As someone who writes and speaks about alternative and renewable energy, I often get asked about climate change.  What do I think about it?  What is true?  Who to believe?

There is so much noise about it.  The media knows it is an important topic to many and they know that controversy prompts viewership so they create controversy.  The U.N. Copenhagen Climate summit is the current case in point.  TV in particular provides superficial, breathless coverage of registration problems, conflicts,  walk-outs and somewhat angry talking heads arguing points of view.  So what to think?

The most cogent description of the four general points of view concerning climate change and humanity’s causality of it was in a column in the New York Times.  It was written by Stewart Brand.  Stewart Brand is best known for creating the “Whole Earth Catalog” and also for being one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.  It can – and has- been argued that Brand and the “Whole Earth Catalog” created the beginning of the environmental movement and the cultural underpinnings of Silicon Valley.  He is that significant of a cultural figure.  After all it was Brand who, in 1968, asked the straightforward question:  “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth?”

Stewart Brand has been a hero of mine for the last 40 years.  It therefore gave me great comfort to read his column and find that of the four positions he describes around climate change that he and I are in the same one: “Warners”.

Brand describes …

It was two years ago that I first wrote about ocean dead zones. These are areas of the ocean that, due to a lack of oxygen, no longer sustain any life.  While dead zones can happen naturally, they usually are caused by the results of human activity.  A primary cause is nitrogen-rich nutrients from agricultural fertilizers that flow into coastal waters from rivers and streams.

Last week there was a report published in the Journal of Science that stated that the number of these ocean dead zones around the world has doubled every decade since the 1960s.  There are now some 400 coastal areas that periodically or perpetually become dead due to oxygen starved bottom waters.

While the size of these dead zones is small relative to the total surface of the oceans, they account for a significant percentage of ocean waters that support commercial shellfish and fish species.  This is due to the fact that these zones occur in areas that have historically been prime fishing grounds since these grounds are close to dense human populations.

In recent years there have been consistent dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, the coastal areas of China and even the Kattegat Sea where the Norwegian lobster industry has been decimated..  There is now a regular dead zone off the coast of the Pacific Northwest that was mentioned in the column two years ago.

The developing problem with these dead zones is that over time entire species are killed …

This thought came to me while standing on Omaha Beach, one of the American landing beaches on D-Day. I think about the future and it is clear to me that humanity will need to find greatness to face some of the issues it faces now and in the next decade.  We need to rise up to a level of commitment, collaboration, will and innovation that seems far from universal today.  There is no question but that we can and that we will need to do so.  The question is how we rise up to this level of greatness. 

Standing on Omaha Beach, and later the same day on Utah Beach I was struck by the magnitude of D-Day.  The heroism, valor, loss of life, and incredible stories of individual and collective victory are usually what comes to mind when thinking of this invasion.  Those thoughts usually are of the soldiers, but there were larger forces at work.  Things were done that had never been done before.  Plans were created based on no prior human experience.  Let me give you just one example.