although it seems hopeless, we have “a moral responsibility…to not just throw up our hands,” Kolbert said.

She added: “We really haven’t made even the slightest bit of effort. If privileged Americans like the ones in this room don’t take action, I really don’t see why anyone else on the planet would, either.”

The issue may be bigger than politics can deal with, as she said John McCain told her. She said the average person doesn’t seem especially concerned and the news media isn’t sounding the alarm loudly enough. There are welcome signs, she said, that religious leaders are beginning to treat climate change as a moral issue.

“If it’s not a moral issue whether we’re going to have a planet that’s habitable in 50 or 100 years, I don’t know what is a moral issue,” she said.

She got a hearty round of applause. As far as I could tell, nobody rent their garments and wailed, threw themselves off a parapet or sacrificed a goat to the gods, although frankly those would have been sensible responses.

Thoroughly dejected, I went home. Under the circumstances, I was relieved I’d walked the half-mile instead of driving.