Thanksgiving is, in many ways, the truest of holidays.  It is not connected to a religion or to a national political event.  It is about giving thanks and sharing life’s abundance, manifested by a large meal to be shared by friends and family.  Giving thanks for all the wonderfulness of this planet.

On Thanksgiving day in 2030, I hope my then middle aged son will be sharing this day with loved ones hopefully including me.  I hope that they all will be able to give thanks for what those of us alive today did between 2007 and 2015 to mobilize humanity to slow and start to reverse global warming.  That is the window we have to allow those of us still living and our descendents to have some semblance of a Thanksgiving that might be similar to the one we celebrate in 2007.

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change issued its’ final, synthesis report this past weekend.  The fact that it had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore gives the I.P.C.C. an amplified voice for this, its’ fourth and final report.  The report is stunning in its conclusions and recommendations. It puts in stark relief the fact that urgent and global action must be taken immediately to avoid almost unimaginable consequences.

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We are moving toward the end of 2007 and there are still people that question whether the planet is warming up and more specifically whether humans have anything to do with it.  I have listened to and read some of the thinking of these people and it falls into several categories.  First, and this is true, there are people, Republicans mostly, that cannot stand Al Gore – they still remember his self righteous sighing in 2000 - and are therefore tying the message with the messenger.  Second, there are those that are natural contrarians, so they will naturally react negatively when every Hollywood star, starlet, celebrity and blow dried news anchor gets on the global warming soapbox again with moral self righteousness (the Polar bears are dying, what about the Polar bears?).  Third there are those that site that the earth has warmed up before, so no big deal this is just a planetary cycle.

I am so tired of all of this dialogue.  The earth is warming up and the scientific evidence is irrefutable, at least to this observer.  The question is not is there or is there not global warming.  The question is not whether we humans have anything to do with it.  The question is managing risk.  Whether there is global warming or not, as a species we should be planning for the worst.  If we don’t, hundreds of millions of us will most likely perish over the next 75 years.   Global warming, by all accounts, seems to …

Congratulations to Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  Congratulations to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for sharing in that prize. There could be no better recipients for the Peace Prize than the man who, more than anyone else has raised the awareness of global warming, and for the international body of scientists that, finally, lifted the dialogue about global warming out of the world of opinion and into the world of science.

 Regular readers know that I have often written about global warming.  Here I discussed the Intergovernmental Panel, and here I spoke about the change in consciousness about the subject that occurred in 2006, when “Inconvenient Truth” came out. Yes, I am an environmentalist, and yes I have long believed that global warming, and mans’ contribution to it was one of the most important issues we face today.  As a futurist however I also see it as one of the greatest challenges in human history. Why the Nobel Peace Prize?  What does global warming have to do with peace?  There are two reasons. 

The first is the clear view that global warming for the next two decades will create tensions between nations and even, in the U.S. between states. Climate change is going to create droughts, famine, shortages of water and competition …