Weather & Climate

Heavy hail outburst and wild wind. Maybe because I'm not feeling well I'm more sensitive to it, but even in our cosy, well insulated cabin, it feels pretty wild. It's attacking people working in the fields! This is of  course completely incomparable to the devastasting 'frankenstorm' this week, yet it has made me stupid me much more empathetic suddenly to the plight of people in Haiti and the eastern US - many people really killed, many neighbourhoods really destroyed, and in the case of Haiti at least, really very little money to re-build yet again and fight off terrible disease. It's not just dramatic footage and articles and conversation - it's real.

Have been reading discussion threads about whether or not the Storm was related to climate change with sadness but rational detachment. This tiny quick hail burst, probably unrelated to climate change, has brought me into more energised feeling about events that probably are related: sadness and grief both about the events themselves, and so many of our attitudes (misguided but conscious selfish deluding about facts, and subconscious, understandable but nevertheless deluded denial of facts/responsibility/power etc) that we all share to different degrees.

I know that climate science is fiendishly complex, and I'm no scientist! The web of variables that resulted in Sandy may well have happened many times before, and of course our planet's temperature has fluctuated throughout its history - both long before fossil fuels were ever burnt. Yet I am clear that:
1) our use of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution very clearly correlates to significantly increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which by trapping the sun's heat, has increased average temperatures
2) that those increased temperatures really can't be jokingly laughed off as helping summer tans - rather are already destroying habitats and species, and impacting an increasing trend of serious weather events which kill and displace huge numbers of our brothers and sisters
3) that as global temperature creeps up, so more ice and permafrost melts - not only are polar bears etc lost, but also the earth's ability to reflect (rather than absorb) yet more solar energy, with the real potential for exponential and runaway temperature rise and apocalyptic consequences
4) that the longer we as a human race continue not to take radical individual / community / national / international to brake the growth and then actually reduce our CO2 emissions, the harder it will be to stop global warming - and associated climactic terrors.

Whether or not Sandy was directly attributable to climate change is in some ways irrelevant; it's yet another terrifying example of our (and other species') vulnerability to the forces of nature, and we'd be incredibly  foolish as selfish beings, and abhorrent as forebears of future generations, not to take action now to do all we can to plan ways (and act on them) to limit our personal and global emissions to reduce

It's gloomy, scary stuff - which I'm not naturally prone to.. But as Al Gore puts it, this 'inconvenient truth' is not only our time's pre-eminent challenge, but a crisis which like all crises contains elements of both danger and opportunity (as the Chinese word). One of the things of course that Trelay is trying to do here is to become more environmentally sustainable - reducing our (fossil fuel) energy needs by increasing insulation, having smaller personal homes and sharing some communal living spaces, sharing transport, using our own wood, eating our own organic meat and veg, etc. It's early days in the community - we'd like to become move much more towards self-sufficiency in food, energy, water, ethical businesses etc to reduce our own emissions as well as increasingly acting as an educational / inspirational model for others even!

The really positive thing is that as well as responding to an urgent absolute requirement, happy byproducts can also be 1) increased financial sustainability (in the long term it costs less to share and to eat/drink/be heated and powered your own; and having courses/retreats etc here could provide an income as well as reducing the need to commute to work!); and 2) social and even spiritual sustainability (living and working together provides engenders 'people care' and 'fair share' as well as 'earth care', in permaculture parlance).

Sorry if this sounds ever so earnest / sanctimonious.. Please give me a slap or something in comments or even real life :)

Painful hail on the path outside