Accelerating Global Warming: Act Now.

This last week was Global Warming Blog Action Day, so I think it is appropriate to repost this. All of it still applies and, to be honest, the whole thing is still freaking me out. We are further along the global warming curve than we thought and we probably have LESS than ten years to deal with it. For my son's sake, I really hope we can act fast enough to mitigate this problem.

Martin Frobisher in 1576 was one of the first navagators to try and find a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He was 431 years too early.

This year, global warming has hit the Arctic sea ice harder than ever before, and the Arctic ice has melted to record lows...opening up the Northwest Passage to navagation.

From the Guardian:

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced.

Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.

So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month.

Ummmm...let me just say holy shit!

I have been nudging everyone to get busy and get active because we only have 10 years to deal with global warming, according to the more optimistic climate scientists. Well, the more pessimistic climate scientists think we may already be irreversibly fucked, to use the technical term. For my son's sake I sure hope the 10 year window holds and that we start fucking doing something. But what is increasingly clear is that the consequences of global warming are coming on faster than the most expert scientists have predicted. The current debate among climate scientists is not whether global warming is happening, but whether it is coming fast or REALLY fast and whether we have any time left to deal with it.

Please folks. Don't let history look back at our generation and brand us the biggest fuck ups in human history. The warning signs are all there. It is all in place. Get busy at all levels, personal choices, government action, spending choices...get busy and let's all stop being history's biggest fuckups!

PLEASE, join me in focusing on forests for the rest of this year.

Or join me in pressuring financial agencies to invest in alternative energy, not coal.

Change your energy supplier to an all green supplier. We did a couple of years ago and it costs us about fifty cents a month more...but it greatly reduces our carbon footprint.

Or offset your carbon usage by contributing to building green energy production on Native American land, providing jobs as well as clean energy.

Or at the bare minimum, get compact fluorescent bulbs! That is a bare minimum. AND you even save money.

If you want to do more and save more money, cut back on meat and smoking. That will help too.

If you think we have time to procrastinate, you are wrong. If we act now, most climate scientists (though not all!) think we can mitigate the damage to our standard of living. But if we procrastinate, future generations will hate us for condemning them to a much worse life than we have.