Climate Crisis

I would now to pause to throw some serious love Step It Up’s way. I’m crazy for this group. They’re taking it to the streets and making some good solid noise about the climate crisis. Demanding attention in ways than cannot be ignored by even the highest and the mightiest no matter where it is they’re sitting on their hands. That’s what I’m talking about, Willis. Getting in their faces. Refusing to back down. And not taking no for an answer.

The Step It Up event last spring was pure genius and highly effective. It got a lot of people involved and thinking. And it got noticed. Now comes Act II: a National Day of Climate Action on November 3rd. Just like last spring’s event, anyone can organize an event in their community. (It’s easy to do.)

The idea this time is to have events be held at places named for great leaders of the past, whether local or national, to invite your local and national politicians and candidates to attend, and to demand that they support three key priorities:

1. Five million green jobs conserving 20% of our energy by 2015.
2. Freeze climate pollution levels now and cut them 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.
3. And place a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants.

Let me hear you say hallelulah, children. Count me in. I love the inviting politicians part. They can’t hide from this one. Step It Up also has
a very inspiring video that demands to be viewed. It’s a trailer for a new climate crisis film called Everything’s Cool. And Step It Up has teamed up with 1 Sky, a great new group working on the issue as well. One climate. One Future. One Chance. The change is coming. Be a part of it. Our kids are counting on us.

On August 8, 2007 there were 2.23 million square miles of ice in the Arctic.

By September 16th there were only 1.6 million square miles, a decline of 28% in only six weeks. This new level was far below the lowest low previously reached, which was 2.05 million square miles in 2005. How could such a huge change happen so quickly?

While most of us no longer question whether global warming is happening, few of us understand the intricate path it is likely to take as it unfolds. One of the most important and least understood aspects of this path is idea of the “feedback loop.”

I caught this this morning during my aforementioned day-launching semi-comatose perusal of the New York Times. It’s a great editorial that says much of what I said the other day about global heating and Unnerved Experts and befuddled polar bears and a world that’s melting faster than a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s Super Serious Climate Crunch on a Hummer dashboard in August except, you know… better.

We can, you know. It’s really not as hard as it looks.

I know, I know… You pick up the paper, read the headlines, and run screaming from the room in a blind war-fevered eco-panic so overwhelming the only way out you can see is to barricade the door, cut the cables, kill the lights, and hole up in the basement surrounded by soft pillows and a nice fluffy comforter with a case or two or ten of good merlot and that Sex in the City DVD set you got for Christmas but haven’t been able to watch because who’s got time for Carrie and the girls when dinner’s burning, the kids are screaming, the phone’s ringing and the nattering nabob on the evening news just said we have about ten minutes until humanity’s warranty on the whole operation expires?

But wait. Because there’s proof all around that we can do this. Kill the war and cool the world and not be so bush-wacked over it all. If you know what I mean… In fact, there are steps being taken in the right and better direction all the time. And some of them are pretty big. You just have to know where to look. I’d suggest right here…

Here are some words you really don’t ever want to see put together in a single sentence:

They go particularly unlooked for as a newspaper headline, which is how they unfortunately presented themselves to me during yesterday’s ritual morning rummage through the New York Times, that laughably absurd exercise in ambulatory unconsciousness in which my desperately sleep-impaired visual cortex sees all the pretty pictures and fun little words swimming around on the page but can make zero sense of them until I fill the 5-gallon sap bucket that passes for my coffee mug full of high-test fair-trade shade-grown organic java and slam its contents into my bloodstream like a howling freight train from Stimulant Hell that makes my nerve endings scream for mercy like the chemically electrified victims of hyper-caffeination they’ve quite thankfully suddenly become.

But you know, you see a headline like that and suddenly you don’t need your body-weight in Costa Rican Reserve to get within a striking distance of competent mental functioning. No sir. Words like that all put together in a neat little row are like a defibrillator for your head. Clear! Gzzzzzt! Good morning, overheated world…

White Rhino forwarded me the latest CSR Newswire in which there is much crowing about all the climate crisis action that’s happening this week from the U.N. to Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative to WalMart to New York State. (The only black mark on the week comes, as always (* heavy sigh*), from our country’s own point man, who just can’t seem to learn how to play well with others.)

This week’s news is all well and fine and good and wonderful and warms me like a happily bubbling fireside fondue pot full of dark chocolate body paint on a snowblown night in February when the kids are with Grandma and my wife is breaking out the good stuff. People are talking. Discussing. Communicating. Cooperating. Let me hear you say Hallelulah, people. Salut! We’re getting past that awkward early stage in the relationship where those of us who who’ve been blinded by science have to incessantly argue the clear and present danger to those keeping one blood-rimmed eye on denial and the other on the Dow. The weather forecast has come in. Cloudy and hot with a chance of the apocalypse. And suddenly, it seems, everybody is sitting up, taking notice, and feeling heat. “Oh holy crap! We’re about to turn the planet in a smoking cinder. That can’t be good.”

Uh… no. It can’t. Which is kinda sorta pretty much exactly what anyone who’s been paying attention has been screaming for a whole bunch of years now.

This dispatch arrived last night from our good friend and 2006 Change It participant, Joseph Kaifala, who wanted to share some of his thoughts on what’s happening in Africa.

As I was listening to BBC Network Africa this morning I heard of the increasing rainfalls that are currently devastating certain regions in Africa. According to the report, at least 17 countries have been hit in West, Central and East Africa by some of the worst rains in living memory. It also reported that at least 500,000 people have been affected by the floods in just twelve countries. An approximated 400,000 people have been affected in Uganda alone by what the BBC refers to as the country’s heaviest rainfall in 35 years.

At this point you might be thinking exactly what I thought: Climate Change. Well, you are right to think it because scientists have predicted such effects on Africa several times within the past four years. But of course, like everything else that concerns Africa, could anyone ever listen?

Earlier this year it was revealed by scientific investigation that Africa is 0.5 C warmer than it was a century ago, but that Africa is simply bearing the brunt of problems created in the rich industrial countries. The report, (Climate Change and Africa) in May 2007 aired on both BBC Focus and Network Africa reports stated that food production in countries in the Horn and the Sahel regions is always at the mercy of the climate, and the rising temperatures are putting those arid areas in an even more precarious position. Recently, a renewed study by the economist William Cline quantified drastic reductions in agricultural productivity in many of Africa’s poorest countries by the 2080s if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. Such declines are expected to be severe in places like Sudan and Senegal where agricultural production is predicted to fall by more than half, while other African countries will experience a reduction by 30-40 percent. I swear we don’t deserve this one.

At 10,000 feet, near the peak of Mt. Washburn, the snow leaves a soft dusting on the ground. The silence is totally enveloping. The calls of bear and elk periodically break the silence. Man is incidental to this endless wilderness. Life above the tree line is harshly peaceful.

This is my first adventure into Yellowstone National Park. From the highest peaks, the landscape seems to dwarf the vistas of my home in Vermont. Black bear and bison are hanging out by the roadside.

This was a long way to come for a Greenpeace board meeting, a lot of CO2 emissions to figure out how to slow the emissions of everyone else. But I’m grateful that I came. I had no idea how beautiful the country that often angers me so could be.