In November, the hope of global controls on carbon dioxide production essentially collapsed at an international conference in the Hague, when the United States refused to make even modest concessions on its use of fossil fuels, and the rest of the world finally walked away from the table in disgust. But in the case of global warming, those kind of answers don't exactly do the trick, at least in the timeframe we're discussing. At this latitude, climate change will creep up on us. Severe storms have already grown more frequent and more damaging. The seasons are less steady in their progression.
Some agriculture is less reliable.
And most of us live lives so divorced from the natural world that we hardly notice the changes anyway. Turn up the air conditioning. Yesterday, in fact. So maybe we should think of global warming in a different way, as the great moral crisis of our moment, the equivalent in our time of the civil rights movement of the '60s. In the first place, because we've never figured out a more effective way to screw the marginalized and poor of this planet.