James Lovelock ( the British Scientist who advanced the Gaia hypothesis) says that we should call it Global Heating since "Global Warming" sounds cozy and we're on the brink of hell for so many beings on this earth with the man made changes underway to our climate. His new book
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (Hardcover) lays out the situation in plain language.

Some think he exaggerates, some think he's just doom and gloom but reluctantly I've come to see that he's put the indicators together and applied his scientist's intuition to project himself into a future that won't have room for most of us.

I'm a supporter of immediate research programs to develop nuclear ( both fission and fusion systems), flywheel, alternative energy, and conservation, emission controls and the rest but cynical about the efforts of most politicians as they would direct our energies toward irrelevant actions that "feel good" but have little effect.

Typical of this is the recent California Attny General suit against car companies for making gas guzzlers. No doubt they are complicit in worsening the crises, but since the Federal Government in the thrall of the Republican Neocon cabal has set the rules this action is a waste of resources.

We need to immediately listen to folks like Art Rosenfeld ( Scientist who also saw global warming and took effective action) so that our efforts will be effective. We need to listen to Christian Anampour when she shows how to deal with epidemics in Africa ( CNN Special broadcast this weekend "Where have all the parents gone?").

We'll surely need to conserve species as this thing accelerates as the species that are saved will be the one's that form the basis of the Gaia that nutures whatever civilization remains in 2300 ad.

With globalization and urbanization trends accelerating, the chances of taking some action that will really change the course of things is small and we'll soon be mainly responding to the changes that we've started in motion.

So I see a burst of population growth followed by grim contention for resources as who ecosystems shift from the eden we now enjoy toward massive deserts, swelling oceans and as new disease epidemics prune the population back from historic highs.

While I don't think we'll be able to avoid most of the shifts, there is plenty of opportunity in the short term. We have the technology to live within our carbon budget, we have the ability to understand climate shifts and to model responses to our actions at a crude but useful level.

I'd like to see the efforts to confuse us such as practiced by Exon-Mobile shut down immediately, the Bush administration replaced with some folks with some modium of ethics who would let a bit of truth inform our discussion.

We must see the changes in glaciers, the melting of the polar ice caps and the plight of the folks who depend on the Himalayan snow pack for their rivers, forests and farms as relevant to us all.

God is sending us a wake up call just as Moses brought to humanity so many years ago. The message is clear, our duty is clear, and the opportunity won't last long.

I'm not one of the Apocalypse types out of Revelations who welcomes the disasters, I'm one who realizes that of the millions and billions who will suffer, god will be crying at the destruction of such a beautyful community of beings, at the destruction of so much beauty.

We must heed the call and turn this as around as we can or I fear that humanity will pay for thousands of years for a few years of euphoric development. The first years of using fossile fuels to develop human civilization are understandable and hardly a sin, but once we know for sure what the continued use of this technology will bring, we are morally bound to move to the next step, the next level.

On a long term basis, we could live quite well using sustainable technology and enjoy a high civilization but only if we also care for the billions who simply aspire to meet their basic human needs. If we bring the basic food, the basic health care and the basic knowledge about how to run our society with the same energy balance that the Hopi used, then we can survive.

If we see this as only a chance to run the same game, we'll have a period where the changes will be out of control and way beyond any shift or human control. I'm scared to be an old person going through such times, scared for the plants and animals who must experience this shift.

I'm not sure that the climate will just shift, I'm not sure that the methane release from Clathrates and such won't just cause a shift that is so dramatic that civilization as we know it won't just evaporate.........back to Gaia, a global adjustment that would "deal with" the problem as the world will go on, the question is will human civilization continue in year 3000?

Our society is more connected, but also has fewer nodes that create the parts for the rest. What happens if our clean rooms are contaminated and no more microprocessors are produced? What happens if the few who know the secrets of the latest generation of chip making are gone in an epidemic?

Surely this challenge is big enough to capture the imagination of some of the brightest and the best thinkers. We need to embrace the human treasures like the Dali Lama and listen to how our consciousness can be expanded to meet the challenges, to meet the responsibility that we have as the folks who set the direction for the next 10000 years for humans and the rest of the planet.

Thanks for this morning, thanks for this breath and thanks for living at this time in history.

Thanks.