In the parable about the blind men and the elephant, each man, concentrating on the single feature of the animal he touched first, confidently maintains his opinion on the nature of the huge beast. The blind man who touches the elephant’s leg is sure it is a tree. The one who grabs the trunk claims with certainty it is a snake. And so it goes: the ear is a fan, and the tail is a rope with a brush on the end. The blind men each studied the elephant but were each limited to a single point of contact. They based their judgment on individual experience, not on the object as a whole. As a result, they were all wrong.

In a significant way, this story is a fitting metaphor for our approach to global warming and planet Earth, from the irresponsible denials of the scientific validity of climate change to the worthwhile questions about its cause and ultimately to the all-important issues about how far too often our conclusions are based only on our very limited perception.

Few are alarmed when they hear of deforestation or melting sea ice halfway around the globe. But to understand the complexities of our planet, we can no longer turn a blind eye to the world around us. We must see the Earth as it truly is—an interconnected living whole.

Fortunately, we have the means to do just that. We just have to broaden our individual experience and look from space. From space we can see Earth as a whole in its larger planetary context. We can see and feel the pulse of our entire planet by studying the dynamic system of land and oceans and atmosphere and life.

When I led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), I was always inspired when the astronauts described our planet. In stunning detail, they would talk about how you could see the continents and the oceans and how they fit together. But they also talked about what you could not see.

Borders. From near-Earth orbit, it becomes immediately apparent that those shaded lines in an atlas do not project up. Borders between nations become meaningless. The only line astronauts routinely talked about is the beautiful, thin, and illuminated turquoise line that separates our planet from the infinite black backdrop of space.

That line, of course, is our atmosphere, and it means everything. Our atmosphere is why Earth, alone among its neighbors in the solar system, supports abundant and diverse life. It is what distinguishes us from our lifeless neighbors Venus and Mars, even though during their formation they were probably very similar to Earth. Our atmosphere outlines a unique planet that is both robust and balanced and at the same time fragile and precarious. But most of all, our atmosphere, along with the oceans and the land masses it interacts with, is shared—by developed countries, developing countries, and all of those in between. Pictures and measurements of the Earth taken from space prove this beyond a doubt.

The view astronauts have of Madagascar, for instance, is striking. Needing more farmland to feed a growing population, Madagascar’s residents have destroyed about 80 percent of their indigenous forests. Once almost entirely green, the image from space is now one of a brownish-red barren land that is literally bleeding topsoil off the coast into the ocean. The continuing encroachment of coastal forests requires slashing and burning with a double-edged machete. At the local level, entire ecosystems become endangered. On the global scale, precipitation patterns are upset. As greenhouse gases and ash are generated and released into the atmosphere, they absorb or reflect solar radiation, thereby suppressing the rainfall that helps wash away pollutants in many areas of our planet.

Other satellite images have tracked pollution plumes—both tropical smoke aerosols and tropospheric ozone—from scenarios not unlike that of Madagascar. In the spring of 2001, a giant natural dust storm originating in the Gobi Desert was monitored by satellites as it traveled east over Beijing, Japan, the Pacific Ocean, and, just over a month later, Death Valley in California, bringing haze to an area known for clear skies.

Remote sensing observations have given us a more comprehensive perspective of our land and air. The same holds true for the seas. Because it is the interaction of the ocean with the atmosphere that drives climate, ocean temperature has an enormous impact worldwide. It is estimated that the storms, floods, droughts, and fires that accompanied the El Niсo of 1997-1998 claimed more than 30,000 lives, displaced hundreds of millions of people, and cost nearly US$100 billion.

Today, we are in a better position to warn vulnerable populations of an impending event such as El Niсo. By measuring sea surface temperature from space, we also have maps of “hot spots” where unusually warm temperatures are threatening the coral reefs upon which more than 30 million people worldwide depend.

While the coral reefs remind us of the tropics, the best place to study climate change may be the Arctic, where the rate of change is more extreme due to the phase change of water and ice, a condition Douglas Martinson of Columbia University calls “polar amplification.” Whereas the average global temperature has increased 1°F, the arctic temperature has increased 4°F in the summer and 8°F in the winter. In addition, NASA has determined that over the past few decades, the Arctic ice cap has decreased about 40 percent in thickness and the summer sea ice expanse is declining about 3 percent per decade. To put this in different terms, for the last three winters, Christopher Columbus would have been able to make his trip through the now open Northwest Passage.

Yet another perspective comes from an Alaskan named Caleb Pungowiyi. He is not a scientist but someone whose lifeline is the sea ice of the Arctic coastline. When I met him, he talked about what the loss of ice meant for him and his community—not only are they losing land, but fisherman and hunters have to travel farther away from home as the animal life is also affected. He concluded: “We are resilient people and we adjust readily to change but if that change is too rapid, too disruptive, it causes social chaos, hardship, and suffering.”to the phase change of water and ice, a condition Douglas Martinson of Columbia University calls “polar amplification.” Whereas the average global temperature has increased 1°F, the arctic temperature has increased 4°F in the summer and 8°F in the winter. In addition, NASA has determined that over the past few decades, the Arctic ice cap has decreased about 40 percent in thickness and the summer sea ice expanse is declining about 3 percent per decade. To put this in different terms, for the last three winters, Christopher Columbus would have been able to make his trip through the now open Northwest Passage.