Its not the blister of summer heat nor the frigid crack of winter that snares my keenest interests. Rather it is the twilight of the seasons that I find most compelling, especially the waning summer months and the eerie beauty of the autumn. And while I revel in the cool nights and toasty days, my affection also extends to the Maritime bluster and storms that churn the ocean waters and strip the browning leaves from the trees in prelude to the winter snows.

As I ruminate about the changing seasons, I can’t help but wonder whether it was always thus. Was the autumn of my childhood and youth as protracted as it is today and did it linger into the days of September and October the way it seems to me today? It is the curse of, if not a faulty memory, then of a memory subject to influence of time and wistful wishes.

It seems to me when I was young time never flowed in the torrent I experience now. Today the days are as short as thunderclaps and I wonder how it was possible that a summer day could hold all the wonders it did when I was young. I know the statistics tell me of the changes to the climate and that seasons are indeed becoming longer and are measurably so, but I suspect the changes are too subtle for my ken, making me rely statistics and the studies of others.

As I look over the science of climate change, a science no different from the science of my cardiologist or my auto mechanics, I wonder why it is such a hard sell and why we as a species do no believe we have to mend our ways to avert a catastrophe, when we have so much information on it. I know that in terms of even a long human lifetime and given the volatility of memory, an analysis of paleoclimate and climate change is not in the cards for any of us from a personal perspective, but surely we must be consistent and trust the science that has allowed us to create the mess we are in and believe its results.

It orbits a golden stable main sequence star, not too hot or energetic, yet amazingly long lived, long enough for life on the Earth to develop into an incredible interwoven tapestry the some call Gaia, far enough away from the centre of our galaxy to escape the searing gamma and x-rays emitted by a giant black hole and the detonating supernovae of the hyper energetic core.

Its a perfect planet and has been in the life zone for an incredible four billion years. The list of “perfects” associated with our planet is astounding. We rotate neither too slowly nor too quickly. This the keeps the planet toasty, but not too hot, cool but not frigid, so that water can exist as a solid, liquid and gas. It is this water that gives us weather, again perfect for life. If the rotation were much faster, the weather would dominated by storms that would dwarf a category five typhoon and the ecosystem would be ravaged and lashed by wind, waves and rain without end. Giant, never ending storms would pound and scour the environment and relegate whatever life that could cling to this planet to simple organisms.  And if the orbit was slower the sun side would cook the oceans to boiling and the far side would freeze carbon dioxide solid and weather as we know it would be impossible, as would life.

Then there is the issue of our moon. A freak collision about 500-million years after the Earth’s birth created the moon and absorbed a huge amount of our angular, slowed down the torrid rotation to what it is today.

And our home planet is just the right size. Any bigger and the atmosphere would be dense and choking and the greenhouse effect would cook everything. A little smaller and the gases of the atmosphere would all seep away into outer space.

We have a tilt that gives us seasons so that all part of the planet receive warmth and no part of the Earth is perpetually locked in dark.

Out past the orbit of Mars we have the super gas giant, Jupiter, that acts as a planetary vacuum cleaner, hoovering up almost all the solar system’s debris that would otherwise fall in towards the sun and inevitably strike the Earth with catastrophic consequences.

Our position in the fringe arms of the Milky Way with the celestial dust that obscures the brilliant, yet deadly galactic core, ensures that very little cosmic radiation ever reaches the surface of our planet.

What a perfect place. What a marvel of circumstances, that if changed even in the slightest, would have dire and tragic consequences for life on our Gaia.

Now imagine a time in the distant future, not tomorrow, but a million tomorrows from now, when finally, some other gifted species from a planet every bit as unique and precious as our own has crafted its own society and created a technology that has allowed them to listen to the incredible majesty of the universe, parsing all the electromagnetic spectra into their constituent parts and in the process coming across this amazing signal, from a pale blue planet orbiting a small, non-descript yellow, main sequence star on the edges of the Milky Way.

At first the noise and brilliance of the star has them baffled. Is it some great cosmic explosion emitting all this long wave radiation? It can’t be coming from the small yellow star, its spectral signature is normal other than the incredible surge in the long wave regions. Is there a black hole lurking closer by or collision of some sort or is it something even more fantastic? Now where else is this amazing phenomenon seen. And it is bright. In the long wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, where TV and Radio waves exist, this source is brighter than the entire Milky Way Galaxy. To have a natural, tradition source from let’s say a star, the energy output would have to be enormous, almost beyond comprehension. Year after year they watch and try to understand what it is they are seeing. And year after year the mystery deepens.

Slowly their technology marches on and then a threshold is reached. The advent of quantum computers and nano technology unleashes a torrent of information and they begin to understand the truth of what they have for years been watching and wondering about. Theory after theory has been raised and subsequently fallen under the brute force power of scientific method. But now they have one which fits.

It is not the star sending out this spectrum. It comes from a source just outside the star. This star is host to a handful of planets that orbit it. At first they see only the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn, but their technology leaps ahead and brings the rest of what we call the solar system into view. And there is their source.

What they are listening to is another civilization. They are not alone! Racing at trillions of calculations per second their quantum computers begin to uncover patterns, patterns that make pictures and sound, that have travelled for more than ten thousand years to reach their massive, yet unbelievably sensitive instruments. And what will they find, these interstellar travelers, who have survived the thousands upon thousands of years and light years? That is the question indeed. What will they find?

It orbits a golden stable main sequence star, not too hot or energetic, yet amazingly long lived, long enough for life on the Earth to develop into an incredible interwoven tapestry the some call Gaia, far enough away from the centre of our galaxy to escape the searing gamma and x-rays emitted by a giant black hole and the detonating supernovae of the hyper energetic core.

Its a perfect planet and has been in the life zone for an incredible 4-billion years. The list of “perfects” associated with our planet is astounding. We rotate neither too slowly nor too quickly. This the keeps the planet toasty, but not too hot, cool but not frigid, so that water can exist as a solid, liquid and gas. It is this water that gives us weather, again perfect for life. If the rotation were much faster, the weather would dominated by storms that would dwarf a category five typhoon and the ecosystem would be ravaged and lashed by wind, waves and rain without end. Giant, never ending storms would pound and scour the environment and relegate whatever life that could cling to this planet to simple organisms.  And if the orbit was slower the sun side would cook the oceans to boiling and the far side would freeze carbon dioxide solid and weather as we know it would be impossible, as would life.

Then there is the issue of our moon. A freak collision about 500 million years after the Earth’s birth created the moon and absorbed a huge amount of our angular, slowed down the torrid rotation to what it is today.

And our home planet is just the right size. Any bigger and the atmosphere would be dense and choking and the greenhouse effect would cook everything. A little smaller and the gases of the atmosphere would all seep away into outer space.

We have a tilt that gives us seasons so that all part of the planet receive warmth and no part of the Earth is perpetually locked in dark.

Out past the orbit of Mars we have the super gas giant, Jupiter, that acts as a planetary vacuum cleaner, hoovering up almost all the solar system’s debris that would otherwise fall in towards the sun and inevitably strike the Earth with catastrophic consequences.

Our position in the fringe arms of the Milky Way with the celestial dust that obscures the brilliant, yet deadly galactic core, ensures that very little cosmic radiation ever reaches the surface of our planet.

What a perfect place. What a marvel of circumstances, that if changed even in the slightest, would have dire and tragic consequences for life on our Gaia.

In just a bit more than a month we are going to the polls for federal and a municipal elections. And with the Nova Scotia provincial government at minority status it could be three in a hurry.

What better time to begin to process of forcing all three levels of government to take the environment seriously. Because the truth of the matter is that none of them get it where the climate is concerned and until forced won’t even consider the issue. In spite of the fact that it is now 99% certain that people and their industrial output into the atmosphere is shifting the climate at an alarming rate that is even worse than the IPCC has forecast. And considering it’s report is only a year old, that is a huge inditement of the folly of the current governments. All three levels of government are in the politics as usual stage and consider the economy, the budget, tax cuts and health care to the issues. Well folks, its time to knock some governmental heads and begin to get our priorities back on track. There will be no economy, tax cuts et al if we don’t do something soon to change the way we do things!

The first thing we have to do is stop the politics of the environment and get the Greens into the debates. The claptrap and positioning of the Conservatives and the NDP to exclude Elizabeth May from the debates should meet with a resounding call in and email campaign to all the participating media from us. If the Greens are not included its not a debate and we are tuning you out. Neither the media or the politicians care what is right or whether it is right for us. It is all about them and their chances of pulling the wool over our eyes so that we don’t get the true picture. If we let them do that then we only have ourselves to blame.

The solution is to immediately tax carbon dioxide output. We must shut it down. Then that money has to go right back into the development of a numerous alternatives to fossil fuels from reducing to sequestering to designing of new systems, ways of thought, actions and planning. The environmental problem is too serious to be left to the politicos and the posturing that stalls action and literally sucks the life out of us all.

Choose your government wisely folks. This may be our last, last chance to put in effect a solution that will rescue our planet for our children and our children’s children. The economy, health care and our society’s infrastructure are all dependent on how we vote, the governments we put in power and empower. Put back what we have had in the past couple of years and get set for more studies, obfuscation, confusion and outright lies.

Already the Arctic has seen changes that stagger the imagination. Temperatures, sea levels, CO2 levels and political rhetoric are all threatening to push us past the tipping point and once that happens, if it hasn’t already, we are going to rue the day we put our blinders on and whistled past the graveyard.

I watch the projected path of the soon to be Hurricane Gus and wonder whether we don’t deserve every little bit that mother nature has to dish out because of the protracted folly of our continued dance with fossil fuels.

The Arctic again has melted to record levels, massive methane outgassing has now been detected as a result of the melting of the permafrost, polar bears are sited swimming for their lives one hundred kilometres from shore, the warmest Maritime coastal waters ever pop up around Canadian waters and the Caribbean is a super heated caldron with water temperatures in the mid thirties Celsius. And still we dance the dance of the oblivious, reveling blithely on, talking of election this and election that, as though we could separate ourselves from the gaseous effluent that is seeping and creeping into everything around us.

Like the froggy of nursery lore we are, swimming in seas of ever warming water not noticing, that slowly but surely, we are cooking ourselves to death. All around we have the evidence, concrete and immutable. Our paleo-climate specialists who unearth the evidence of distant yesteryears find that climate changes happen catastrophically and cataclysmically in a matter of years and not decades and centuries, like switches thrown. Time after time it has happened and recorded in the long forgotten past. And still we ignore and marginalize the evidence. For some reason we think this is different.

And while we dither, behind Gus, Hanna is growing and feeding, waiting to churn into the eastern US. In behind Hanna are the brewing, the nascent Ike, Josephine and Kyle, waiting their turn to bite into the warming continent.

We talk a good talk. Tax the emitters, cap the polluters, debate one scheme after another, but not right now, by 2020 or 2030 perhaps. Make the fight to reduce CO2 an economic one and forget the fact that we still, on all levels, are doing nothing to reduce the poison, the gaseous stew of turbulent effluent that cooks our ecosystem. Set dates far off in the future, confuse the issue with irrelevant issues, and bluster and obfuscate. Yet still we cook, storm after storm.

What will it take? Who will say enough?

Cars are not only expensive to run and a burden on the climate through their CO2 emissions, they also take a huge toll, in their manufacture (mining, refining and transport of raw materials) and they destroy the fabric of our urban lives through roads, parking lots, high speed expressways and suburbanization of our living environment with attendant toll on living space and impacts on our fellow creatures in the form of roadkill and reduced habitat. In short there is very little I can find that is redeeming in the car. We have been sold a bill of goods, that the car represents a “free” lifestyle and that nature and the car are like a hand and glove. And we have bought it lock, stock and four barrel carbs.

So when I see the foofra around whether we should license the electric car as a road worthy substitute for the gas and diesel monsters we have degrading just about everything in our lives and the lives of our fellow creatures, I feel like, well, “here we go again”. Folks, just about the only thing I can say about the electric car in comparison to the fossil fuel guzzlers is that it is slightly less destructive, I think. And I am not quite sure that they are better when all the factors are taken into account. We still have to get the raw materials out of the ground, refine it, ship it, manufacture it and then drive it. But now we have rare, toxic materials in the batteries that need to be refined, cradle to grave, so that we don’t wallop the environment again. But that aside. We still churn up the countryside so that we can splatter bugs on the windshield, continue the reduction of our cities to motor clogged parking lots and sell our collective souls to the transportation demons.

And we name it things like the “Zenn” car like we have achieved some higher morality if we drive the stupid thing. Come on! Do the math. This is a business with its own ethic and the ethic is to make you buy the product over and over and over again to keep the economic engines churning. There is nothing zen like in the product at all and the only thing you will “enlighten” is your wallet!

So, before we debate the lessor of two evils into the next life with yet another reincarnation of the same monster, look at the big, ugly picture. Too many cars, too much consumption. GM or Zenn? Not a choice at all!

Geologic exploitation was always difficult enough as it was and required huge resources  in the best of times and places. But in the Arctic, because of the cold, ice and wind it was almost unthinkable. Trying to find gold, diamonds or other minerals while sitting on a shelf of ice, some it three kilometres thick, separating you from your strike was difficult, if not nigh on impossible. Out on the ocean waters, marauding ice bergs, like some ghostly, midnight destuctors could turn any rig into scrap metal with just a shift of the winds. So by and large we stayed away, with notable exception.

But now the tendrils of our industrial greed and might has shifted the climate of the world and the North, more than any other region of the globe, is undergoing massive changes. The ice is melting and we see opportunity and money and exploitation in them thar formerly frozen wastes.

As the planet burns, instead of taking note and trying to undo the damage, we find another place where we can mine, poison, pollute and grab for the sake of a consumer lifestyle that has put us in this pickle in the first place.

There is oil and natural gas under the sea of the North and its another opportunity to continue along, business as usual, fueling our SUVs, a consumer society and increase the CO2 burden another few gigatons and ignore the pleas of all sane people and the thousands of scientists begging us to stop our fossil fuel addiction.

The business papers and newspapers are chock ablock with stories about how we have  new access to oil and gas under what used to be ice, and so much of it, that we can extend our wanton ways another couple of decades, as easily as you please. You see with all that ice melting, we can grow rich! rich! rich!

What in goodness name are we doing??? Have we learned nothing? How on Earth can you mine, drill and use fossil fuels, grow rich on the destruction of a planet and then say out of that same mouth “We care about the planet!”

And what strikes me is how the the public news is twisted and spun, by our much vaunted newspapers, to satisfy the business interests of the world. It appears, according to newspaper coverage, that the fact that the ice is melting at unprecedented rates and will have enormous and profound climate change impacts waiting to drop on us all, that is now no longer a news story. Climate change has had its 15 minutes of fame and now we have switched gears to business interests again.

Now it is all about Arctic sovereignty and oil and resources. Its back to business and while climate change and the melting ice is now a fete a complet, what is quickly forgotten is how vociferously the new organs of the world distorted the melt and any link to climate change in the first place. The nay-sayers of the print media, who had been looking for any scrap of information that would bolster their pro-business and anti-climate change perspective have now so skillfully shifted gears it boggles my imagination. It seems that the Northwest Passage is going to be free of summer ice and within a decade the entire north will suffer the same fate and yet it can be talked and conjectured about with ever admitting to absolutely incorrect information the newspapers put out!.

Its now a business thing and a political thing. Somehow the Arctic will be free of ice for the first time in thousands and thousands of years, but that is no longer a front-page story. What is the front page story, is not the escaping tundra methane, the acidification of the oceans, the threat to the Ocean Conveyor or any of the thousands of other pertinent science stories that might point to media culpability, but rather its about sovereignty and resources. Back to business and with the wave of a word processor the ice is melting, the global carbon dioxide content is still increasing, but business is ready to jump on a new mother lode of unfrozen riches that we can use to further hike the burning of our precious planet. And that is the story! All this without ever, for the tiniest of moments, reflecting on the scads of BS that floated our way through the past dithering decades where journalists were empowered to proffer every cockamamy whack job theory that even hinted at making climate change a misshapen polyglot of an idea.

Wow! No wonder 80 per cent of the populace is jaded with the media, the government and businesses who still refuse to address the catastrophe on our doorstep. We are going to get a front row centre seat to more and stronger storms, anoxic ocean zones, red tides, extinctions and yes the ice is melting. And here we are looking at the newspapers conveniently forgetting their responsibilities to inform us and looking for ways to spin this into business and politics.

Yet again I rail on about the priorities of our culture. Where and when did we make the turn from fact to fame and hyperbole and why, I ask, do we allow the media, the fourth estate, to put this stuff out as news and information? Its as though it is a circus where its the outrageous stunts and unbelievable death defying acts that grab you by the eyeballs.

We’ve got president’s who believe in Armageddon and horoscopes, celebrities who become experts in pharmacology and new whacko religions and pop stars who take up causes and solve the world’s ills and are according to the media, far more credible and newsworthy, than any of the thousands for scientists who painstakingly plod their way through scientific research looking for ALL the facts and upon whose labours and researches we have built what to me is looking less and less like civilization.

If you have a modicum of fame, notoriety or celebrity you have influence because the clowns who run our news service care only about one thing, ratings. And what a slippery slope that one is, as newspapers begin usurp tabloids in their quest to remain viable, TV descending into reality hell and micro fame shows, and the internet….well anything goes there as vested interests and the struggle for impact negates any real progress in truth and information.

So here is what we wind up with. 6000 peer reviewed studies and 4000 scientists who have participated in the largest scientific probe in the history of humankind who still cannot get any meaningful response from government, media or industry to curb what is the direst threat to our existence in 70,000 years. Yet one astronaut whose claim to fame rests on being a just that, a space cadet, echoing Von Danniken and Velikovsky, grabs a flurry of news spots and credibility in a heartbeat. What is wrong with this picture?

Next time my car or computer goes on the fritz I’m gonna find me a shaman to lay hands on the beast and purge the evil demons from its workings. Why waste time with science when we have Intelligent Design, the Earth is flat and UFOs are just abuzzing.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yet again I was blind-sided by our corporate greed and lack of controls on anything that generates profits. Just like the car industry that gave us SUVs, power companies who sang the king coal mantra and big tobacco who denied any connection whatsoever to any ill health from any of their products, so too was the food industry touting its list of lies for the sake of a fast buck.

Trans fats, or hydrogenated oils, a human invention that now permeates pretty much anything that comes from the processed food industry, is the nutritional equivalent of nuclear radiation. No amount is good. Not even the smallest smidgen of the stuff is safe to consume. Originally invented to be used in the margarine industry to replace butter because it would make liquid fats solid, it has found it way into literally everything we eat that is processed. It enhances taste, satisfies our cravings for fatty foods and best of all cheap and incredibly easy to manufacture. Just bubble some hydrogen through a vegetable oil and you get hydrogenated oils and fats or trans fats.

The problem is that trans fats occur in nature in only the tiniest amounts and natural foods are so low in the stuff that they are by and large devoid of trans fats. As a result your body has never developed the capacity to ingest or use trans fats, so it stores them in places that you don’t want. My cardiologist discovered evidence of fat food days clogging up an artery about five years ago that required an angioplasty and stent after I complained of chest pain while exercising. Shortly there after my eating habits underwent a remarkable transformation.

What really burns me is we have known about the ills of trans fats for a decade. And yet in most jurisdictions it is still legal to sell the stuff. Restaurants still cook with it, whether fast food or the more expensive kind. Most processed food, from breads to margarines to cookies to ice cream still have the stuff though it is the food equivalent of plutonium. And California is the only state or province that has in its wisdom banned trans fats.

Heart Disease is a killer and kills more than the testosterone laced drunks that pilot SUVs on our highways. So, why oh why do we still have this stuff in our food? And we feed it to our kids!  It money folks, same old same old. Corporate profits and a slick ad campaign and the money comes rolling it! Who cares if its not good for you!