When Ice Falls from the Sky -- The Global Tipping Point

As I write this, it is so cold that the only place I can sit in my house is next to the heater. Freezing ice is falling from the sky. The rain is so heavy that the gutters might colapse. Today, on the other side of the country, golf ball sized hail is canceling the launch of the space station.

But last week, in exactly the same spot, same latitude, same longitude, it was almost tropical here in Marin County, California, north of San Francisco. I was wearing shorts and sitting on the deck in the sunshine. I had to open all the windows to cool the house down. It was so dry we were watering the plants with a hose. On the East Coast, it's been 20 degrees warmer than usual this winter. Twenty degress is quite a bit hotter than the "one degree of planetary warming," the officials quote. http://www.usatoday.com/weather/c...ther_x.htm

It's February.

Something isn't right. I'm scared. The stock market is tanking. The war is escalating. Gas is $3 a gallon. Housing prices are in free fall (when's the last time you saw property below $300,000 in San Francisco?) Today's losses wiped out all of the Dow's gains for the year. Alan Greenspan finally admits we're in recession and meanwhile, everything escalates up, up, up ... why was it $10 to see a show three years ago and now $20? Why does a burrito cost $9? Is anyone paying attention to this rampant inflation -- or are we all too busy paying the bills?

Today feels like a tipping point where everything's all happening at once. When everything is wierd, even the weather, there's a sense of nothing being what you expect it to be, an utterly surreal sense of instability.

"What do we want to do to create the things that we'd like to expect? That means we have to be strategically hopeful." says a commentator on NPR radio as I write this.

The politics of hope. I'm usually hopeful. But today, when the ice falls from the sky, coats the deck in a thick pebbly layer, I have this strange sense in my gut that whatever we're hearing from Al Gore, from the scientists and the climatologists -- whatever they're saying, the reality is much, much worse and there's nowhere to hide.

The film and a concurrent announcement by the UN sparked an unprecedented 30,000 Global Warming stories on Google News today--and this one, from India, is the most brutally honest I've found: http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/st...02500.htm

I'm glad an Inconvenient Truth finally got seen, I'm glad this bold film won a much deserved Academy Award. I'm glad people are finally waking up and the Academy is proudly going green. (Nice statement -- but how about wearing something more sustainable than Blood Diamonds with that $10,000 Halston Gown? How about riding a biodiesel powered bus to this festival of conspicuous consumption or at least a Prius?) Though thanks to Global Green USA's Annual Red Carpet/Green Car campaign, some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Charlize Theron, Marcia Gay Harden, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sting, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Robin Williams, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black, arrived at the red carpet at this years' Academy Awards in alternative fuel vehicles rather than gas-guzzling limos.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movi...imos_x.htm

Mr. Gore gave his speech for 16 years before fashionable people paid attention. Is it too little, too late? Is there any time left to turn this gigantic mess around? http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/sc...ap/index.html

Some of us, the ones who call themselves "conscious" (the ones others call "hippie freaks") knew things weren't right for years now. We talked about Global Warming and our friends treated us like nut cases. We recycled and we composted and we walked to the bus stop and we carried our own bags to the food co-op, we carried our own plates and spoons, we used compact flourescent bulbs and non toxic cleaning products, we shopped at Buffalo Exchange and garage sales, we gave money to the Sierra Club, we gathered at the Green Festival, we abandoned fast food and ate vegetarian -- and we were ridiculed for years for our anti-corporate, unmaterialistic (read: "Anti-American") bumperstickers and beliefs.

If someone rich, famous and beautiful carries her own bag to the co-op (does she even do her own shopping?) will that finally get us to change? Does that finally validate the choices of those who have always been living green?

So now that things are getting this extreme, now that it's this dire and ice is falling from the sky, people are finally paying attention, but I still seem to be the only person at Whole Foods carrying my own bag today, even here on the liberal left coast. Most Americans are still not awake enough to see the link between their own excessive consumption and the sorry state of the planet.

Last February it snowed on the beach in Santa Cruz. It froze on the waterfront in Sausalito, sheets of ice hanging from the houseboats. Does anyone else think this is more than a little strange? The weather pendulum back and forth from one extreme to the other like an unmedicated manic depressive -- too hot, too cold. Too dry. Too wet. Too calm. Too windy.

How much more can we take? How much more can the plants and animals take? Oranges this year are all wierd and mushy from the freeze. Last summer, the stone fruits like peaches ripened too fast, and fell off the trees two months early. Anyone in touch with nature, anyone who has ever gardened knows how sensitive the plants are to extremes of weather. They're holding up incredibly well, bravely.

When the weather ping pongs back and forth this way, from one manic depressive extreme to the next, I have to wonder, how much further can it go before the plants and animals bend and crack? We have technology and houses to sheild us from the weather, but what about the plants? Where will they hide when the climate swings from tropic of cancer to the north pole in the span of a week?