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Olympia FOR Confronts the Climate Crisis

By Boutai Hargrove

Concerned about the lack of public awareness, and the absence of concerted efforts to slow or halt climate change, members of the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation have started a new climate action group, Confronting The Climate Crisis. The group meets every second and fourth Tuesday at the Olympia Center. They are working on a wide range of climate issues, including the coal train environmental impact comments and hearings, 350.org's divestment campaign, and maintaining constant pressure on our elected representatives. The group will also organize creative non-violent demonstrations demanding an immediate massive economic push - comparable to the mobilization in World War II - to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. They are urging everyone concerned about the climate crisis to join them.

In 2012, the climate crisis began to affect the American public in ways that could not be ignored. The United States had the hottest July on record - from June to August, nearly 10,000 daily high temperature records were broken. More than 2/3 of the country experienced drought throughout the summer, much of it severe to extreme, causing a failure of the corn crop and a sharp rise in food prices. From January to August, more acreage was burned by wildfires than in any other recorded year.

In October, a giant hurricane devastated New Jersey and swamped parts of Manhattan. As shown on NASA's Aqua satellite, Hurricane Sandy covered 1.8 million square miles, from the Mid-Atlantic to the Ohio Valley, into Canada and New England. Fueled by waters that are warming due to anthropogenic climate change, Sandy was not only huge, it packed more energy than Hurricane Katrina. The megastorm was so unprecedented that it shocked some politicians into breaking the climate silence. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admitted that there has been a series of extreme weather incidents, and said "Anyone who says there's not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think, is denying reality."

But 2012 was only a harbinger of what is to come if we continue to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 2007, Jim Hansen, the world's leading climatologist, warned that a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was, at most, 350 parts per million. We are already above the safe zone at our current 392ppm and if that figure continues to increase each year, we run the risk of reaching irreversible tipping points, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and major methane releases from permafrost melt.

One ominous sign is the rapidity of the arctic sea ice melt. Sea ice in the arctic receded a dramatic 18% this year, reaching an all time low. "We are now in uncharted territory," said National Snow and Ice Date Center director Mark Serrreze. "While we've long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur." As Bill McKibben puts it, " A catastrophe is unfolding, right in front of us, in slow motion."

For more information go to http://www.olympiafor.org

Boutai Hargrove is a retired lawyer and a member of the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation. Her quote sources include www.thinkprogress.org, Science Daily, the Washington Post, and The Guardian.


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Updated 2015/01/07 21:14:22