It has now become 2013 I am in San Francisco California…the year is two hours old. In 2012 I traveled across Canada looking at the land, nature and people. I try to make some sense of the contrarians view of the impending catastrophe, which will occur as a result of Global Warming. Each day more dire projections of the climate change phenomena arrive. I remember contemplating the twin tower collapse in 2001 as the towers crumbled. At that moment, twelve years ago, I realized that event would change the face of history and human development. I know now it is in motion with each passing day. We know that climate change on a global scale is upon us, this kind of phenomena does not happen in a single lifetime. However, the catastrophic speed at which it is now proceeding has put in motion life altering changes that will massively impact every facet of our lives, the lives of our children and future generations. James Hansen, chief climatologist at NASA, makes reference to this in the title of his recent book “The Storms of My Grandchildren”. Let’s look at how one degree of warming is impacting the planet. Last year’s news headline: Recent Storms Recall Dust Bowl Days as Drought Persists. The Ogallala Aquifer, one of the ancient underground water supply Systems are under stress. The level is dropping and unable to supply water for crops. The Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s are returning to the Midwest—in 2012, 61.8% of the USA was under moderate to severe levels of drought. The 2012 Corn crop was a disaster and we are not sufficiently buffered with stored food supplies to withstand continued crop failure. The conditions for Global starvation are here with a burgeoning global population. The global population now is twice that which we had to feed during the 1930s. We have over exploited the topsoil using chemical fertilizers, which do two things: Chemical fertilizers destroy the humus causing topsoil to blow away in drought and windy conditions, secondly, using chemical fertilizer greatly contributes to greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Topsoil, which took centuries to build, is now being destroyed in decades or less. Weather patterns are changing as a result, contributing to increased melting of the North and South Polar ice caps and the Greenland sheet. This too is causing moisture in the atmosphere. Heat waves are creating evaporation, resulting in increased cloud cover. Deluges are taking place at an increased pace and surpassing one-hundred-year floodplain statistics. Great storms like Katrina and Sandy that some call “Frankenstorm” are now appearing. Insurance companies are unable to keep pace with property loss claims and are refusing to cover flooding. The damage to the environment increases. The Grid systems used to power a country’s electrical distribution are subject to major disruptions with power outages still in effect from Sandy in New York. There is little reason to think this will diminish over the years coming. If anything, the storms will increase in intensity, duration, and frequency. Policy makers fail to act and are deadlocked in power struggles, the political will to reduce the use of fossil fuel and move to an entirely renewable energy culture is largely missing in action. For years the global science community, has been forecasting these events. The fossil fuel lobby has done all it could to obscure the negative effects, Climate change will cause for everyone. The public has been confused for a long Time, essentially in denial, that climate change was occurring as a result of the burning of fossil fuel to power our industrialized civilization. We have created the very conditions for civilization’s destruction. In 2008 General Motors was Manufacturing the Hummer, with about eight gallons of MPG, the height of Irresponsibility. Current Government policies are weak on this issue that it has sparked resignation of several EPA board members. The current developed world’s psychology hides the facts with every social event, however harmless, from the opening of an art gallery to a fashion show or theater event. We retreat from the harsh reality by removing from vision the environmental destruction we are causing which signals the end of organized Society. Only recently has growth in public awareness of climate change risen to 70% of the American people, comprising 6.3% of the Earth’s population is causing 25% of the world’s pollution. This has long been known, but having the “good life” is too seductive and inextricably connected with the consumer society, which fuels the western world’s economic system. In the meantime, global oil exploration goes on non-stop, Shell is trying to extract more fossil fuel (that in the interest of CO2 reduction, should never be burned) from the Arctic Ocean nearly free of ice due to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels! The ultimate irony! The dangerous process of tracking continues unabated despite known risks to ground water. The production of bitumen from the tar sands in Canada, the dirtiest oil on the planet, moves ahead at full speed under the direction of Canada’s Harper Conservatives The Harper government seems hell bent to destroy the planet, as quickly as can be achieved, they are the models of human greed. It is the pursuit of money, rather than the meeting of real human needs that creates all this pollution and toxicity. We must focus on raising humanity to a higher level of understanding about the meaning of self-realization rather than the goal of endless exploitation alone. Are we here to be consumers without a mind? Isn’t the importance of the elevation of humanity’s quest for recognition through love, creativity and living in the most aesthetically satisfying way, in our short lives, the real objective? Paolo Lugari, the inspired creator of Gaviotas Village in Columbia, understood this in the 1970s when he brought together a community of refugees and engineers fleeing the drug trade and poverty to work with the indigenous Indians and campesinos in rural Columbia in the creation of a community based on a new paradigm. These transplanted thinkers and educators established a communal system without the tools of formal education, police, legal codes or judges’ courts and it thrives in harmony on Columbia’s Savanna to this day. There they utilize solar energy and low impact tools of every sort to create an environmentally sound community life. What are we supposed to do in current Western culture, when the civil disobedience of the people, recognizing the failure of its policy makers To save society, see our destruction coming and try to resist? When they try to resist, they are assaulted and crushed by the collusion of the federal secret police and military melded with civilian police into a giant network of control. All this funded by a corrupt banking system designed by a few who are stealing the wealth of the global population under the guise of austerity? All this as a result of those who wish to enslave the global population, utterly subservient to wealth, the 1%, the super rich, who own everything and everyone. These people, along with the power elite of the western world, think they will retire to a place of ease when all Earth’s systems Breakdown. They have no conscience or understanding of the beauty of life, the importance of a Beethoven, Mozart, or Van Gogh. The controlling elite is destroying the major populations on the planet with environmental catastrophe and its handmaiden’s…poverty, disease and starvation. Our major scientific thinkers have told us there is, at the present time, one degree of warming presently causing the current changes in the Climate. One more degree of temperature increase in the pipeline! The question is, how long before the rapidly disintegrating polar ice shelves and glaciers cause great masses of ice to slide into the oceans. Then, we are told, ocean levels will rise by many meters causing an enormous catastrophe and major population dislocation throughout the globe. This threat to humanity’s global survival is greater than nuclear war. What are the chances of this occurring within the next thirty years? And, why Is this significant? We know how much carbon dioxide is being released at the present time, but we can only surmise how much methane is being released as a result of the mixing of the oceans, releasing methyl hydrate, and the melting and rotting tundra of the Northern hemisphere. The forecasts of ocean rise have been continually updated as research teams receive new data. In each new report we see the speed of rising temperatures and melting increase. This is the signal that runaway disintegration of the Northern and Southern Polar ice regions is happening at a quickening pace! Can we stop it? Probably we can’t, because of the resistance to change from the corporate sector and its political allies around the globe. These people cannot grasp the significance of the changes taking place on a vast time frame as a result of the built-in human “hot stove principal”. We are emotionally hard wired to respond to alarming events that are happening now. Events, which happen over an extended time, fall by the wayside. We cannot grasp their relative importance and therefore, we fail to react sufficiently to meet the catastrophic challenges they present. This is particularly so when the general population is preoccupied on a day-to-day basis with immediate problems like paying rent, buying food and taking care of their families in a complex world. The rise of decadent and wasteful values in Western culture is a predictable response to these threats to our survival. People, being generally unfamiliar with science, are unable to adequately grasp the threat to survival being experienced today. Endless advertising manipulates our consumer society while the vast and unconscionable entertainment industry provides mostly meaningless diversion. This was true of the Roman Empire in its final days where we saw the rise of human sacrifice in the orgy of the coliseum while the fringes of the Empire crumbled until Rome collapsed. America’s endless war and continuous intervention in global conflict wastes resources that could be deployed to meet the real threat, climate change, while a distracted population drifts along in a daze. We find ourselves facing a “World On Edge” ready to slip off into chaos and disorder as we feel the increasing impact of runaway climate change. If we fail to act, this will only become worse. In the future, we will only salvage the few isolated communities that can remain viable as the planet heats. As they are doing in Gaviotas Colombia, small pockets of socially adaptable people who live for the survival of their entire community by working collectively in a system based on low tech tools and renewable energy, will offer a viable model for society. Thinking people will take steps to move in this direction. We are rediscovering the past as we move toward the future… “Eternal re-occurrence”!