Climate Change

While he was dying, a man named Philip Simmons wrote a book about living titled "Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life." Its prose is poetic, I'm tempted to say flawless. Read aloud, it rings with a clarity reminiscent of a note played on fine leaded crystal. Days after seeing the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," I came across a bit of wisdom Simmons' borrowed from an Indian yogi and tacked to his office door. "Before speaking," the reminder read, "consider whether it is an improvement upon silence."

This was the hottest Labor Day weekend we’ve been through since we moved to California 26 years ago. The heat was brutal. And don’t even talk about the traffic. All 3 million Orange County residents must have been trying to find parking spaces at the beach this past weekend. We’re lucky to live in Huntington Beach, where the temperature seldom climbs even into the 90s. We get by at our house with only fans, but we’re wondering how many more years we can do this.

hbi-natperspectives07TextTO27E01CNatural Perspectives The last few columns on global climate change, organic farming and sustainable living have been leading up to today's column on the importance of conservation. A couple of months ago, I was asked to give a talk on that topic to staff at the Orange County Conservation Corps. Vic suggested I lead off with pictures of California to show what a beautiful planet we live on. I chose a picture of Bolsa Chica and one of Yosemite.

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY As we say goodbye to yet another year, we wonder what environmental assaults and accomplishments the new year will bring. Last year, our column topics touched on many topics including snakes in the grass and flights of dragonflies overhead. We wrote about red tides taking oxygen from the ocean, ticks sucking the lifeblood from baby bunnies and forest fires damaging our lungs with smoke. Many people enjoyed our tales of travel as we ventured into the local mountains, but what drew the most comments in the past year was our tale of woe about the exploding can of Mandarin oranges in our kitchen cupboard and our failure to clean it up immediately.

There is no better time than the Christmas season to show your love for God?s green planet. Unfortunately, this planet is in crisis, and not enough people recognize it yet. And nowhere near enough people are doing something about it. Vic and I are talking, of course, about the biggest crisis our civilization has had to face ? global climate change. Global climate change, which is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the past 150 years, is changing the environment more rapidly than anyone thought possible.

Were Jamie and Andi Douglass evangelicals, somebody might be raising Cain about what they have planned for Sunday, which this year also happens to be Earth Day. At their Huntington Beach Episcopal church, St. Wilfrid of York, the husband and wife have organized a fair called "Caring for Creation." The event will pair tasty foods, fair trade coffee, games and prizes with hands-on, educational displays about an array of environmental issues. "When you talk about the environment, the list of what you can learn and what you can do just goes on and on," Jamie Douglass says.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center's "State of the Climate: Global Analysis for Annual 2010" makes for some pretty sobering reading. Vic and I waded through the nine-page document over the hot Fourth of July weekend. Looking at the combined global land and ocean surface temperatures, scientists determined that 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year ever. That was for the whole world. But when they looked at just the Northern Hemisphere, there was no tie. For those of us living north of the equator, 2010 was the hottest year on record.

Huntington Beach Mayor Gil Coerper is now a cool mayor — officially. In part of a unanimous city council vote Tuesday, the council endorsed the goals of the U.S. Mayors for Climate Protection Agreement, which states broad goals for environmental friendliness and whose sponsors are known as Cool Mayors for Climate Protection. The endorsement was part of a vote to have city staff develop policies to promote energy conservation, both by leading with its own consumption cuts and encouraging "green" practices in the private sector.

We applaud the City Council for getting on board with the U.S. Mayors for Climate Protection Agreement, which promotes various environmental goals. But it's a little unsettling that the sponsors, council members Debbie Cook and Keith Bohr, had to assure their colleagues that it wasn't locking the city into any mandates or requirements. Instead, the agreement mostly focuses on setting a good example. Sure there are still some holdouts, but there is a growing consensus that global warming is caused by human activity and that it's becoming a very serious problem.

Environmentalist group Greenpeace rolled into Huntington Beach last week, partially in an attempt to put congressional candidates in the hot seat on global warming issues. But while neither U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher nor his challenger, Mayor Debbie Cook, showed up, the group’s officials still called the day a success. The 26-foot bus “Rolling Sunlight” is powered solely by biodiesel, along with 256 square feet of solar panels to run an “action tent” that lets the public record video and e-mail messages to congressional candidates.