Overwhelmed: Climate change version

I've been reading Elizabeth Kolbert's superb series on climate change in The New Yorker, and it is a fascinating read. I learned a new word, actually a new way to think about what "age" we live in at present. Traditionally, the present day has been known as the "Halocene," that period of time after the big glaciers of the Ice Age, but Paul Crutzen has coined a new term, the "Anthropocene," which started around 1780 when we started doing some real damage to the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emmisions from our industries. I like the term; it denotes a specific thing, an overwhelming thing, that we humans have done to the Earth that has changed geological processes that we usually measure in thousands, if not millions, of years. The word does something that needs to happen before we can start thinking about how to change the relationship between ourselves and nature--it eliminates the dualistic thinking that puts humans on one side and nature on the other; it puts us in the scientific world along with water cycles, sedimentation, plate tectonics, and species extinction as a scientific framework for classification and study. Now, we can study the differences between the Pliestocene, the Halocene, and now, and one of the definitions will always be the fact that we are a force in the history of the earth, one that creates a new age. That's pretty overwhelming.

The political dialogue has been overwhelming, too. The forces of big oil have tried to paint the climate-change models of reputable climatologists as academic gameplaying, but they are losing--probably because facts, and good science to go with them, and the plethora of pictures of glaciers, icecaps, and snowfields melting in the sun have overcome the rhetoric of the American Petroleum Institute. I feel a tipping point coming on as the propagandists of the Bush administration are outed by the likes of the New York Times, who did a story on a former oil lobbyist who tried to mellow out the facts of government documents that warned about greenhouse gases and global warming. So the discussion, finally, has turned, I think, from one that debated the facts of global warming to what we can do about it.

And as it turns out, we can do quite a lot. Ideas are pouring in from all over; some of them, like solar design and energy conservation, are technologies we have been using for thousands of years and some are brand new, but at least there's some hope now that we've turned the rhetorical corner on the discussion--so much so that big business even believes us now.

Worldchanging blog has ideas.
The Union of Concerned Scientists does, too.