"Our climate IS warming-- and, as it does,
low-probability events like hurricane Sandy will become more probable-- and more intense.
Carbon emissions are
trapping extra energy in our atmosphere-- and with extra energy comes more extreme conditions: higher sea levels, drier droughts,
hotter heat waves, and heavier weather storms.
We need a crash program in this country right now to re-engineer the nation's infrastructure
to cope with and prepare for the climate disruptions that are already ensured with
the carbon we've put into the atmosphere.
We need an immediate, aggressive transformation of our energy production economy and society to reduce
the amount of carbon we will put into the atmosphere in the future.
This is as fundamental, as elemental,
as human endeavors get.
The story of civilization is a long tale of crusades for order battling the unceasing reality of
chaos. And it is a kind of miracle that we have succeeded as much as we have... that airplanes fly through the air and roads
plunge beneath the water, and the entire teeming lattice-work of human life exists in the manifold improbable places it does.
But it is the grand
irony that in imposing this order on the world we've released millions of years of stored-up carbon into the atmosphere--
which is now altering the climate and threatening the very monuments of civilization that we so cherish.
We absolutely have
it within us, collectively, to beat back the forces of chaos once again. But we must choose to do so. And the time for choosing
is NOW.
You are either on the side of your fellow citizens and residents of the planet-- or you are on the
side of the storms as yet unnamed. You can't be neutral. So which side are you on?"
-- Chris Hayes
(Up With Chris Hayes, 2012)
