December 31, 2015 11:20 AM UTC

Take a Cup of Kindness for a Habitable Home

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• by: PKolbenschlag

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

The world didn’t end at Y2K. Or in 2012. All signs are that we, not all of us of course but collectively, will be here again next year, looking back at the year.

With the West gripped in a snowy El Niño and riders and skiers rejoicing for a fantastic season opener, on this side of the continent winter is here.

But the blizzards are mild in comparison to some of the weather that has been afflicting the nation. And how mild other parts have been most of the month is likewise newsworthy.

Snow. Cold. Global warming? Easily fooled by word games perhaps, some with a climate ax to grind like to point to the term ‘climate change’ itself as some grand conspiracy.  “The climate always changes, and it always has!”

Get it? Those tricky leftists and their scientists, and their scientific research institutions, scientific associations and national scientific academies (all around the world).

Republican Congressional leaders want American scientists and the entirety of the world leaders alike to know that they are not fooled. And besides Congress doesn’t have to listen to science anyways.

As my own congressman put it:

Is there climate change? I live in the shadow of some of the greatest climate change the world has ever seen. It’s called the Rocky Mountains. When the glaciers went back. – U.S. Representative Scott Tipton

Once again Colorado sits in the middle of the national debate around climate change and our need to act. For one, Colorado stands to be impacted dramatically from climate change. Agriculture, recreation including skiing, white water rafting, hunting and fishing, our water supplies, forests, and much more, all face certain impacts and an uncertain future given what we know and expect will happen from climate change in the Rocky Mountains.

And our politicians are divided on the scope and significance of the problem, as well as on solutions. Senator Bennet supports climate action, including the Clean Power Plan. Colorado’s Republican delegation generally opposes climate action, when they even acknowledge that climate change is real, human-driven, and happening.

Governor Hickenlooper is ready to work with the goals of the Clean Power Plan to innovate and move Colorado forward.

Attorney General Cynthia Coffman is joining fossil fuel and conservative states in suing the Obama administration over it.

It is true that some calcified congressional fixtures might seem immutable. But put the intransigence of the GOP Congressional caucus and some state politicians aside.

Seismic shifts and significant events have marked the year past on the climate front and even stalwart defenders of the status quo are unlikely to stop it now.

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

2015 in Climate Action

Once again this past year will be the warmest year on record. 2015 was marked with notable climatic events and anomalies.

Pope Francis issued an official church encyclical on caring for the planet that focused heavily on climate change, human’s role in it, and our responsibility to care for creation.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama’s direction moved to regulate carbon pollution for the first time under the Clean Power Plan.

ExxonMobil got caught in massive climate lies – as complicity in a cover up among other oil and gas companies appeared to spread.

Weeks after a horrific terror attack — one of many that have erupted across much of the globe — Paris hosted nearly 200 nations in reaching a successful agreement to reduce carbon emissions and leave much of the world’s dirty fossil fuels undeveloped.

2016 is a New Year, time for new energy, and time to Act on Climate.

In many ways, 2015 was the year we came face to face with the climate crisis. And it has not let up in the year’s waning hours. The New York Times reports on the latest wave of extreme weather gripping the nation:

But that natural pattern of variability is not the whole story. This El Niño, one of the strongest on record, comes atop a long-term heating of the planet caused by mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases. A large body of scientific evidence says those emissions are making certain kinds of extremes, such as heavy rainstorms and intense heat waves, more frequent.

Coincidence or not, every kind of trouble that the experts have been warning about for years seems to be occurring at once.

“As scientists, it’s a little humbling that we’ve kind of been saying this for 20 years now, and it’s not until people notice daffodils coming out in December that they start to say, ‘Maybe they’re right,’ ” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University in Britain.

Facing such calamity, weather supercharged by the effects we have had on the hydrological and other of the earth’s cycles, “climate disruption” might be the better term for what we are experiencing. Full on system change.

But however we fashion it, the chips are now on the table. We can dismiss the false leaders that dawdle, the fossil fuel throw backs, the corrupt self-interest that is disincentive to act. We all lose if we don’t.

Climate change is here, due in large part to the massive amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that we have already put into the atmosphere. 

We stand on the cusp of a revolutionary transformation. Or not. In any case, the moment is at hand — the consequences rise and with them signs of effort and action. A new time to approach a familiar challenge. Welcome the New Year.

So as you raise your “cup of kindness” to the year past and ahead, don’t forget to toast our home while you resolve not to toast our home. Make 2016 the year we Act on Climate.