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

I know, rationally, the world doesn’t work like this, but in an odd sense, I’m looking forward to the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The irrational part of my brain thinks, “Maybe we’ll wake on September 12th and things will stop being so strange, that this decade of global chaos will end.”

This train of thought started last week, when I realized I was startled about not being startled. I was reading about the workers who were hospitalized after standing in highly irradiated water. They received radiation burns on their legs.

Interesting, but no big deal, right? “Burned by water,” however, just lodged in my head and I found myself muttering it over and over. It slowly surfaced in my brain that what was once absurd is now commonplace.

Consider: we have three wars running simultaneously. (Two and a half, minimum, depending on how picky you wanna get.) There’s no draft; most of us plod along never thinking about it. And plod we do, three years into an economic crisis and no relief in sight. Yesterday, Portugal became the third Eurozone nation to seek a bailout. Yawn. Shrug. Whatever.

Nine years ago in this space, I wondered if perchance I hadn’t developed schizophrenia and could no longer distinguish reality from fantasy. How else, I wondered, could Mark Floegel of 2002 explain his life to Mark Floegel of 1982?

That was when we only had one war. That was before a major American city was washed away and we decided to rebuild it – even though it’s below sea level and even though we haven’t done a thing to stop ocean-raising climate change.

That was before American banks trashed the global economy and everyone understood how the bankers did it and we did nothing about it, except bail out the bankers and let tens of thousands of Americans lose their homes. That was before we dumped two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and decided to just say it was all OK rather than doing anything about the hazards of offshore drilling. Did you hear the Cubans are opening their portion of the gulf to drilling? They say it’s OK, they won’t make the mistakes we did. Just like our nuclear plants can’t fail the same way Japanese ones do. Except the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (unofficially) says they can. (Officially, they tell us not to worry.)

Economist Joseph Stiglitz, writing in the UK Guardian, sees a common thread in all this: detachment. The people who benefit from – and decide on – the senseless ways in which we run the world, energy executives, bankers, politicians, are detached from the consequences of their decisions.

These oligarchs send out the bureaucrats to explain to us (with that “you’re too stupid to understand” tone) that the risk of anything going wrong is vanishingly small. (They haven’t seen the inventory in the paragraphs above.)

Here’s something to remember: risk is not impact. If there’s a mosquito in your bedroom, it’s annoying, but you’ll stay in bed and try to sleep, knowing you might get bitten. If you know that mosquito will give you a fatal disease, you’ll pull the sheet over your head and run out of the room. The risk of being bitten is the same, but your appreciation of the impact is what determines your behavior.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The good thing about beekeeping is you have ready access to bee venom for your arthritic joints. The bad thing is that in winter, when your (and by “your,” I mean “my”) arthritis flares up, the bees are all inside.

Except when the sun shines. Bees won’t defect in the hive, so when you get a warm sunny day like today, the snow around the hives is speckled with yellow bee crap. I went out and thumped a hive and when the girls came out to see what was up, I grabbed one and stung the forefinger that’s been stiff and sore and now I have warm venom coursing through it. First sting of 2011.

It got up to 50 in northwest Vermont today and it’s 17 February. The first week of January, I noted most sub-zero weather in Vermont occurs between 31 December and 15 February. It was unusually warm that first week of January and it’s stayed that way. We did have a week, or almost a week, of sub-zero weather toward the end of January, but that was it. I feel cheated. We’ve had plenty of snow, but then global warming predictions for this area include more precipitation of all kinds.

Following up on another old commentary, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong in September when I wrote, “As far as I can see, the only successful facebook campaign resulted in Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live. I CAN attest that attempts at facebook political organizing have and do waste countless hours that should have been dedicated to real political organizing.”

Shut up, Mark. I still think facebook, as most Americans use it, is a waste of time, but clearly on-line social networks have more than earned their keep in recent weeks by aiding democratic and peaceful rebellion in the Middle East.

I’m still thrilled when I look at the news, seeing what’s happening in Arab nations and Iran, yet I fret for the safety of the brave men and women daring their lives for the sake of their nations’ and their children’s future. It’s great theater from our safe remove, it’s another thing entirely if you don’t know whether you’ll get Tunis or Tehran, Tahrir Square or Tiananmen Square. The impulse, I’m sure is to avoid another generation without hope; the feeling that if you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.

Which leads to the final vegetable at the bottom of this bowl of gumbo: oil. I haven’t written about peak oil lately, because the global recession has driven down demand in recent years, but as my erstwhile colleague Jeremy Leggett points out, peak oil is not a “theory.” It will happen, the only dispute is when. When it does, I hope we have humane democracies in place everywhere, because it won’t be pretty.

In what must be some unholy harmonic convergence of Middle East politics, peak oil and WikiLeaks, the UK Guardian published cables from the American embassy in Saudi Arabia from 2007, privately warning that the Saudis were overstating their oil reserves and that given a growth in demand (bear in mind, this is before the financial meltdown), real trouble could hit the oil markets as early as 2012.

On the other hand, that’s when the Mayan calendar runs out, so why worry?

© Mark Floegel, 2011

This being the gulf, implications from the other recent disaster – Hurricane Katrina – were never far away. A young man from St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana with the St. Bernard accent (it sounds more like Brooklyn or Baltimore than Louisiana) said, “I was only 20 when Katrina hit. Sure, I lost things, but I’m at an age when I don’t have much to lose. Still, it breaks your life in two. There was before Katrina and after Katrina… and now this.”

“And now this” is the spoiled coastline, the wounded fisheries, the environment that will never be the same. Rick Steiner, the marine conservationist who delivered the keynote address at the conference said, “The Gulf of Mexico will never be the same. That’s not to say it won’t recover, in some ways. That’s not to say it won’t thrive again, somehow. But the Gulf of Mexico will never return to the state it was before the spill.”

He should know. Professor Steiner lived on the shore of Prince William Sound in Alaska when the Exxon Valdez ran afoul (to put it mildly) of Bligh Reef in 1989. He’s been studying the effects on the sound ever since.

Maybe one can read into Prof. Steiner’s words that everything will soon be all right. Not the same, but all right enough that the fishermen can go back to work and the tourists can come back and not work. But of the 30 most affected species in Prince William Sound, 20 have not yet recovered from the Exxon spill, even 21 years later. Many never will. The last of their kind are living out “functional extinction.” Members of their populations are still living, but their numbers are so reduced that the population as a whole is doomed to die out soon. Now there are species in the Gulf that are functionally extinct. We’re just not sure which ones, yet. Those lives are not spilt in two, only ended.

The White House wants you to think it’s all OK. It canceled the deepwater drilling moratorium Tuesday, saying it’s now safe to go back and drill, baby, drill. This decision has nothing to do with the environmental health of the Gulf and everything to do with politics. It’s worth noting that the decision comes a week after the Graham-Reilly Oil Spill Commission blasted the White House for forcing overly optimistic spill scenarios on government scientists last spring. More significantly, it comes three weeks to the day before voters go to the polls for the mid-term elections and Barack Obama is eager to kiss the feet of tea-party right-wingers. Feet that will kick him in the teeth anyhow.

Two stories this week, one in the New Yorker, the other in the Washington Post, make clear just what a political football oil drilling, global warming and environmental issues in general are in Washington, if there had ever been any doubts.

All this opening of the outer continental shelf was supposed to be part of a “grand bargain” in which the White House and the Democrats give on oil drilling, loan guarantees for new nuclear plants and EPA regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. In return, the Republicans were to give on carbon caps and funding for renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

What happened? For some reason that begs understanding, the BP oil disaster, made passage of a “clean energy” bill an impossibility in Washington. It was as if a terrorist attack made it impossible to appropriate more funding for police. The deal fell apart, but because the White House had surrendered its negotiating points in advance, the Republicans and corporations got everything they wanted, the White House and the Democrats got nothing. Yay! We’re moving faster than ever toward frying our civilization off the face of the globe while proven solutions will remain unused. Smooth move, Barry.

It might all be just another case of Democratic incompetence, but the wager in this game that is not a game is our collective future. Barack Ozymandias.

It’s not just lives that can be broken in two by the bungling of so-called leaders. Presidencies can be broken in two. So can society. So can the climate.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day – is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change
expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” (The entire article is worth reading, or re-reading.)

Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms – the bands in which given temperatures dominate – are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article – isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.

The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.

(I’m typing this at 6:30 a.m. It’s 82 degrees in northwest Vermont, the only time of day when I can be in my office without dissolving into a pool of sweat. It was 99 at 10 p.m. last night. It’s been above 90 for the last five days in this, the land of no air conditioning.)

None of this is inevitable. We have the technology in hand to substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels and their creation of greenhouse gas. We had those technologies four years ago when Jim Hansen wrote his article. We have not mobilized the political will to use them.

We need to tax carbon. Now. What’s happening so graphically in the Gulf of Mexico is exactly what we’re doing to our atmosphere each and every day, except it doesn’t look the same. The consequences, however, will be worse.

In his article, Dr. Hansen writes about Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina discovering, in the 1970s, the damage done to the Earth’s ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon chemicals (CFCs) and how the global community reacted, via the Montreal Protocol, to phase out CFCs and reduce the damage and eventually, the threat posed by these chemicals. He calls for a similar effort on fossil fuels.

There are several problems here. Although the CFC industry actively lobbied for support from government, we did not live in a CFC economy. We do live in a fossil fuel economy. Oil and coal run the world, any doubts about that should have been laid to rest by the last two presidential administrations taking their marching orders from that industry – one willingly, one with embarrassment.

Second, the fossil fuel industry learned from the ozone crisis. It did not learn how to be a good global citizen and save humankind from the worst effects of our excesses. It learned how to undermine scientists and environmental organizations. It learned how to protect its short-term profits and executive compensation, even at the cost of our civilization. We see that playing out in Congress today as the “representatives” of those most damaged by the latest oil atrocity scream loudest for renewed deep water oil drilling.

This year marks the fourth Hansen Day – there are only six left. Hansen Day should be recognized as a day to take stock of where we have come since July 2006 (the wrong way, really) and think about how far we’ll have to go to avoid the hazards Dr. Hansen outlined in his article.

Maybe the global recession has bought us some time, maybe not. Certainly not enough for us to make up for four years of doing the wrong thing. Since Dr. Hansen’s article was published, China has become a world leader in renewable energy technology, but it has also become the world’s number one greenhouse gas emitter. Not good news at the end of the day – or century.

How many more Hansen Days with pass with no action taken? How many can we afford? As he wrote, we have ten years, not to decide, but to fundamentally alter our trajectory.

Hansen Day is not for celebrating, but it should be noted.

© Mark Floegel, 2010