The old saying about there being two types of people in the world can apply to almost anything, but increasingly it applies to belief in human-caused global warming. Either you buy it or you don’t. Lately, the buyers are dwindling in number due to a pushback against climate science on a number of fronts, and by the scientists’ human failings being exploited by a well-organized corporate opposition. Part of the success with this pushback is due to the fact that global warming itself seems difficult to understand. But as Albert Einstein once said about his Theory of General Relativity, really anyone can understand it if it’s explained the right way.

The idea of human-caused climate change starts with a scientist noticing that we’ve been pumping billions of tons of heat-trapping gasses into the air, and wondering if they could possibly make a difference in the greenhouse mechanism. The two potential answers are, no these billions of tons of gasses which we’ve spewed into the sky for more than a century make no difference at all, or they do. Studies led scientists to conclude yes, they make a difference. Further studies have begun to pinpoint how much. Scientists are still trying to chart the details of global warming, but they know beyond all doubt that warming is occurring.

Skeptics say the atmosphere is too big to be affected by anything we puny humans do, but consider: the Baltic Sea is nearly dead and it’s one of the largest seas in the world; the Mississippi River is so choked with agricultural runoff that the area where it drains into the Gulf of Mexico is dead due to oxygen depletion; and all the world’s oceans are highly acidic and coral reefs are dying as a result. These are all “big things” which humans have affected, and at one time or another they were all considered too big to be harmed. Thus we have to doubt that in our atmosphere we’ll have found—for the first time in history—a part of the ecology that is magically immune to us, especially when, unlike the relatively smaller populations that have access to dying rivers and seas, every single human on the planet has access to the sky.

Fighting the effects of global warming will cost many companies millions of dollars. This is of course a big reason for their assault on climatologists, but there is a much larger underlying reason that they don’t discuss out loud. Free market ideologues and the politicians they own have spent the last forty years destroying regulation in industry and commerce, and their rationale has been that unregulated markets are better for people. That contention was always a fallacy, easily refuted by any objective analysis of the economic evidence, but the lie has been easy to cover up with enough lobbying dollars and enough advertising and by placing enough hired mouthpieces on Fox News to extol free market virtues to a credulous audience. But the truth of human-caused climate change is nothing less than the Earth itself declaring that free market economics, and its childish underlying fallacy of perpetual economic growth, are false.

And this is terrifying to free market ideologues, because they can’t exactly get one of their shills to go on Fox News and claim that the atmosphere has a liberal bias. So after defeating the Constitution, turning everyone from Marx to Michael Moore into caricatures, and stifling American liberalism in general, free market adherents are faced with an opponent they cannot ignore, bribe, or beat. The climate is implacable, and pays no mind to slander or spin. The science can be assailed as long as people don’t understand it, and the scientists can be portrayed as involved in some imaginary conspiracy, but the climate will simply continue burning us out like a fever burning out a virus. It will be people of color in inundated areas of Asia and drought-stricken regions of Africa that pay the highest price, but the climate doesn’t see color—another lesson we could afford to learn.

Climate change is the most stunning discovery of our lifetimes, because it renders the American religion of unchecked economic greed completely moot. What we’re witnessing in response to that discovery is a desperate counterattack by those who believe there should be no limits on what they consume, accumulate, destroy and remake. The free market ethos has always been that “the market will work everything out on its own.” Climate change tells us that this idea—always an easily-penetrated canard dreamt up by rich men who wanted a rationale for ignoring the suffering masses—is in fact a recipe for our own destruction. A mere twenty years after American leaders declared capitalism the greatest system ever devised and managed economies not just inefficient, but immoral, the Earth has interrupted the celebration with a raised finger and a few quiet words: “Not so fast, my friends.”