The wind was up as the front moved in, the light through the clouds held a blue tint and worried though I was, I had to admit a certain exhilaration.  The loose ends of the shower curtains (we use retired shower curtains for drop cloths, etc.) flapped furiously as I ran up and down the stepladder with a Barlow knife and bits of twine.  I worried my knots would prove ineffectual; that I’d wake in the night to see the arbor fluttering like a banshee and I’d have to resign my seat in the Greenpeace Knot-Tyers Club.

The knots held, the freeze passed us by, all the plants seem to have survived and while I’m still trying to hold to my weather observing resolution, I have to admit global warming has hopelessly intruded upon it and may never be ejected.

How is cold weather a symptom of global warming?  Short answer: it’s not.  Every Vermont gardener knows frosts and freezes are likely all the way through Memorial Day, which is why no one puts their tomatoes in before that holiday.

On the other (and more pertinent) hand, the real reason for the Frenetic Friday Floral Festival was that temperatures in March and April were so far above normal that blossoms are well ahead of schedule.  The forsythia bloomed for more than four weeks this year and even overlapped with the lilacs, something I’ve never witnessed.  They’re usually five or six weeks apart.

Because we’re the good guys in the global warming debate (falling over ourselves to “not be alarmist”), let us feel compelled to add this disclaimer: “This particular event cannot be directly attributed to global warming, although based on computer models, this is the kind of event we should expect to see more frequently.”  I’m sure that phrase (or one like it) will be invoked a record number of times this year.  I’d like to see a graph of the frequency of that phrase’s appearance in the media and political discourse in the past decade.  I imagine it would look like a hockey stick.

On Saturday, I cut the grass, the first time I’ve ever done it in April.  It was overdue, if anything (see disclaimer above).  It was chilly, but not too chilly if one was sheltered from the wind.  I worry about the bees.  This spring has been hard on them.

Some scientists predict that sometime this month, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will top 400 parts per million for the first time in human history.  Not that it will stay there.  Although CO2 is steadily on the rise, it’s not constant.  The last two weeks of May tend to be the CO2 high point for the year, because 1) most of Earth’s land mass is north of the equator 2) the snows in the northern hemisphere have greatly receded, allowing last year’s dead leaves to begin decaying in earnest and 3) this year’s new leaves have yet to reach potential in terms of CO2 absorption.

Even though the number will hit 400 and dip again, soon after it will pass 400 ppm and we will never see the 300s again in our lives.  If we fail to take significant action, neither will our kids or grandchildren and they will not thank us.

Since May is also the month in which I was born (thus adding even more atmospheric CO2), I thought I’d chart my history with this particular gas.  There was an atmospheric concentration of 320 ppm CO2 when I was born.  It hit 330 when I was 13, 340 when I was 19 (those big ‘70s gas guzzlers), 350 when I was 26 (and abandoning journalism for environmentalism), 360 when I was 34, 370 when I was 39, 380 when I was 44 and 390 when I was 48.  The intervening years, therefore, are 13, six, seven, eight, five, five, five and three.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

If, as oil companies, Republican senators and presidential candidates claim, global warming is nothing more than a hoax dreamed up by environmentalists to raise money, it’s one hell of a hoax.  On the radio yesterday, the announcer said we were having yet another “red flag day,” meaning that the threat of brush or forest fire was high.  I first heard a red flag warning on March 23.  Late winter and early spring in Vermont are supposed to be exemplified by mud, not fire, but “new normal” are the words on everyone’s lips.  (I really didn’t want this resolution series to be all about global warming either, but these circumstances are beyond my control.)

The winter of 2012 was dry, with neither much snow nor rain falling.  Global warming models call for the northeast to get wetter overall, but also call for precipitation to fall in short, intense bursts, as we saw late last summer with Hurricane Irene.  The US Geological Survey maintains a web site that records the water level in Lake Champlain and because I have a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I check the lake level every morning.  In March, that level dipped below average for the first time in four and a half years.

The maple syrup season was a bust.  Sugar maples produce sweet sap when temperatures are in the 20s at night and 40s during the day.  The season kicked off early and ended even earlier when warm nights caused the sap to turn “buddy” – or bitter.  Southern Vermont sugarmakers (as they’re known) got about two-thirds of an average crop, northern Vermonters about one-third.  If you like syrup, buy it now, because the price will go up.

Bees in Vermont were doing well through the mild winter, but the warm spell caused them to break the clusters they form to stay warm in the winter.  When the cold returned, many likely did not re-cluster and froze or started using up honey stores at an accelerated rate, trying to stay warm.  Many trees and shrubs budded and then got caught when the cold weather returned.  It’s too early to tell what effect this will have on the apple crop.

I’ll admit I enjoyed the warmth, sort of, walking around in a t-shirt and shorts, sitting on the front porch of an evening, swatting the March mosquitoes.

On March 20, PBS’s news hour broadcast a report on two Texas towns running out of water.  The town of Robert Lee now has to have its water trucked in and is building a million and a half-dollar pipeline to a nearby town, but how long before that town runs dry is a question.  It’s a sobering story, and features Professor Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech, who wrote a chapter on global warming for a book by Newt Gingrich, but that chapter was deleted after Rush Limbaugh mocked it.  So that’s the level of seriousness we accord this problem.

In the middle of this, the phrase “instant, endless summer” kept sounding in my head.  I remembered I’d used it as a title for an earlier commentary, but I couldn’t recall exactly when.  I checked; the year was 1998 and the date was May 21, so in 14 years, I’ve moved up by two months.  Put that in your igloo, Jim.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

Final NCAA update: I was 36 of 61 for the whole tournament and picked Kentucky to win the final.  A teenaged girl of my close acquaintance, however, picked 39 of 61, so move over, old people.

That was fairly rare this winter and one evening, as I was watching the light die through the back window, I realized how much I’d missed the snow cover this year.  I guess it was a strange case of Seasonal Affective Disorder.  The term usually applies to people who find the lack of light during winter depressing.  I find the gray and dark comforting and restful, as opposed to constant light, which I find enervating, as if I should always be doing something more productive than whatever I’m doing.

I used to feel I needed two weeks of below-zero weather to feel I’d had a winter, now I’ll settle for a few weeks of snow cover.  We’re getting covered in snow today, as we’re in the midst of our first proper snowfall of the season.  It’s been coming down since mid-morning, but there’s only a few inches of accumulation.  The thermometer stands one degree below freezing and the forecast says temperatures will be back in the 40s by Saturday.

It’s been one of those winters.  The news carried reports of two vehicles falling through the ice last Saturday, a Jeep on Mallett’s Bay on Lake Champlain and a pickup on Lake Willoughby in the Northeast Kingdom.  There’s nothing unusual about either event, except for the dates.  Trucks-falling-through-ice season usually does not commence in these parts until late March.

Even if it had been cold, there still wouldn’t have been much snow, as it’s been a dry winter overall.  On warm afternoons in the past few weeks, I would see what I thought was rain dripping off the sugar maple out back, but since it hadn’t rained, how could that be?  After a bit, I realized it was sap, running very early this year.  This does not necessarily portend a bad year for syrup, since the sap run will depend on how many warm days and cool nights we get, regardless of when they begin and end.  One year does not a trend make, but some scientists measure these things and conclude sugar season in Vermont now begins 8.2 days earlier and ends 11.4 days earlier than it did 40 years ago, for a loss of about 10 percent of the crop.

The federal Department of Agriculture released its updated zone hardiness map a few weeks ago and my garden jumped up half a zone from 4b (minimum temp: -25 degrees F) to 5a (minimum temp: -20 degrees F), since 1990.  Even that’s low-balling it.  If this past winter is a predictor, we should be in zone 6a (minimum temp: -5 degrees F).

Last month I reported on conversations at the winter meeting of the Vermont Beekeepers.  As we had such a warm February, beeks (as they’re known) have been opening their hives (not me, my bees died last fall) and report the girls are coming through the winter in remarkably good shape.  (The boys were left outside to die when the weather turned cold.  That’s life.)

I shoveled the front walk at noon, for perhaps the fifth time this winter and the driveway apron for perhaps the third time.  I haven’t bothered touching anything behind the sidewalk.  Why bother?  Chittenden County schools were off this week for winter break and I have to soon head out and retrieve a teenager off one of the nearby mountains, which will give me a slight fix of winter driving.

I hope I haven’t forgotten how.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

In the modern world, a stalking horse is a metaphor for some third party that tries out an idea or technique for someone else, to see how it goes over, without exposing the ulterior party to the negative side effects of failure.

The stalking horse is the way to go in the 21st century.  This week’s famous stalking horse is the Heartland Institute of Chicago, Illinois.  Isn’t that such a nice name, the Heartland Institute?  What pleasant folks they must be!

Actually, not.  The Heartland Institute is a right-wing think tank for hire.  If you’ve got cash and a libertarian idea, they’ll be happy to cook up some bogus nonsense to promote it and hide your identity.  There’s the “Free to Choose Medicine” which opposes the Food and Drug Administration’s “extreme tunnel focus on safety,” you know, making sure drugs that are supposed to cure you don’t kill you instead.  How could Big Pharma not like (and contribute to) that?

There’s “Operation Angry Badger,” (no, I’m not making this up) which seeks to save Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker from a recall election prompted by his attack on the state’s public employees last year.  Heartland says, “Successful recalls would be a major setback to the national effort to rein in public sector compensation and union power.”

Heartland, all other looniness aside, is best known as a home for global warming deniers looking for a facade (Hello, Koch brothers!).  This week, an anonymous do-gooder sent a trove of Heartland’s internal documents to DeSmogblog, a web site devoted to pointing out the hunters behind the deniers’ stalking horses.

Among other things, Heartland has been planning to pay a Department of Energy consultant – David Wojick – $75,000 to develop a K-12 curriculum on global warming.  (Things get complex here, so pay close attention.)

A document entitled “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” says Dr. Wojick’s work “will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

Heartland denied this is its document.  A document it does not disown, however, says Dr. Wojick will be paid $75,000 for a K-12 global warming curriculum; it just doesn’t have the inflammatory language about dissuading the teaching of science.

(To be clear, while Heartland did not disown the other documents, it didn’t verify them, either.  A spokesoid said Heartland’s president, Joseph Bast, was traveling and couldn’t verify the other documents.  Which raises the question: if he wasn’t around to verify most of the documents as true, how was he around to verify one as false?  Oh, and another question: if he was traveling and unavailable for verification duty, how did he manage to write the rather lengthy fundraising letter about the leak that went out over his signature the same day the story broke?)

Here’s what caught my eye: “the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain” and “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”  Reminds me of the “intelligent design” nonsense we’ve seen, and still see, across the country.

Was that another stalking horse?  The “creation science” debate was and is preposterous (“teach all the theories”) but it’s been a handy tool for keeping evangelical Christians firmly in the Republican Party, even as their wages erode, their life savings are wiped out by health care costs and their homes are lost to unscrupulous banks.  (Republican operatives refer to these poor folks as “useful idiots.”)

Beyond that, maybe it was a test run for the bogus global warming debate in the schools.  Pick a useful issue, but one not crucial to your primary agenda and conduct your test run, see how well you can manage to undermine real science.  Get the bugs worked out, optimize performance, then apply the lessons learned to something you really care about.

Makes sense to me.  No one ever said these guys were dumb.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

Yesterday was the Imbolc, the Celtic feast of pregnant ewes, a harbinger of spring soon to come.  There are no ewes, pregnant or otherwise, in my vicinity (no groundhogs either, for that matter), so I can’t report on their gestational progress.

I did hear a phoebe sing outside my window Tuesday and again this morning.  The phoebe’s song is one of my favorite voices of spring, but it shouldn’t arrive here for another six weeks.

The window of days likely below-zero temperatures is six weeks long; two of those weeks still remain, but we’ve only had a few days when the thermometer dipped below zero.  Yesterday afternoon was in the high forties.  There’s no snow on the ground and my snow shovels rest in a corner of the front porch, unused.

The Vermont Beekeepers Association held its winter meeting last week, weather talk dominated there, too.  A warm winter isn’t necessarily a good thing for bees, as they are more active, flying out in search of unavailable pollen, which can lead to consuming their honey stores at faster rate and shortening their life spans, which may reduce colony size in the crucial weeks before the first brood of the season hatch.  Last summer in the Champlain Valley was brutal for bees.  Many colonies (mine included) died and nucleus colonies for sale are few and expensive.

One beekeeper that has a horse-drawn sleigh reported he has yet to take it out this winter.  “I’ve never gone this late before.  I’ve had to return $3,000 worth of checks to people who’d prepaid for rides.  I had the trail all groomed last week, then this,” he said, making an upward gesture with his hand, meaning the rain that had come in the three previous days.  “I ought to just give up.”

Chickadees, sparrows and a female cardinal frequent the new feeder.  Haven’t seen the phoebe there yet.  Squirrels have learned to jump straight down on it from the porch roof in a Mission Impossible-style maneuver that succeeds in maybe one of five attempts.  I try not to dwell on that as I consider backyard squirrel obsession a sign of advancing age.

My New Year’s resolution was to pay more attention to day-to-day weather.  What a year to pick that one.  Last month, I said that I think by looking at a photo of northwestern Vermont, I could tell which week of winter it was taken.  Not this year.  It has seemed like the first week of April for the past three weeks.

There’s still the winter light for me to use to gauge the date.  It’s not exactly weather, but it changes day to day.  The time of dawn and dusk, the angle of the late afternoon sun, the particular peak of the Adirondacks behind which I see it sink, should I be fortunate enough to be walking lakeside as it sets.

Vernal equinox is still seven weeks away.  By the calendar, most of winter is still ahead of us, regardless of what groundhogs say or don’t say.  I don’t know what that means in our post-agricultural society.  It may be going the way of Imbolc.  Last autumn, I noted my neighbors lighting bonfires on the first Sunday of standard time.  Daylight time, when modern people welcome the return of the light, is five weeks away.  It might be time to plan a new ritual.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

(By the way,  I don’t think “standard” time is standard anymore, as we observe it for only about four months a year, just as a car’s manual transmission is no longer the “standard” equipment it once was.)

The fact that we shift clocks at all is a symptom of industrial society ruled by measured time.  Real farmers rise with the sun, not the clock.  We change from daylight to standard time (and vice versa) in the middle of a weekend to ease the Monday morning transition.  By the light of the flames, we could see ourselves on the cusp of transition from the global, oil soaked era to a new agrarianism.

My neighbor Malgosia said she lit her fire because when she was growing up in Poland, school would let out in the early days of November so children could help with the potato harvest and in the evenings they would burn the dry, desiccated potato plants in the fields, with tubers roasting in the embers.  The failing light and crisp November air reminded her of those days, so a fire seemed appropriate.  We decided to have a backyard potato roast this weekend (weather permitting); if it goes well, maybe another on Thanksgiving eve.

Then we talked about our gardens, what had and hadn’t gone well in the growing season just past.  We’ve started to refer to our block as “the farm” because so many of us have gardens, fruit trees, bees or chickens.  Malgosia from Poland and Margaret, a Vermont native, (they were born one day apart, um… some years ago) are the resident advisors on growing and pruning, canning and preserving.

We agreed that turning our neighborhood into “the farm,” eating locally, learning about foraging and supporting farmers’ markets are the new activism.  Attempts to head off global warming have not worked.  Nor have we stopped overfishing or deforestation, hard as mainstream environmentalists have tried.

Unsuccessful though we may be, we still have to try.  The consequences we face are too severe to stop now.  At the same time, we can’t pretend everything will be all right.  It’s already too far gone for that.  The effects of global warming, overfishing and deforestation are upon us.  This summer’s fires in Texas burned 22 percent of the American cotton crop.  Corn, wheat, peanuts and beef all took hits as well.  The new activism, my neighborhood farm, is going to look smarter every year.

The old activism, my day job, is important too, if for no other reason than it buys time for the new activism to establish itself.  “I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.  He was referring to violence, but I reach for those words when I feel any burden.  “Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives,” Dr. King said.

The harvest is in, the days short and the year is winding down.  Our industrial society is failing, so we return to the land in the ways we can and spontaneously find new harvest rituals.  We plan for the next year, the next spring, the next phase of hope.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended (at least in terms of the calendar).  Wildfires destroyed an area of Texas as large as the state of Connecticut, another all-time worst.

On August 13th, in the midst of this, Texas’s Republican Governor Rick Perry declared himself a candidate for president.  He thinks – or at least says he thinks – global warming is a hoax invented by scientists as a way to get research grants.  He has not indicated whether he thinks these scientists are setting his state on fire.

Mr. Perry may be one reason Texas’s wildfires are bigger than everyone else’s.  (Texans like to boast about the size of things.)  This spring – long after the drought began – he cut 72 percent of the budget for firefighting equipment for volunteer fire departments

Salon quoted state Sen. Mario Gallegos, a Democrat and former firefighter: “Volunteer fire departments are the backbone of fire protection in this state, and they need heavy equipment and other resources to do their job.”  On the other hand, Mr. Perry did ask Texans to pray for rain in April.  God apparently said no.

The business of cutting nearly three-quarters of funds for volunteer fire companies caught my eye for another reason.  In the recent dump of State Department documents by Wikileaks, was a 2003 memo on US-Canada pipelines.  One section said: “Pipeline firms say they maintain close relationships with landowners, municipalities, and volunteer fire departments along their routes in order to enhance both monitoring of the pipeline, and emergency response. Company employees help to train local firefighters, and these two groups in combination are the ‘first responders’ to pipeline emergencies.”

Last month, that same State Department concluded the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry highly corrosive tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, is unlikely to have an adverse environmental impact.  Look again, at the paragraphs above.  Volunteer firefighters are the “first responders” to pipeline emergencies.  Friend of oil companies Rick Perry cut the budget for volunteer firefighters by 72 percent and the State Department whistles past the graveyard of “adverse environmental impact.”

In Wednesday’s New York Times, Terry Cunha, a spokesperson for TransCanada (which proposes the Keystone pipeline) says Keystone will be the safest pipeline in North America.  Words are easy and talk is cheap when it’s all just talk.  Mr. Cunha should speak to BP Vice President David Rainey, who told the US Senate in November 2009 the “best available and up-to-date scientific information” supports offshore oil drilling and that such drilling is “safe and protective of the environment.”  Mr. Rainey’s eaten those words a dozen times over since the disastrous Deepwater Horizon blowout less than six months after his testimony.

Talk is cheap for corporate spokespeople, consequences for real people are not.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The answers (I won’t make you wait) are 100 and 98.  No statistically significant number of scientists deny the Earth is growing warmer.  About two percent deny humans are the cause.  Many of that minority are funded, directly or indirectly, by fossil fuel industries.

Kudos to presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr. for saying at the Republican debate last night, “in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.”  He probably wasn’t going to win the nomination in any case, so why spend the next six months pretending to live in La-La land?

Pollsters for the other Republican candidates could have told Mr. Huntsman that adhering to good science is bad politics.  A few hours before the debate, Kevin Drum reported in Mother Jones that most Americans don’t know that global warming science is a settled issue.  He cites the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication as saying that less than 20 percent of Americans know there is scientific consensus on global warming.  Reading that, I had unsettling flashbacks to the “Elvis is alive” mythconception so popular in the mid-80s.

We don’t need reminding in Vermont.  We’ve had two hundred-year floods since May.  The last one, courtesy of Hurricane Irene (Why Irene?  Why not Exxon? Or Cheney?), destroyed 700 homes and washed out hundreds of roads and bridges.

Such calamities are never welcome, but in this third year of massive recession and government budget shortfalls, this is a real economic gut punch to the state.  Inns are closed, festivals have been cancelled, leaf-peeping season – which despite its too-cute name, is extraordinarily important to the tourist economy – will undoubtedly suffer.  (It was shaping up to be a less-than-stellar display this year anyhow, as it is whenever the summer months are dry.  Ironic, isn’t it?)

We’re also an agricultural state and crops contaminated by floodwater are unsafe to consume for both humans and beasts.  That applies to acres of cattle feed and dozens of streamside community-supported-agriculture farms in this localvore-loving state.  The dairy farmers were late getting their crops into the fields and missed their first cut of hay because of heavy spring rains.  (Ironic again?  You’re goddamned right it is.)

Contractors were already hard-pressed to finish planned road construction projects before winter, now we have several hundred new projects that beg completion before the punishing blizzards arrive.  Given the extent of damage all along the East Coast, even if we had the money to bring in workers and equipment from out of state, I doubt they could be found.

This is what the much-scoffed-at-by-right-wing-politicians computer models predict for the northeast.  Warmer and wetter, but the wetter doesn’t happen in a steady, manageable fashion.  Huge spring deluges, then months of parched soil, then more deluges.

This flood was the last thing people need as they are laid off from their jobs, as they lose their houses.  If Bill Gates breaks his leg, he can afford the finest medical care and has a dozen gadgets to keep working as he sits on the couch.  When a low-income laborer breaks her or his leg, it’s a financial crisis – via medical bills and loss of work – which may push his or her family into poverty for years.  That’s how this flood feels in this state right now.  It’s frightening.  And yet a bunch of Republican millionaires stood on a stage last night and complained that poor people don’t pay enough taxes.

Most of those millionaires deny global warming (and evolution, but let’s leave that for another day).  Worse, perhaps because the media puts a climate skeptic in every “balanced” story, most Americans don’t know there is consensus on global warming and what causes it.

In 1944, as he watched the events he would soon turn into “1984,” George Orwell wrote, “One day there will be a big, careful, scientific enquiry into the extent to which propaganda is believed.”  Even George Orwell didn’t foresee that science would be one of propaganda’s victims.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene.  “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are.  Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities.  This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction.  It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.

Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact.  Experts disagree.  James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming.  One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….

If you haven’t already learned about the tar sands, extracting oil from them requires massive abuse of forests, clean water and energy, so the tar sands as a whole is a global warming machine gone berserk.  If oil is an addiction, the tar sands are the dirty needle we heedlessly plunge into our arm.

Thousands of people – citizens – have protested in front of the White House, hundreds have been arrested.  Barack Obama likely believes environmentalists have no choice but to vote for him next year, thus revealing himself to be another calculating politician, who’d rather retire in glory as a two-term president than actually accomplish anything of value in either of his terms of office.  In the addiction analogy, he’s the clueless enabler.

Yesterday, ExxonMobil and Russia – two of the planet’s evil entities – announced an agreement that will open the Russia arctic to oil exploration by Exxon.  Exxon – with help from us – has already gone a long way toward “opening” the arctic.  Global warming has meant the retreat of polar sea ice to the point that the Ruxxons can drill for more oil, to melt more ice, drill for more oil, etc., etc.

Exxon maneuvers at its peril, as Russia is famous for shafting its partners after it’s gotten what it wants.  Maybe Rex Tillerson will end up in a cell next to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch and oil billionaire.  Might be a pleasant meditation for a holiday weekend.

Researching something else last night, I came across an article describing the dumping of nuclear waste and over a dozen vessel-sized reactors in the western Kara Sea – where Exxon just won the right to explore.  The currents in the Kara carry water from west to east; that is, from the radioactive taint all across the rest of the local ocean.  Can’t beat those Soviet smarts.

If the tar sands are the dirty needle of oil addiction, then Tillerson and Vlad Putin are the thuggish pushers who will take our money, beat us senseless and leave us for dead.

Cold turkey is starting to look good.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Who cares what James Hansen thinks?  Aside from the unfortunate fact that Dr. Hansen looks like Homer Simpson come to life, he’s NASA’s top expert on global warming.  Sure, there are any number of people on the payroll of Charles and David Koch who will tell you Dr. Hansen is a scare monger, but when the data comes in (and it piles up, day by day, year by year), it shows Dr. Hansen’s predictions about climate change are right and the deniers are wrong.

Is it worth mentioning that I type this in a bath of my own sweat?  It’s July in Vermont, after all, the farmers are haying, the temperature’s in the 90s and the insects are droning in the trees.  Is it not true that I have been heard to say at least twice a year that if we don’t get a week of 90-degree weather, I don’t feel like we’ve had a summer and if we don’t get a few weeks of below-zero weather, I don’t feel we’ve had a winter?  True, all true.

We barely got a day or two of below-zero temperatures this past winter but the summer end of the deal is chugging right along.  In Washington, DC today the combination of heat and humidity is described as “dangerous” and the Washington Post is giving advice on maintaining one’s health in such temperatures.

Dr. Hansen, however, was not writing about “the weather” five years ago last week.  “The weather” is a short-term event over which we have no control.  Dr. Hansen was writing about “climate,” which is long-term (although not that long) and over which we have limited control, in that we can make it hotter by burning fossil fuels and we can slow the rate of that heating by curtailing said burning.  You know all this.

What’s significant about Dr. Hansen’s essay is the time frame: ten years to control what we can control.  Five of those years are gone and we have done nothing to “alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions.”  The developing nations Dr. Hansen referred to are still increasing their greenhouse gas output and the developed nations are not significantly reducing theirs.

The Sierra Club today is announcing a $50 million gift from Michael Bloomberg to fight existing coal-burning power plants.  Good for him and good for them.  They’re already campaigning against proposed coal plants and have helped prevent 153 from opening.  Will it be enough?  Probably not.

People – young people who work for Greenpeace or people of all ages who are concerned about what they see – ask me what’s really happening with global warming.  (As if I’m keeping a secret.)

Here’s what I tell them: It’s real; it’s happening.  We cannot avoid the effects of global warming, because those effects are here.  Any actions we can take as individuals, or more important, as a society, are worthwhile because they will help blunt the worst effects of global warming.  Because we have failed to act we will have to deal with significant effects regardless.

So plan for it.  Plan for the aspects of global warming that you may enjoy, if any.  Might as well, there’ll be plenty you won’t enjoy, like economic disruption and mass migration.  Plan for that, too.  Plan to take care of the weak and vulnerable in your community or those who will soon join it.  Start thinking about your community and what you can do right now to make it stronger.

Happy summer, now and forever.

© Mark Floegel, 2011