Vermont’s fall colors may arrive two weeks early this year. Vermont’s strange spring was hot and therefore compressed. All the flowers bloomed at once instead of the usual leisurely parade. By the reckoning of many gardeners, the spring was two weeks ahead. And through the summer, several biological arrivals have been early. So perhaps the leaves will turn color two weeks early this fall and all the leafpeeper tourists will be too late!
Saratoga Apple’s crop will be 40% of normal this year because of the weird Climate Changed weather this spring. A long hot spell in the spring tricked the trees into blossoming ten days to two weeks early. Then came a fairly normal cold patch that froze the forming fruit.
The lilacs bloomed two weeks ahead of the Lilac Festival in Rochester, NY, to organizer’s dismay.
These are just more data points allowing us to ”solve for pattern” that we are already living on an Earth experiencing the Climate Crisis. These are relatively harmless examples compared to Pakistan’s floods and Russia’s fires, but perhaps more persuasive because they are local.
Author Bill McKibben said on Democracy Now recently, “The planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways, from the one we were born onto. The atmosphere holds about five percent more water vapor that it did forty years ago. That’s an incredible change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA said yesterday that we’ve just come through the warmest January, February, March on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever scene.”
The “debate” about “Is Climate Change happening?” should be over. McKibben’s new book Eaarth gives dozens of examples of how our world is already experiencing a Climate Catastrophe. He says that we live on an Earth so changed we might as well call it a new name, like Eaarth. But the debate isn’t over because it’s not a debate. “The Debate” is a well-documented public relations stalling tactic by fossil fuel companies to confuse the public while grubbing every last fossil fuel dollar. Wall Street will be under water before Exxon Mobil stops funding “The Debate.” Mother Jones magazine reports that Exxon Mobil spent 55 million dollars to fund think tanks to contradict mainstream science. The Debate Stalling Tactic has worked because the sky looks so big, the science is complicated, and consequences seem far off.
I guess it’s Human Nature “to need to see it to believe it.” Seeing this out-of-phase spring unfolding was my wake-up call. Now I’m sure that the Climate Crisis is actually happening and I’m a little freaked out because that means humanity is in a very dire situation indeed.
Skies are air oceans, limited, able to be polluted, changeable in their make-up. Carbon may invisibly disappear out of our tailpipes but it doesn’t drop out of the atmospheric mash-up for a thousand years! Carbon in the atmosphere takes a long time to be sequestered, or gathered back by plants. Carbon is more like a cathedral than a fart. Every flippant car trip causes pollution that will be in the atmosphere for 1000 years. As in, “Oh my god, do you really have to drive to return that movie?”
So we need to leave the coal in the hole and leave the oil in the ground. We need to stop burning stuff. We need to make burning oil and coal ILLEGAL! We need electric cars powered by an electrical grid that’s charged by solar and wind. We would already have these technologies if those selfish oil companies hadn’t been blocking and stalling and ‘debating’ for 40 years.
The BP Gulf Coast Oil Catastrophe was a national wake up call (though we seem to have hit the snooze button. Again.) We need to get off the oil. We should start the process by banning offshore drilling. Oil companies are sociopathic non-human entities that don’t care who lives or dies. The oil companies are forcing humanity onto a Trail of Tears towards runaway climate change and Planet Death. We must stop them, stop burning oil, and protect the ecosystem stability that allows us to grow apples.
On 10/10/10, (10 October 2010), there is a Global Work Party for the Climate Crisis being organized by 350.org. Join your community members in responding to the Climate Crisis and then we’ll tell our politicians, “hey, we’re getting to work on the problem, how about you?” And who knows, maybe working together will help you transition your town into a community that’s more resilient and pleasant to live in. Check out the Transition Town movement to see how some communities are trying to prepare for post-oil.
