Glacier Melting Quotes

He could melt glaciers with that smile. End wars. Resolve the national debt crisis.

Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty’s glacier.

She smiled, tilted her head, and . . . have you ever seen video of melting glaciers where huge chunks, the size of skyscrapers, break off and crash into the sea? If hearts could do that, then when her hair slid from behind her ear and down her eyes, and the right side of her lip turned up, I heard my heart crack down the middle.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature.

I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is.

Loving him came to her the way snow melts into creeks, then rivers, then oceans. Time has engraved him into her heart the way the rivers have carved canyons and glaciers have cut fjords.

Dreaming, investing, and changing the status quo takes courage; but the courage to melt an ice age does not grow in all cultural climates. Moribund cultures are fertile fields for fearful, fatalistic worldviews. Only astrologers, fortune-tellers, witch doctors, and sorcerers thrive on such glaciers.

this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap.

Science Class Would you invent some irrational explanation for we lost souls that the glaciers aren’t really melting at all, that they are and will remain just as they always have been? Some rationale that claims the whole climate change scenario is really just a satanic plot, concocted by liberal secular humanists to trick the world into thinking that the glaciers have been melting for twice as long as the Bible says the Earth has been around.

The labyrinth was dirty, constricting. The smell of wet and rotted vines littered the air, making his tentative hands twitch and curl with desperation. How he wished to be free again! To feel the glaciers melt into springs and witness the stars turn themselves over and over again under his fingertips.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

Sometimes I could feel the glaciers shifting inside me, and I hoped they were melting, but they were just making themselves comfortable.

I wait for the significance of this to dawn. Moss grows around my feet. Glaciers form and melt.

Yes, perfection. it rests its full weight upon the core of the poor aunt's being, like a corpse sealed inside a glacier-a magnificent glacier made of ice like stainless steel. Only ten thousand years of sunshine could melt such a glacier. But no poor aunt can live for thousand years, of course, and so she will have to live with her perfection, die with her perfection, and be buried with her perfection. Perfection and the aunt beneath the ground. Ten thousand years goes by. Then, perhaps, the glacier melt in darkness and perfection thrust its way out of the grave to reveal it self on the earth's surface. Everything on earth is completely change by then, but if by any chance the ceremony known as "wedding" still exists, the perfection left behind by the poor aunt might be invited to one, there to eat an entire dinner with impeccable table manners and be called upon to deliver heartfelt words of congratulation. But never mind. These events would not take place until the year 11,980.

But it’s not just me, you know. The whole world’s sad,” I said. “It’s like a virus. It’s going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It’s a terrible place to bring a child into,” I said. “This world. It is terrible. Just terrible.” I

Gaia giveth even as she taketh away. The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity's unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits. Now we could grow oysters in New England. Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters. Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine. The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy. But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defense, poachers would be found.

SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story.

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation. Now He is there, now there is less of Him, but sometimes He is not there at all, because God manifests Himself even in the fact that He is not there. People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.

Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo. But warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years. Alongside that timeline, the entire lifespan of human civilization is rendered, effectively, an afterthought; and the much longer span of climate change becomes eternity.

The retreat of the Arctic sea ice, the warming of the oceans, the rapid shrinking of the glaciers, the redistribution of species, the thawing of the permafrost—these are all new phenomena. It is only in the last five or ten years that global warming has finally emerged from the background “noise” of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion. The warming that has been observed so far is probably only about half the amount required to bring the planet back into energy balance. This means that even if carbon dioxide were to remain stable at today’s levels, temperatures would still continue to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change for decades to come.

Global climate change had been impacting the world's oceans since the early 1980s, although most people hadn't noticed the transformation until the mid-2010s, when the reduced surface temperatures, increased ferocity of storms, and seemingly endless blooms of toxic algae had become severe enough to make headline news. As the glaciers melted, they dumped their runoff into the deep currents that warmed much of the world. The sudden freshwater influx lowered the ocean's temperature and overall salinity even as temperatures on land continued to climb. Fish were dying. Whales and other large sea mammals were changing their ancient migration patterns, following the food into waters where they had never been seen before. Sharks were doing the same, sending scientists into tizzies and panicking the public.

To the sky, we are just another natural phenomenon that will leave an insubstantial trace, a fossilized arrangement of bone here, the crater of a long-melted glacier there. If only we were privileged with such distance, perhaps we could see how minor we all are, all our art and thought and illness and meaning reduced to a bit of debris, the detritus on one of a million spheres stupidly looping nothing.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

But it's not just me, you know. The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible.

Being a glacier, I remember birth, The waves of stars falling over the years, White, six-pointed stars descending to form My soul. On my birthday, it always snows. Being the sea, you wait for everything With motherly love. You eat continents Of land, continents of ice. Your blue tongue Catches snow. You taste like salt. You make sand. I’m inland now, grinding the path that ends At your door. I’ll pause for weeks on the shore Before I let go. You will let me in Then begin to melt me down as I float. Months later you’ll ask me, “Do you love me?” I’ll answer you, “Does the sea love the sea?

For most people who do not live near a glacier, the amount of earth’s water held as ice may seem small compared to all the water in lakes and oceans. In fact, roughly 68 percent of the world’s freshwater is locked in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow.46 Due to human-caused climate change, however, ice melting of Antarctica has increased from 40 gigatons per year in the 1980s to 252 gigatons per year over the 2010s. All that ice melting into the ocean has raised global sea levels.47 In some coastal areas, sea level rise is beginning to regularly flood whole towns and low-lying parts of major cities.

Snowmen My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whale bones: heirlooms from sea funerals. His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic, he froze women in his embrace. His wife thawed into stony water, her old age a clear evaporation. This heirloom, his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson, generations of snowmen on my back. They tap every year on my window, their voices hushed to ice. No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman, that I’ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since preindustrial times, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 to 378 parts per million. During the same period, the concentration of methane has more than doubled, from .78 to 1.76 parts per million. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square meter, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, like aerosols, subtracted) for every single square meter of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans, all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy-Bake oven.) The delay that is built into the system is, in a certain sense, fortunate. It enables us, with the help of climate models, to foresee what is coming and therefore to prepare for it. But in another sense it is clearly disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren.

I’ll tell Rangi you’re up and coherent.” He paused by the door. His expression turned hesitant. “Do you think . . . once things settle down, I might have a chance with her?” Kyoshi stared at him in astonishment. Lek held her gaze as long as he could. Then he burst into laughter. “Your face!” he cackled. “You should see your—Oh, that has to be the face you make in your Avatar portrait! Bug-eyed and furious!” And to think they’d shared a moment. “Go soak your head, Lek,” she snapped. “Sure thing, sister. Or else you’ll do it for me?” He waved his hands in mockery of waterbending and made a drowning noise as he left the room. Kyoshi’s cheeks heated in frustration. And then, like a glacier cracking, they slowly melted into a grin. She noticed what he’d called her for the first time.

They [mountains] are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance—no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold, fiercely hot—hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers—down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.

The most visible effect of global warming in Montana, and perhaps anywhere in the world, is in Glacier National Park. While glaciers all over the world are in retreat—on Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and Alps, on the mountains of New Guinea, and around Mt. Everest—the phenomenon has been especially well studied in Montana because its glaciers are so accessible to climatologists and tourists. When the area of Glacier National Park was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800s, it contained over 150 glaciers; now, there are only about 35 left, mostly at just a small fraction of their first-reported size. At present rates of melting, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by the year 2030. Such declines in the mountain snowpack are bad for irrigation systems, whose summer water comes from melting of the snow

To the north of them the great continental glacier had dipped southward, as though straining to encompass the beautiful icy mountains within its overwhelming frozen embrace. They were in the most frigid land on earth, between the glistening mountain tors and the immense northern ice, and it was the depths of winter. The air itself was sucked dry by the moisture-stealing glaciers greedily usurping every drop to increase their bloated, bedrock-crushing mass, building up reserves to withstand the onslaught of summer heat. The battle between glacial cold and melting warmth for control of the Great Mother Earth was almost at a standstill, but the tide was turning; the glacier was gaining. It would make one more advance, and reach its farthest southward point, before it was beaten back to polar lands. But even there, it would only bide its time.

Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what’s left of New Zealand’s glaciers pink. A warmer planet = more water vapor in the atmosphere = even warmer planet = more water vapor = warmer planet still = thawing permafrost = more carbon and methane trapped in that permafrost releasing into the atmosphere = more heat = less permafrost = less polar ice to reflect the sun’s energy, and all this evidence, all these studies are sitting there in the library for anybody to find, but as far as Seymour can tell, he’s the only one looking.

In 2014, we learned that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were even more vulnerable to melting than scientists anticipated—in fact, the West Antarctic sheet had already passed a tipping point of collapse, more than doubling its rate of ice loss in just five years. The same had happened in Greenland, where the ice sheet is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day. The two sheets contain enough ice to raise global sea levels ten to twenty feet—each. In 2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enough to cover New Jersey in three feet of ice. If both glaciers go, scientists expect, ultimately, an additional 16 feet of water. In total, the two Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea level by 200 feet; in many parts of the world, the shoreline would move by many miles. The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic. Better not to think what that means for life at the equator.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

But knowing that moose had returned to Vermont in his lifetime pleased him enormously. It was the idea that things repaired themselves, that if you backed off a little and didn’t ask too much of the world then it would meet you halfway. This was one of the few corners of the planet that had gotten better in the last century, he thought—greener, healthier. The damage that too many sheep had done was wearing off. Or maybe you didn’t even need to think of it as damage. It had been good then, when Vermont was full of farmers, and it was good now, when Vermont was full of trees. Life ebbed and flowed, came and went. Goodness didn’t demand the one-way arrow toward Progress and More. It was, he thought, a blessing to have lived out his life in a place that spun slowly like that yellow leaf, an eddy in the American rapids, a place that was shrinking when most of the country was growing growing ever-growing. A place where—yow, a place where a grouse might fire up at any moment from right under your legs, scaring the wits out of you as it somehow flew off at top speed between the tangle of trunks and branches. A place where moss covered the back of a giant boulder, what the geologists delightfully called an “erratic” dropped in place when the last glaciers melted away. A place where the beech leaves still clung brown to the branches, shaking a little in the too-warm breeze.

A bisse was a fifteenth century man-made irrigation channel in the mountains, re-channelling the melting glacier waters to arid parts of the hillsides where the poor farming communities struggled to feed their cattle. This one had its source in a high mountain stream. Its waters filtered through boggy marshland then tumbled down rocky waterfalls and ran along a gently descending ditch cleaved into the flank of the hillsides overlooking Grondère, before cascading down to its final destination, the remote pastures of the valley below. 

Maybe she'll bring him lunch, like she used to. Surprise him with fresh steak or ribs. Or she'll keep driving to places where there is no development, no dirt to move. She will find a glacier, where her skin can adopt the pale blue of the ice, still hard, refusing to melt for anyone or anything.

Let's imagine... if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to... the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won't challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if... what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone's head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn't be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they've ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn't fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint! In every moment there's the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up!

Daniel and the Pelican So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle. Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out. “Would you like a hand?” I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod. He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real. The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.” “I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered. Oh my goodness. “Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech. “Yes, every now and then.” In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary. As I watched Daniel prepare for his passenger, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew him from somewhere. “Have we ever met before?” I asked. “No I don’t think so,” was his reply, smiling again with warmth that would melt glaciers. I held my breath as the man crept toward the pelican. Their eyes met, and the bird meekly allowed Daniel to drape a towel over his face and place him in the cage. There was no struggle, no flapping wings and not one peep of protest--just calm. “Yes!” I shrieked with excitement when the door was latched. What had seemed a no-win situation was no longer hopeless. The pelican was finally safe. Before they drove away, I thanked my fellow rescuer for his help. “It was my pleasure, Michelle.” And he was gone. Wait a minute. How did he know my name? We didn’t introduce ourselves. I only knew his name because of his shirt. Later when I called the Sanctuary to check on the pelican, I asked if I might speak with Daniel. No one had ever heard of him.

Global crude oil reserves are like a huge, melting glacier that shrinks, floods, and fertilizes side valleys hitherto deserted, out of reach.

The most surreal consequence of melting ice and rising seas is that together they are a kind of time machine, so real that they are altering the length of our days. It works like this: As the glaciers melt and the seas rise, gravity forces more water toward the equator. This changes the shape of the Earth ever so slightly, making it fatter around the middle, which in turns slows the rotation of the planet similarly to the way a ballet dancer slows her spin by spreading out her arms. The slowdown isn’t much, just a few thousandths of a second each year, but like the barely noticeable jump of rising seas every year, it adds up. When dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a day lasted only about twenty-three hours.

So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs. Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death . . . I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree. . . . This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.” For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know. Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room. Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.

Cate felt stifled at Google, purposeless. Yes, there were the perks, but the longer she worked there, the more she sensed that the free yoga workshops and stock options and yogurt bars were only there to distract her from an uncomfortable truth- namely, that her job was to create solutions for problems that didn’t actually exist. Every morning when she read the paper, she learned that another glacier had melted, or that another racist cop had gotten away with murder, and then she would go off to craft arguments for why it was acceptable to harvest housewives’ private data. The realization ate away at her: the world was in crisis, and this is what was doing about it.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth. As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left. Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.

Try this: Fill a glass with water. Measure the water level as carefully as you can and put a mark there; use a piece of tape and a pen or pencil, or maybe a felt-tipped marker. Put the glass of water in a microwave and run it, just for a minute or so. Look very carefully at the mark on the tape. The water level will have gone up—just a little. So it is with the world’s ocean. As it gets warmer—just a little bit warmer—it will get bigger, just a little. Water expands when warmed. The warming of seawater is a major cause of our rising sea levels. Melting glaciers and ice sheets also contribute to the rise. As the ocean expands, it will overrun seaports around the world. Wharves and streets that provide access to the cargo that comes and goes are just a meter or two, a few feet, above the level of the sea surface.

In the 1840s the Nisqually Glacier reached about nine hundred feet past the Nisqually River bridge on the Paradise Road. Today the terminus sits more than a mile upvalley. The Carbon is currently in mild retreat; the ice at the terminus is melting back faster than the motion of the glacier can push it ahead. It has shrunk twenty feet every year since 1986.

It’s been a harder book to write for personal reasons too. What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It’s the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For a Moose is one of his favorites. It’s about a bunch of kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low—through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for “a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose.” The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve never ever seen so many moose!

Crystalised" You've applied the pressure To have me crystallized And you've got the faith That I could bring paradise I'll forgive and forget Before I'm paralyzed Do I have to keep up the pace To keep you satisfied? Things have gotten closer to the sun And I've done things in small doses So don't think that I'm pushing you away When you're the one that I've kept closest You don't move slow In taking steps in my direction The sound resounds echo Does it lessen your affection? No You say I'm foolish For pushing this aside But burn down our home I won't leave alive Glaciers have melted to the sea I wish the tide would take me over I've been down on my knees And you just keep on getting closer Glaciers have melted to the sea (Things have gotten closer to the sun) I wish the tide would take me over (And I've done things in small doses) I've been down onto my knees (So don't think that I'm pushing you away) And you just keep on getting closer (When you're the one that I've kept closest) Go slow Go slow Go slow Go slow Go slow

Cape Canaveral. The ultimate historic site. And it’s underwater. How could they not have noticed what was going on? They went to the Moon, and they couldn’t see that the glaciers were melting?” “I’m sure they did,” said Alex. “But you know how people are. They’re going to resist changing a lifestyle unless the danger is looking them directly in the eye. The glaciers must have seemed like somebody else’s problem.

A lot of these ridges formed during the ice ages,” he explained. “Imagine filling all the existing valleys with ice, then sending lava flows out along the margins of those glaciers. When the flow hits the ice it hardens and creates a dam, so instead of flowing onto the glacier it continues down the ridge. When the ice age ends, the glaciers melt away and you get pretty much what you see now.

The signs have been everywhere.  The changing temperatures.  The rising tides.  The melting glaciers.  Deforestation, pollution, and voracious, unsustainable consumption.  We are killing our home.

Ocean warming dominates that total heating rate, with full ocean depth warming accounting for about 93% (high confidence), and warming of the upper (0 to 700 m) ocean accounting for about 64%. Melting ice (including Arctic sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers) and warming of the continents each account for 3% of the total. Warming of the atmosphere makes up the remaining 1%. The 1971–2010 estimated rate of ocean energy gain is 199 × 10 12 W from a linear fit to data over that time period, equivalent to 0.42 W m–2 heating applied continuously over the Earth’s entire surface, and 0.55 W m–2 for the portion owing to ocean warming applied over the

She tipped her head back to look at him and her expression could have melted the glaciers. I loved that shit. I wanted to see my people happy. I wanted them to thrive. The world was a goddamn mess but as long as we were together, we could handle whatever life threw at us.

edges by continental shorelines, the only place the warmer water has to go is up. This is called thermosteric rise and explains about 30 percent of the change in sea levels that warming has induced. The rest is down to simple melting, as glacier ice turns liquid and runs into the sea.

Less than one percent of the Lakes hailed from runoff or rainfall; she swam through the liquid remains of a glacier that had melted ten thousand years before. It would never refill once human appetites had drained it dry.

Is it so much to want to be seen?" He hesitates, before saying, "I notice you. And you shouldn't be ashamed for wanting the spotlight. It's already yours." As much as I don't want to condone the cliché poetry of his words, I can't help but smile. "You're enough." His voice is sharp when he says it. "Don't ever forget it." I meet his eyes, and to my surprise, I do feel seen. Something within me softens, turning my cheeks warm. Maybe it's my glacier of a heart melting down. I untangle my folded arms, welcoming Damien closer. His fingers stroke my throat, rousing a shaky breath. I lean closer, and his lips part wider. The whole world stills, all thoughts fading as I graze the wetness of his bottom lip.

I check out another kind of book: A Year to Live. It's a Buddhist manual on preparing to die. It's written by a Buddhist chaplain who has worked with many people who know that their death is imminent. He says that most people think that if they found out they had a year to live, they'd go off on a grand adventure. But in reality, people tend to finish what they've started, to try and tie up loose ends. I am coming to terms with my own mortality at the same time as that of the planet. Someday, my father might die. My mother will die. There are people I have loved who I may never see again. And, more uncommonly, all the glaciers may melt.

I had envisioned that this would be a short book, about half of what it has become. Once I opened up the Scriptures, however, it was like the glaciers melted and the dams overflowed, and I had to ride the rivers way downstream. I hope you enjoy and learn from the ride.

As all power, Kamasqa is both an effluence, an etheric light fluid, as well as a dreaming. It is always creative, just as any river that is born of the melting of the glaciers, which starts as a trickle and then becomes the roaring rivers that feed the ocean. Along its way it creates habitat through life, it creates opportunities, lands to be cultivated and the people to be fed from it. I, personally, as with everything that is good medicine, take the stance of the poet when it comes to my relationship with Kamasqa. I try not to define it too much. I try just to understand that it visits me in different expressions, and every one of the expressions allows me to be more creative as a soul because I am anointed and touched by its flowing through me. It never composes me, it never defines me, but it does inspire me. And it does help dream me into being. And that’s how I understand Kamasqa to be. Creative power is a good definition, but there is much more to it.

a frozen pizza cooking in the oven, filling the kitchen with the tantalizing smell of melted cheese and sizzling pepperoni. Six beers cool in the fridge. A map of Glacier National Park is spread on the table, accompanied by sheets of paper filled with scribbled notes and calculations. Sitting around all day is not healthy for any human, but it is certainly not healthy for thru-hikers. After spending the day brainstorming possibilities, sharing ideas, and speaking our desire to finish the hike, Koozie and I decide to get all logistics down on paper. During our most recent conversation, we were both moved to tears expressing how important hiking this trail is and what it means for us. Working for 5 months toward this goal, only to be halted 75 miles from the finish, is an insult to the previous 2,460 miles hiked and every sacrifice made to get to this point. Our determination is not to be doubted, but our finish-vision can easily get us into trouble that would be better to avoid.

He should have walked across that goddamn glacier instead of waiting for it to melt.

Melting icecaps and glaciers will release more than water, according to Scientific American. “As the global climate continues to warm, many questions remain about the periglacial environment. Among them: as water infiltration increases, will permafrost thaw more rapidly? And, if so, what long-frozen organisms might ‘wake up’?”32 Authors Kimberley Miner, Arwyn Edwards, and Charles Miller give ample cause for alarm. “Organisms that co-evolved within now-extinct ecosystems from the Cenozoic to the Pleistocene may also emerge and interact with our modern environment in entirely novel ways,” they reported. Scientists have traced an anthrax outbreak in Siberia to permafrost thaw.

dead ahead were two inviting glaciers which held the promise of ice to be melted into water.

Later on, the glaciers began to melt, and the sea level rose, marking the end of the Ice Age.

She smiled, tilted her head, and . . . have you ever seen video of melting glaciers where huge chunks, the size of skyscrapers, break off and crash into the sea? If hearts can do that, then when her hair slid from behind her ear and down over her eyes, and the right side of her lip turned up, I heard my heart crack down the middle.

THE ECONOMIC barometer at Harvard University had consistently pointed to bad weather. But even its precise readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its own energies. Oil wells were running dry. Black, white, and brown coals were producing less and less power every year. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snowcaps melted by the perennial summer could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine generators would stop. The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled around like a dervish dancing his last delirious dance.

The truth was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the earth, be swallowed, and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.

You rationalize. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt-species die-and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject truth without even hearing it first.

Antarctic clear ice was the oldest ice on the continent, its presence on the tabular berg tracing back to the glacier that calved it into Prydz Bay. Over eons, tons of snowfall had accumulated and had been compressed on the glacier. Air bubbles trapped in the ice were squeezed out, rendering the ice as clear as crystal and as old as half a million years. The blue ice was a phenomenon associated with melting and re-freezing, a process that forced out trapped air, allowing the blue color in the visible light spectrum to pass through while blocking the red color. Circling the tabular berg, we came upon a third color: green. As glaciers cross the Antarctic continent, their roots crush and absorb minerals from the underlying bedrock. When the ice melts, phytoplankton feeds off the minerals and grows. In turn, krill feed on the phytoplankton, and penguins, seals, and whales feed on the krill. The Antarctic food chain would not exist without its glaciers. Hours later, we came

I check out another kind of book: A Year to Live. It's a Buddhist manual on preparing to die. It's written by a Buddhist chaplain who was has worked with many people who know that their death is imminent. He says that most people think that if they found out they had a year to live, they'd go off on a grand adventure. But in reality, people tend to finish what they've started, to try and tie up loose ends. I am coming to terms with my own mortality at the same time as that of the planet. Someday, my father might die. My mother will die. There are people I have loved who I may never see again. And, more uncommonly, all the glaciers may melt.

Anno Domini 2017 In the year 2017, 9 million people died from environmental pollution. Over 20,000 researchers and scientists issued a sharp warning to humanity and explained that we’re heading for a climate and sustainability catastrophe; time is running out. In the year 2017, German researchers determined that 75–80 per cent of insects had disappeared. Not much later came the report that the bird population in France has ‘collapsed’, and that certain bird species have been reduced by up to 70 per cent because they have no insects to eat. In the year 2017, forty-two individuals had more money than half the world’s population combined and 82 per cent of the world’s total increase in wealth went to the richest 1 per cent. Sea ice and glaciers were melting at a record rate. 65 million people were displaced. Hurricanes and torrential rain claimed thousands of victims, drowned cities and smashed whole nations to bits. It was also the year when the emissions curve again turned upwards, at the same time as the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere increased at a velocity which, from a larger geologic perspective, can only be compared to pressing the warp button in a Star Trek movie.

In order to achieve the goals of the Paris Treaty – that global warming should not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius – CO2 emissions must be reduced to zero by 2050. In order to succeed, we will also need to invent technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere in quantities that are equal to all today’s emissions. This is one of the biggest challenges humankind has ever faced. What is being proposed is an unprecedented turnaround in the world’s energy mechanisms. And 2050 is exactly as far into the future as 1990 is in the past. Since 1990, emissions have increased from twenty-two gigatons to thirty-six gigatons. That’s a 60 per cent increase. To get emissions down to zero in thirty years sounds like an unmanageable task. Like constructing a time machine, thwarting gravity or inventing a pill for bringing someone back to life. No one knows whether it’s technically possible to capture thirty gigatons per year. The technology is at an early stage and no one has figured out buildings or infrastructure that could enable us to achieve our goals. Even if we reduce emissions by 50 per cent, our problems will still have increased if we do nothing to remove the carbon dioxide already in the air. If we don’t succeed in that project, the Earth will continue to warm, the glaciers will continue to melt and the sea levels will continue to rise, submerging cities and coastal areas. The market value of a 100 million barrels of oil is about $6 billion, assuming a $60/barrel price for oil. We therefore burn approximately $600 billion a day. If anyone thinks changing our sources of energy will

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don't know 'where' God is--and people sometimes ask such questions--you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn't fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances o the sun's corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowering to the sea, seed germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother's belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation.

Some of Phil Camill’s trees are drunk. Once, the black spruce trees…in northern Manitoba stood as straight and honest as pilgrims. Now an ever-increasing number of them loll about leaning like lager louts. The decline is not in the moral standards of Canadian vegetation, but in the shifting ground beneath their roots. —Gabrielle Walker, “Climate Change 2007: A World Melting from the Top Down” (2007)

The mapping uncovered widespread deep valleys below the ice sheet, many of which lie below sea level. Many valleys also originate far inland and end at the sea. Out of 123 marine-terminating glaciers, “60 drain 88 percent of the ice sheet in area and are grounded below 300m depth at their termini, meaning they are deep enough to interact with subsurface warm Atlantic waters and undergo massive rates of subaqueous melting.”32 Under the right conditions, this could lead to a rapid meltdown that would affect a substantial portion of Greenland.

Rising sea levels, for instance, “aren’t being driven primarily by glaciers melting,” Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy. “It is driven mostly by water-warming—literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up.” Sea levels are rising, Wood says—and have been for roughly twelve thousand years, since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425 feet higher today, but the bulk of that rise occurred in the first thousand years. In the past century, the seas have risen less than eight inches. As to the future: rather than the catastrophic thirty-foot rise some people have predicted over the next century—good-bye, Florida!—Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about one and a half feet by 2100. That’s much less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations. “So it’s a little bit difficult,” he says, “to understand what the purported crisis is about.

This country’s bones and flesh are made of rock and its blood is the ice-cold water of glacier melt.

The parks are our indicator species. Living laboratories where we can see—sometimes in something as simple as a photograph—that trouble is coming. If glaciers continue to melt at their current rate, then one day soon entire Alaskan villages will be underwater. People are already dying from wildfires caused, in part, by the longer, hotter summers brought on by climate change.

Only a handful of family farmers still work the homesteads of No Man’s Land and the Texas Panhandle. To keep agribusiness going, a vast infrastructure of pumps and pipes reaches deep into the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation’s biggest source of underground freshwater, drawing the water down eight times faster than nature can refill it. The aquifer is a sponge, stretching from South Dakota to Texas, which filled up when glaciers melted about 15,000 years ago. It provides about 30 percent of the irrigation water in the United States.

We have all heard the sceptics who warn that serious action to fight climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice. When it comes to cities, they are absolutely wrong. In fact, sustainability and the good life can be by-products of the very same interventions. Alex Boston, the Golder planner who advises dozens of cities on climate and energy, doesn’t even ask civic leaders about their greenhouse gas reduction aspirations when they first start talking. ‘We ask, “What are your core community priorities?”’ says Boston. ‘People don’t talk about climate change. They say they want economic development, livability, mobility, housing affordability, taxes, all stuff that relates to happiness.’ These are just the concerns that have caused us to delay action on climate change. But Boston insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience. THE GREEN SURPRISE Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated by a concern for spotted owls or melting glaciers or soon-to-be-flooded residents of villages on some distant coral atoll. Still, a funny thing happened near the end of his term. After making Bogotá easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more fair, the mayor and his city started winning accolades from environmental organizations. In 2000 Peñalosa and Eric Britton were called to Sweden to accept the Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment, for pulling 850,000 vehicles off the street during the world’s biggest car-free day. Then the TransMilenio bus system was lauded for producing massive reductions in Bogotá’s carbon dioxide emissions.fn1, 3 It was the first transport system to be accredited under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism – meaning that Bogotá could actually sell carbon credits to polluters in rich countries. For its public space transformations under mayors Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus and their successor, Luis Garzón, the city won the Golden Lion prize from the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. For its bicycle routes, its new parks, its Ciclovía, its upside-down roads and that hugely popular car-free day, Bogotá was held up as a shining example of green urbanism. Not one of its programmes was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.