Axios

We’re at the beginning of a make-or-break period to confront global warming. A combination of forces, from dire scientific reports to extreme weather events, has crystallized a movement to action.

What's new: In the past 2 years, a spate of dire scientific reports has hammered home the urgency of acting on this issue.

In October, a UN panel found that the effects of global warming are already evident worldwide.

To avoid more severe impacts, the panel said greenhouse gas emissions should be cut by about 45% by 2030, relative to 2010 levels — a Herculean task compared to current global trends.

Another report the Trump administration released on Black Friday tied trends in wildfires, sea level rise and heat waves to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

The collective message from these studies is that the actions we take in the next 10–20 years will be crucial to determining the climate for centuries to come.

Yes, but: These studies don't mean that we're headed for certain doom, reminds Zeke Hausfather, a climate analyst with Carbon Brief. "I've seen a tendency recently for people to focus on overly dire projections of climate change, suggesting that it will lead to human extinction if we don't act in the next few years. ... This is not consistent with the current state of the science."

Polling shows some people are becoming more alarmed about global warming:

A December poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change and George Mason University found that the "alarmed" segment of the American public is at an all-time high of 29% — double the size in a 2013 survey.

The poll also showed a decline in Americans who are classified in the "dismissive" or "doubtful" camps.

The percentage of conservative Republicans who are worried about climate change has also reached an all-time high, according to Yale's Anthony Leiserowitz, who studies public opinion on climate change.

“More Americans think that climate change is here and now, affecting them here and now, and poses a risk to them personally than ever before,” he tells Axios.

Scientists are picking up on this shift in how their work is perceived.

"I sense that things are different now, but as a scientist I'd like to see the data and do a more careful analysis before inferring causality," Kate Marvel, a NASA climate scientist, tells Axios. "But I'm very happy to see the threat of climate change being taken seriously."

"In general, the public's perception of just how real and dramatic this [climate change] is is changing quite quickly," journalist David Wallace-Wells, the author of the new book, "The Uninhabitable Earth," tells Axios.

What to watch: The recent scientific findings are also inspiring a new grassroots movement on this issue.

For example, citing the UN report, a 16-year-old Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, is inspiring thousands of school kids to stage walkouts in protest of the lack of climate action. These protests have swept across Europe and will reach the U.S. on March 15.

The bottom line: The next few years will show us whether that means there's a window for action or whether we'll just be more aware of our fate.