No need to hide in a corner: There are a few signs of hope when it comes to climate change. (Photo by Zen Sutherland.)

Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

With magazines like Scientific American publishing articles titled “Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible,” and 15,000-plus temperature records set this spring in the U.S., it’s no wonder the CFO of the business I work for said to me recently, “I have this crippling anxiety about climate change … what are our children going to have to deal with?”

At Keystone, in Colorado, ski season is still going on, but a nearby fire meant the lodge was being used as an evacuation center a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Washington Post expressed bafflement about U.S. inaction in the face of obvious climate threats highlighted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

This all leaves most of us in the movement to solve climate change with a borderline-debilitating creeping terror that haunts our daily activities, and inclines many of us to want to rock in the corner holding our knees, eating Chinese food out of the box.

But that’s neither productive nor healthy, and Kung Pao stains carpet.

Instead, we need to find signs of hope. And surprisingly, there are a few.

The first very hopeful development comes from science. One of the glaring problems climate realists understand is that it’s going to be very hard to cut CO2 emissions to the levels required globally by 2050 to keep warming to sub-catastrophic levels of about 2 degrees C. It’s just too hard to restructure the global energy infrastructure in that time frame. But Drew Shindell and colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies suggest in the journal Science that that may not be necessary. They argue that we can target non-CO2 greenhouse gases — in particular black carbon (soot), methane, and ozone — to cut warming in the short term and buy us time to deal with CO2. Shindell, et al. outline a variety of actions that could prevent 0.5 degrees C of warming by 2050. Better yet, these actions all have major health benefits, preventing “0.7 to 4.7 million annual premature deaths from outdoor air pollution and [increasing] annual crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons due to ozone reductions in 2030 and beyond.” This is bipartisan news, because when people are healthy and crops survive, economies do better. You might even want to undertake these measures purely to protect human health and commerce.

The second development is the increasing bipartisan popularity of tax reform that aligns with climate protection. The far right doesn’t like the income tax and loves free markets. And the left wants to solve climate change and hates the fact that externalities aren’t valued by our economics. One way to address both concerns would be to replace part of the payroll tax with a carbon tax. There are several versions of this approach (including James Hansen’s suggestion to dividend the carbon fee back to citizens, which has been endorsed by Republicans for Environmental Protection — or ConservAmerica, as the group is now known), but all of them would be revenue neutral, in that a citizen’s wallet won’t change thickness; they will create market incentives to become more efficient for business and individuals; they will allow businesses to reduce their taxes through efficiency; they will create a free market for the first time by finally accounting for the costs of pollution; and the tax would help solve climate change. A carbon tax is, in a way, more libertarian than leftist; it’s a very conservative idea.

The third sign of hope comes from what I’ll call “stealth policy.” Even though the U.S. government hasn’t been able to pass climate legislation, it has the tools for de facto policy through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, and other mechanisms. Along these lines, President Obama has, with industry cooperation, set strict standards for vehicle efficiency that mean cars in America will get 55 miles per gallon by 2025, a huge increase. Last month, the EPA issued limits on carbon pollution from new power plants, and the agency is legally obligated — by the Clean Air Act and Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency — to regulate existing power-plant carbon dioxide emissions too. Electricity generation is the No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions, so this is big news. Without any new legislation, the U.S. can — and slowly is — reigning in major sources of carbon pollution.

The last sign of hope is really an omen. After a winter that didn’t appear in much of the U.S., this hot March broke some 7,000 heat records.

Climate hawks — activists like Al Gore or Bill McKibben — have always been baffled that Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan floods, and the recurrent Midwest floods haven’t woken people up to global warming, despite science connecting the flooding to warming and expectations that we’ll see more of the same.

But maybe it’s too hard to connect flooding, or storms, to the planet getting hotter. Maybe, to wake us up, what we really need is some heat.

That’s a big claim, but how else do you account for the statement that “the earth hasn’t warmed for well over 10 years now” when it is well known by anyone working on climate that 2010 was the hottest year on record?

Despite the fact that many of the authors of the article are funded by ExxonMobil through the George C. Marshall Institute, and despite the fact that none of them are leading scientists, they, and the editor of the opinion page, simply had to know that that statement was false. They may be unethical, but they are not stupid.

This is new stuff. The claim of “no recent warming” has been made deviously before by taking a snapshot of an upward-sloping zigzag line graph. (If you take a snapshot of an upward zigzag, it can even appear to be going down … ) But rarely before have we seen brazen, unobscured lying in such a prominent location. Usually the lie or misinformation is gussied up just a little bit. It suggests a desperation of sorts, as Joe Romm pointed out in his masterfully complete debunking. Romm also noted that it brings up some questions. Why would anyone — spaceman, oil industry shill, editor, university professor, or simple citizen — tarnish their name by signing onto an obvious untruth? How does that help their cause?

The problem is that willful lies have become the stock in trade of the extreme right. Another example, outside the climate arena, is the notion that if you cut taxes for the wealthy, and cut corporate taxes, the economy booms. Where are the economic or historical studies that say when you cut taxes for the wealthy, it creates jobs or stimulates the economy? Where are the economic or historical studies showing that cutting corporate taxes creates jobs? They don’t exist. And we have a 30-year test period showing that trickle-down economics didn’t work either. So how come people keep claiming it’s true?

Another claim in the article is that “a recent study by William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls … ” Well, let’s ask Nordhaus what he thinks of that. In Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog he stridently disagrees with that statement:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others) … I can only assume they [are] either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

A whole campaign, a whole half of the country, now believes blindly in multiple falsehoods. On climate, at least, some of the people you can blame for this are the spacemen and oil guys who signed the WSJ op-ed. But opportunities for blame abound. Should MIT sit idly by while a professor of theirs, Richard Lindzen, incorrectly says the planet hasn’t warmed in 12 years? Is that a teacher you want on your staff, a guy who’s missing something that basic, and lazy enough not to correct the record?

The most guilty party of all is a fellow named Paul Gigot. He’s the editor of the Wall Street Journal opinion page. And he should be held accountable for knowingly publishing statements both he and his authors understood to be false — in particuar, the lie that the earth has not warmed in the past 12 years. Galileo would have muttered: “But it has.” And because of that, Gigot should resign.

Events of 2011 show that no matter how solid the science, some people will never accept that humans are causing global warming.  So how can we cut the Gordian Knot that is manmade global warming?

by Auden Schendler, reposted from the Atlantic

One version of the myth of King Midas holds that he was not greedy. Instead, he loved his daughter so much that he longed to leave her a stable future. When given the chance, he asked for the golden touch as a way to create an endowment. But when they embraced, she turned to gold as well. In trying to protect his beloved daughter, Midas destroyed her.

Some climate change deniers have the same admirable motive as Midas. The actions required to solve climate, they fear, will preclude us from capturing the wealth that can benefit or save many children today. Even the left argues that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, despite the fact that continued growth probably dooms the planet to runaway warming.  Environmentalists fear that no action on climate condemns us to an even more costly fate that threatens every child, forever.

Finding a fix, then, seems close to impossible. What we learned in 2011 –a  banner year for human understanding of climate change and its impact on our lives — helps explain why.

In October, climate-change skeptic Dr. Richard Muller released the results of a two-year study at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project that was funded in part by the Koch brothers, leading climate deniers. Muller’s report, in his own words, found that “global warming is real.” In fact, Muller found warming to be “on the high end” of what others had found. The results were reported in the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page.

2011 also gave a taste of what climatologists have long predicted: that a warmer world will experience more severe weather events, both droughts and storms. PBS reported on “mind-boggling extreme weather” resulting from warming, what Dr. Jeff Masters, Director of Meteorology at the Weather Underground, Inc. calls “steroids for the atmosphere.” This summer, droughts in the Southwest matched those of the dust bowl and a tornado outbreak blew away the record 1974 season. USA Today reported how natural disasters were straining FEMA’s budget. In the last week of 2011, Vermont fixed the last of the roads destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Irene.

At the same time, still more peer-reviewed science came out showing that the anthropogenic warming signal is unmistakable. Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf’s paper in Environmental Research Letters stripped out the known non-human influences on climate (El Niño, volcanic aerosols and solar variability, among others) and found human-induced warming to be clear and consistent.

Meanwhile, a new paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society argued that society is at substantial risk of exceeding warming of 2°C, the threshold widely seen to be the difference between something to which we could possibly adapt and disaster.

Last, and least noted, has been the inability of climate deniers to produce peer-reviewed science showing that warming is not human caused. Their anecdotal claims are easily debunked: the sun is at a minimum, despite record global temperatures. Cosmic-ray activity hasn’t coincided with modern warming. Volcanoes emit far less CO₂ than humans. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that is exacerbated by CO₂ induced warming. The earth has warmed before, of course, but always with a well understood cause, just like we have today.

One might imagine the economic damage of 2011′s storms would get deniers thinking. Can we continue to rebuild roads and bridges, sump out towns and drench fires, or, might ought we do something about it? And since cutting CO₂ emissions will cool the planet, is that not a good place to start?

Well, no. In 2011, the result of the head-smacking obviousness of the science, as Naomi Klein pointed out in The Nation, is that opposition has become even more strident, in large part because deniers are no fools. Fully dealing with climate change, Klein observed, would require “that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.” The climate message didn’t fail, Klein argued: It simply got through too clearly.

At the same time that the right became more rigid, Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times reported on the radicalization of the environmental movement in response to lack of policy action. She quoted Roger Ballentine, a climate adviser to the Clinton White House:

“The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people are justifiably outraged. What we have now is an antagonized grassroots calling for a radicalized approach.” Such an approach did develop, most notably in the form of 12,000 protesters who surrounded the White House and blocked the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring the most carbon-intensive fuel–tar sands oil–into the US from Canada.

In 2011, scientific certainty didn’t clear up anything at all, it just energized the left and the right, in opposite directions, confirming historian Naomi Oreskes’s notion that climate-change denial has never been about the science, it was always about ideology.

So we start 2012 with an unprecedented understanding of climate science and the consequences of warming, and at the same time seemingly irreconcilable differences on what to do, a Gordian Knot of a problem; complex and intractable, ingeniously self-tightening.

Solutions will require the boldness, innovation, and rule breaking of Alexander the Great, who famously used a sword to cut that knot. But uniquely today, we’ll need the political right and left to hold the blade without killing each other first. Some feel the only path to this future is enough of a climate signal — Manhattan under water — to make action obvious. Others see bipartisan solutions percolating even today: eliminating the payroll tax and replacing it with a carbon fee, for example, or eliminating subsidies for big oil and using that money for clean energy development, meet goals both left and right.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to understand its cause. Who, for example, tied the legendary Gordian Knot, a good metaphor for the puzzle we face today? It turns out it was a man known by some to be kind and fair, but whose vision of affluence led to disaster. He was a king. And his name was Midas.

Auden Schendler is Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book “Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.” This piece was originally published at Atlantic.

I am a parent and a 41-year-old human denizen of planet earth, climate warrior, dormant mountaineer. So like others of my ilk, I spend a lot of time in mid-life/existential crisis. That state of mind is ameliorated to some extent by my charitable giving, often done at this time of year. To that end I’m offering Grist readers my annual philanthropic suggestions. I will preface the suggestions with a short description of the conditions of my life that lead, on any given day, to me enjoying my limited philanthropy so much. An average day in my life, which I imagine is similar to many people’s lives, explains why I find the act of giving palliative if not redemptive.

Last night, my 4-year-old Elias chugged a sippy cup of water before going to sleep. Woke up in a pool of urine at 1:30 A.M., freezing. (Elias did, not me.) My wife Ellen stripped his bed, I took off his PJs. He came into bed with us. I woke around three o’clock with a negative epiphany: “I will never be as fit as I was when I was a high school teacher coaching the telemark team, skiing two days a week and one whole day on weekends. And the reason I will never be that fit is structural: tele is an insane workout, and my knees can’t take it. And second, I wouldn’t have the time anyway.”

So I went to work feeling pretty tired, and was schlumping up the stairs from the finance dept where I was talking about obscure finance aspects of wind farm development and accelerated depreciation, thinking to myself how beaten down I felt and how I would never be as fit as when I was teaching high school, and I opened the door, which bounced off my “postman shoes” as people call them here, and rebounded into my temple. Which hurt like a mother@#$%^&, and I walked into the bathroom to see WTF was going on, and I had a gaping cut. Easily a one- or two-stitcher. So I look in our first aid kits at work which have 1) infection control kits (for performing surgery? Dealing with a bio attack?) And 2) band aids.  So I hop in the car, drive to Carl’s pharmacy, buy some steri strips. Fix my injury in the bathroom after waiting for a contractor from next door to get done taking a dump. And I’m back at it, 10:55 AM. Thinking: “I still got it baby.”

So you can see why helping some desperate causes helps me get through an average day. And here are some good ones, most of which I’m involved with in some way so, like all things human, consider this a compromised and subjective, awkward and self serving enterprise.

First, you should give to Grist. (See, I told you this would be self serving and compromised. Come on in! The water’s warm!) But seriously, daily, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people like me get critical information on key environmental issues quickly and with humor. That’s a blessing but also a driver of change. 

And if you care about good journalism and free press, which is a key to protecting our crumbling democracy against corporate dollars, you should support the newspaper from which Grist came, High Country News. (www.hcn.org.) That’s where Chip Giller, Grist co-founder, (with Lisa Hymas) got his start.

And if you still care about good reporting, you should support Climate Progress, (www.climateprogress.org) a Grist partner and an incredible climate science resource, led by the combative and brilliant Joe Romm who I’ve been friends with for years and who I admire as much for his no-prisoners stance as for the fact that he is a gracious and mature adult: one thing he does as much as anything is praise and recognize the good work of others, when they do good things or win awards. That: recognizing the success of others (even in your field) as your own success, is the mark of maturity, even possibly transcendence.

If you care about climate change, you should support Protect Our Winters (www.protectourwinters.org) which I’m on the board of and which is mobilizing the power, celebrity, and leverage of the $66B winter sports industry on climate action. Their budget is tiny, but their impact is huge, and their constituents are rabid and fit, with the endurance necessary for the fight ahead.

I don’t feel too conflicted about recommending groups that I sit on the board of because I chose to sit on the board FIRST because I think the organizations are great. So another one I’d recommend is Colorado Conservation Voters, if you live in CO, http://www.coloradoconservationvoters.org/, which effectively mobilizes voters to protect democracy and the environment, also on a shoestring. Nationally the LCV does the same thing.

If you want to do more on climate, there are some relatively big NGOs that continue to impress me by how they tap corporate power in creative ways to drive disproportionate change. They are NRDC and CERES (www.nrdc.org and www.ceres.org.) both of which groups often call me out of the blue to say: “Hey, here’s an idea.”

If you care about equity and poverty and effective international aid that uses local resources and talent, then you should give to Partners in Health, where most of my money goes, www.pih.org. If you haven’t read Tracy Kidder’s book about founder Paul Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” you are missing a plain fun read.

If you don’t give much money away, then you should go to http://www.1lifecampaign.org/index.html, which in two minutes outlines Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, and will help you understand why you need to give more money away.

And if all that doesn’t seem like its of much interest to you or you’ve just had a pipe explode in the house that busted the budget, then at least know I’m there with you experiencing similar daily grievances. You don’t have, by any chance, have some Advil I can borrow?

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Photo: Kenn WilsonCome Friday, I’m usually pretty torched after a typical week of being attacked as a hypocrite for working on climate change in the ski industry. So, often, I’ll join our company CFO for a cocktail. Our favorite is a Manhattan, which I mix up with some Gentleman Jack if possible, because I like owner Brown-Forman’s work on climate change. And, in theory, I escape. Or so I thought.

But it turns out that global warming may affect weather patterns crucial to the bourbon aging process, according to a terror-inducing study conducted for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Hey, now. Come on. Things are getting a little personal now.

For years, we’ve been hearing that climate change will lead to increased drought, fire, superstorms, floods, threats to oceans and fisheries, and disruptions to food and water supplies. But that’s just standard apocalypse. Now climate change is messing with cocktail hour, and that’s not cool.

Maybe alcohol will be the final straw that galvanizes people into action. Just this week alone, two articles brought up the booze-climate connection, both written — not surprisingly, given the climate-activist worldview — by friends who have been known to enjoy the occasional highball. On Huffington Post, snowboarder Jeremy Jones talks about his climate nonprofit Protect Our Winters’ new collaboration with Alamos vineyards. (Alamos depends on Andes snowmelt to irrigate their grapes.) And Jenn Orgolini from New Belgium Brewery pointed out in the Coloradoan that drought and flooding threaten the brewery’s (and many Broncos fans’) very lifeblood: hops and barley.

When many of us got into the field of solving climate change years ago, conventional wisdom was that a few industries would be extremely concerned about climate out front. Those included insurance (Swiss Re and other reinsurance giants have had climate divisions for years, correctly anticipating a spike in weather-related disasters), banking, agriculture, and skiing. But now a whole host of other industries are worried, many of which cut to the heart of who we are, of our history and tradition and ritual.

Take tea, for example, a key part of life in many parts of the world. It’s under the gun from climate as well.

Coffee too. A few weeks ago, Jim Hanna at Starbucks talked about climate impacts on coffee and his remarks got covered everywhere, from Newsweek to The Washington Post to Fox News. This surprised Jim a little bit, but of course his comments went viral: To drink coffee is to be a human being. (I’m such a coffee addict that I used to carry a glass press pot into the wilderness for three-week trips when I worked for Outward Bound.)

You can Google almost any business and find concerns about climate change associated with it. No surprise. But we humans are funny. Some things are too big for us to understand, let alone think we can fix (climate, democracy). Some things get our attention because they are small and personal and in our faces. Things like children. And whiskey.

But actually if you read Muller’s piece, you realize he’s debunking something that even most of the deniers now take as fact–the idea that the earth is warming. Most everyone now agrees it’s warming. The question, the deniers say, is the cause of the warming. And that allows them to launch into wrong and debunked talk of volcanoes (wrong, humans emit way more CO2 than volcanoes ) the sun (wrong, our hottest temps have occurred during recent solar minimum) or predicted cooling in the 70s. (Wrong, most studies predicted warming.) Muller’s oped ends saying: we didn’t look into how much of the warming is caused by humans.

But that’s the only question the deniers are asking these days, and it’s brilliant that the Kochs funded a study that showed what everyone, pundits and scientists alike, already agreed on but at the same time pointedly ignores the only issue the right still uses for its destructive politics. Deviously, the act of doing the study ingeniously and subtly questions causality; it even highlights the question. But at the same time, they appear to be conceding something in their great nobility and respect for science. But it’s like giving your typewriter to charity–you’re not being generous, you just didn’t need it anymore.

So now what? At best, the Kochs will fund Muller for two more years to show that, in concurrence with all other peer reviewed science, the bulk of warming is anthropogenic. But they’d likely never do that because they know the answer to that one too, and it’s not an answer their business model can sustain.

In short, by doing a study on whether the earth is warming, and by running Muller’s oped, the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the anti-science community keeps the door open for years of continued “debate,” while appearing to be “science based” and honorable. But they are not honorable, and the continuance of the “debate’ is craven, immoral, corrupt, cynical, unchristian, un-any religion, and wrong.

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

On Oct. 17, Newsweek will release its attention-getting rankings of the top “green” publicly traded global companies.

Last year, the magazine ranked Dell as No. 1. Dell is no slouch on operational greening: The company, along with Hewlett Packard, has led the tech industry in lifecycle stewardship, with a willingness to take back and recycle its old hardware, among many other progressive internal waste reduction measures. Dell also leads in the energy efficiency of its products.

But is Dell really the greenest company in the world? It depends on your criteria. The Newsweek analysis looks at operational issues like emissions of nine key greenhouse gases, water use, solid-waste disposal, and emissions that contribute to acid rain and smog. That’s good and important.

But if you read Climate Progress regularly, you know two things: First, that the scale of the climate problem (the response to which is what defines corporate sustainability today) is so large that voluntary corporate action won’t solve it. Second, you know that because of this, how companies operate is vastly less important than how they try to influence policy, policymakers, and public opinion. If the lobbying power of one company — Koch Industries, for example — can more or less single-handedly stop climate solutions, then what other companies do as climate activists is clearly critical.

The influence of the Koch brothers and other wealthy lobbyists and business owners was put in stark relief by Jane Mayer at the New Yorker last August and then again last week, when she exposed Art Pope’s successful purchasing of the North Carolina legislature. The work of Pope and the Kochs (now magnified by the passage of Citizens United) means corporate advocacy and activism (and the broader issue of money in politics) is the battlefield on which climate will be solved or ignored.

And so, it makes sense for Newsweek, and the roughly dozen or so other corporate rankings like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, to include, and heavily weigh, advocacy or activism in their ranking methodology. I’ve just published a paper, “The Factor Environmental Ratings Miss,” that goes into detail on this topic with Mike Toffel of Harvard Business School, in this month’s Sloan Management Review. (That article is available free, but you need to sign up on the site). The article notes:

News Corporation’s climate change performance was recently rated AAA by one rating organization — yet Rolling Stone magazine named News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch No. 1 in its list of “politicians or execs blocking progress on global warming.”

Toffel, in other research, has shown that companies will respond to negative rankings, and improve their performance.

Another legendary tech company, Apple, which was admittedly late to the operational greening and product stewardship dance, ranked in at 65th in the Newsweek ratings last year. But Apple arguably did more to move the ball on climate change solutions than any other company last year, when it very publicly dropped out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2009 because of that organization’s strident criticism of plans to limit greenhouse gases. (The chamber, by the way, also supports the Keystone XL pipeline, which James Hansen has called “game over” for climate, if allowed by Obama.)

Where might Apple rank if this bold move were included in the rating criteria? And how might the tide of the climate battle change if increasingly visible corporate rankings appropriately valued activism?

Newsweek should take note. These are the forces that are truly driving sustainability.

Photo: Shay Haas

If there’s snow around, and you give an Inuit child one ski, or a Moroccan elder a plastic bag, both will naturally do one thing. They’ll slide downhill. Why? Because having fun is a piece of being human. A big piece.

That’s why 1,500 youth, but also some grandparents and half a dozen infants, gathered Sept. 23 on a rainy night in Whistler, British Columbia, for the world premiere of All.I.Can, a new ski film by some young and ambitious Canadian upstarts called The Sherpas. The crowd screamed at the expected ski acrobatics, but they also sat captivated and in awe as the film delivered a subtle message not typically found in so-called “ski porn.”

All.I.Can explores the common joy human beings of all cultures and ages derive from sliding on snow — and what we stand to lose if climate change destroys that opportunity. The film forces viewers to reflect on the beauty (and therefore preciousness) of the world — not just the snowcovered parts, and not just nature — as a source of redemption and happiness.

Walking around the lobby, I ran into representatives from Snowriders International, a new NGO dedicated to snowsports and the environment. It reminded me of the Mountain Riders Alliance, also formed recently “to develop values-based, environmentally friendly, rider-centric mountain playgrounds that encourage minimal carbon footprint.” Just last week, I joined big mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones in Washington, D.C., along with Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler and skier Chris Davenport, fresh from the top of Everest, to ask legislators to save our $66 billion winter sports industry from climate change. Jones, who has two children, started his nonprofit, Protect Our Winters (POW), in 2007 in response to the visible changes he’s seen in the world. POW has 30,000 followers on Facebook.

Welcome to the cold revolution. The first generation of new era hot shots, initially out for a sick thrill, is looking for meaning, and they’re finding it primarily in the struggle to solve climate change. They probably won’t stop there. One of the producers of All.I.Can, the legendary ski trick innovator JP Auclair, recently launched a nonprofit called Alpine Initiatives, which taps his community’s boundless energy in support of humanitarian projects. How did environmental and social consciousness explode inside a generally superfluous and selfish pastime? How did skiing (and riding) get a new soul?

A little more than 15 years ago, snowsports underwent its first revolution. The advent of snowboarding had created a new subculture — it was disaffected, thrill seeking, and big air launching. Skateboarders of the alpine. With the help of shorter, fatter skis, that culture spread to skiing as well, eventually reaching audiences of hundreds of millions through the Winter X games. These radical tricksters adopted saggy L.A. gang style, and raged for more than a decade, pushing their sport into new levels of athleticism. But then something happened. They got older. And like many approaching midlife, they started looking for something other than big air to provide meaning in their lives.

The explosion of consciousness and advocacy on climate change is characterized by leadership from elders, respected and accomplished fixtures in their sport. And it’s also increasingly backed by savvy, and booming, outdoor businesses, like Black Diamond and The North Face. The former, through the leadership of CEO Peter Metcalf, has always avidly, and often radically, defended the environment, most famously threatening to move a huge outdoor industry conference out of Salt Lake City in response to then-Gov. Jon Hunstman’s position on wilderness. They won that battle. The North Face, through its support of groups like Protect Our Winters and All.I.Can, has quietly become the leader in climate advocacy in the apparel industry. The vibe they’ve helped create is palpable. At the premiere, I spoke briefly on the need for climate action, then retired to the floor for a beer. Within minutes, two North Face sponsored athletes from the film thanked me and asked how they could help.

Corporate support notwithstanding, the revolution is truly grassroots. One is hard pressed to find a single pro athlete who doesn’t want to mobilize on climate. The list goes on and on — for example, Bode Miller, Julia Mancuso, and Ted Ligety have already worked with World Wildlife Fund on climate issues.

At the same time, industry trade groups remain mostly passive on the issue. That, like the climate, will change. With climate’s palpable and urgent threat to a way of life, an unprecedented critical mass of smart and thoughtful athletes coming of age, and young visionaries like The Sherpas emerging from the sidelines, a whole hell of a lot of rock stars are going to be doing all they can.

Last month, three little girls, ages 8, 5 and 2, and their mother, were killed in a Wyoming flash flood that washed away their van. It was the kind of torrential downpour climatologists predict will increase as the planet warms. Their father survived. He alone can speak of the horror of trying to save his family, only to realize he could barely save himself. In the rushing water, he ran up against the greatest fear humans can experience: that we will be unable to take care of our children.

Also in July, on the other side of the earth, Marcus Stephen, president of the tiny South Pacific island of Nauru, used The New York Times to plead with the world. As a rising ocean laps at his island, he exhorted the international community to “plan for the biggest environmental and humanitarian challenge of our time.” “What if the pollution coming from our island nations was threatening the very existence of the major emitters?” he asked. “What would be the nature of today’s debate under those circumstances?” Stephen asked the world to operate according to the greatest of all human hopes and aspirations: that we treat others the way we would like to be treated ourselves — that we follow the Golden Rule.

Our greatest hope and our greatest fear are united by one issue: climate change. Solve this profound threat to civilization and we become a living manifestation of the Golden Rule. Fail and we realize our greatest fear: that we’ll be unable to protect our children from flood, drought, famine, fire and war.

This sounds biblical because we face the very stuff of the Bible. The challenge presented by climate change is embedded in our most ancient texts. But as often happened with the people in the Bible millennia ago, we are still desperately trying to ignore the problem. In America, the political right denies the mere fact of warming. Globally, at a recent U.N. Security Council meeting, members deadlocked over whether they should address rising sea levels or competition over water resources.

In response to vapid leadership and a broken political process unable to solve even small problems, many of us have turned inward, to backyard gardens and solar panels and community bans on plastic bags. These are good actions, but so short of what is needed that I do not know whether to weep or to laugh.

Still, I sympathize. We are following timeless advice for survival as an apocalypse approaches: “Where you have nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air, and breathe upon them,” novelist Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Road. Or, to phrase it differently, in a place without people, be a person.

And yet I believe that we should not yet abandon the public sphere for private ceremonies in our own backyards. Working as a nation with other nations, including Nauru, to reduce extreme weather and drought and plague would be the decent, human thing to do. It would let us citizens of the globe endow our lives with the primal aspirations of grace, compassion and dignity.

It may be hard to visualize the United States acting from such motives. Government’s potential to help us lead moral lives has been hijacked by those who equate morality with banning gay weddings or stem cell research. But the appeal of these issues to so many people shows that the desire to advance core moral values is strong among us. The life or death question is whether that subverted moral desire can be turned toward protection of our children.

It is easy to despair. But there is also reason to hope. We are in a dynamic situation. Even as the waves lap higher around Nauru, even as climate change helps to kill children in Wyoming, our conservative heartland is being cooked by extraordinary temperatures and dried out by persistent drought. Were the voters in Oklahoma and Texas who suffered through record-breaking temperatures and drought pleased when Govs. Mary Fallin and Rick Perry asked them to pray for rain? Or would they rather have seen expanding solar photovoltaic production, where the sun would fuel their air conditioners?

Many elected officials in the states most afflicted by the effects of climate change view government action on climate as radicalism. But what is being asked of society and government is not radical: It is a return to who we are.

This week, though, sure feels like the tipping point on public opinion on climate, and so I’m going to stick a fork in it right here, folks. Climate opinion just tipped. Why do I say that? In the last week:

• Australia, with huge coal reserves — but rapidly passing the Arctic as ground zero for climate impacts with epic fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and dust storms — passed a carbon credit law, with a tax coming up next.
• Canada rolled out regulations that will likely phase out coal by mid-century.
• Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” research was once and for all vindicated.
• Prominent Republicans like Jon Hunstman and Chris Christie agree that climate science is real, and there’s even pressure within the GOP to not become the anti-science party. In fact, when Rick Perry denied climate science, he wasn’t just censured by some Republicans, he was instantly and vigorously debunked by the Washington Post.
• The press is finally doing its job by calling deniers like Rick Perry out on their climate claims.
• Last and most important, prominent intellectuals, scholars, and youth (the people who always make up revolutions and are regularly jailed in less freedom-friendly countries) were arrested and imprisoned for peaceful protest in our nation’s capital, and kept overnight on the eve of the national dedication of a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is a gift. What more could an activist ask for than for all these things to happen at once — to wind up in jail, just like Dr. King in Birmingham, and to have it all happen on the eve of a national dedication to this great man who would certainly have seen our cause as his own: about poverty, and intergenerational justice, and equality. Dr. King tragically and prophetically said that he might not get there with us, but that he had seen the promised land.

But he did get there with us. Because from public opinion comes policy. And that suggests that, indeed, the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”