Do you hear what I hear?

That cracking you hear should be the facade of the corporate-funded dead-enders who still in the face of all evidence continue to cherry-pick data and nitpicking at details to deny the reality of global climate change. Unfortunately, it is instead probably the cracking of building foundations in Alaska, as the BBC clues us in:

In parts of Fairbanks, Alaska, houses and buildings lean at odd angles.

Some slump as if sliding downhill. Windows and doors inch closer and closer to the ground.

It is an architectural landscape that is becoming more familiar as the world's ice-rich permafrost gives way to thaw. ...

Alaska is not the only region in a slump. The permafrost melt is accelerating throughout the world's cold regions, scientists reported at the recent Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. ...

The observations reiterate the recent findings of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, which attributed the northern polar region's summer sea-ice loss and permafrost thaw to dramatic warming over the past half-century. ...

Natural features are also affected. Scientists reported an increased frequency in landslides in the soil-based permafrost of Canada, and an increased instability and slope failures in mountainous regions, such as the Alps, where ice is locked in bedrock. ...

[M]onitoring programmes ... such as the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTNP), indicate a warming trend throughout the permafrost zone.

One of the things climate scientists have worried about in considering global climate change is the possibility of a feedback loop - that is, that warming will cause some change which itself will cause further warming, accelerating the process until, possibly, it reaches a point of a "runaway greenhouse effect," when the changes in the biosphere have exceeded the capacity of Earth's systems to deal with them. The establishment of grass lawns in Antarctica, which I mentioned on Thursday, is one possible example of such a feedback loop: The darker lawns will not reflect as much sunlight as the ice and snow, so the ground is warmed more, which leads to more ice melt, which allows the lawns to spread, which reduces heat reflection even more, and so on.

Another, perhaps graver, possibility lies in the thawing of the permafrost, which releases organic material into the air, including the greenhouse gases CO₂ and methane. That is, the thawing of permafrost as a result of warming will itself lead to greater warming. Just how grave is that threat?

Scientists do not know exactly how much carbon is sequestered in the permafrost regions, but estimates show it could be up to a quarter of the sequestered carbon on Earth, 14% of it in the Arctic, alone.

Global climate change simply is the biggest environmental issue of the 21^st century. The threat is real and worldwide, the danger is real and worldwide.

The biggest international effort toward dealing with that threat has been the Kyoto Protocols, the agreement that was originally promoted by George Bush the father and now stands rejected by George Bush the son. Not long ago I saw some conservative blogger mocking environmentalists for supporting the Kyoto protocol, quoting some as saying it didn't go nearly far enough. Well, then, why support it at all? was this twerp's ostensibly clever rejoinder. The simple answer is, because anything may be better than nothing. Several years ago I was involved in efforts to get an addition to the local school. At the close of one contentious town meeting, I approached a member of the school board and said that in looking over the figures they had presented, I realized that by their own account, by the time the addition was completed, it wouldn't be big enough.

"We know," he answered. "But if we asked for what we really need, we'd never get it. Let's just get what we can and worry about the rest later."

I don't expect anyone would mock them for trying to make what improvements they could, even knowing in the end it would not be enough. So too here, that's the attitude understandably adopted by most environmentalists. We know Kyoto isn't enough. We know that the most that can be expected of it is to put off (rather than prevent) a coming disaster. But even this limited, inadequate response is more than the oil and coal companies and their paid-for acolytes in the US government are willing to accept, apparently in the belief that by the time the situation has gone from threatening to disastrous, in 50 or 100 years, they'll be dead so who cares? (I actually had someone - not an energy company executive, just someone I corresponded with - tell me exactly that.) So what many of us have done is to try for what we think we can get rather than for what we know we need, hoping to be able to get more later.

But later may be a long time coming and "too little, too late" is beginning to sound descriptive rather than sarcastic. I say the time to declare that yes, Kyoto isn't good enough, isn't nearly good enough, is now. Oh, the response will be, it's just gone into effect, we have to give it time, you can't say it hasn't worked, lots of blah blah and a little BS for flavor.

The thing is, all of that is true but it's still blah blah BS because it's irrelevant. Totally. The issue here isn't can Kyoto achieve what it sets out to achieve. Perhaps it can, although the last century's record of efforts based on the voluntary action of nation states going right back to the Kellogg-Briand Pact don't inspire a lot of confidence. The point is, even if Kyoto works exactly as advertised, even if it does everything it can, it's not good enough. It doesn't control emissions enough, it doesn't reduce emissions enough. It doesn't protect our future.

As Americans we consume far more - far more - than our share of the resources of the world and consume far more than our share of the energy. Yes, we are richer and more industrialized than much of the world and that explains a lot of the difference. But it does not adequately explain why despite being just 4.6% of the world's population, we, according to the Department of Energy, account for 24% of the world's total energy consumption. It does not explain why we use 35% more energy than Western Europe despite a roughly equal - in fact, somewhat smaller - population.

So what does explain it? Waste. Inefficiency. Laziness, defined here as valuing convenience over environmental soundness. Yes, we need to demand more of our government, yes, we need to scream yell rant and rave against the ignorant buffoons and slobbering clowns who populate Washington and the ravenously destructive corporate greedheads who buy and sell them. But dammit, we as individuals also need to do more, to try harder, to more clearly determine between what is and isn't valuable, between necessity and desire, between "I want because it will make my life in some way better" and "I want just because I want."

I'm addressing this to myself as much as to anyone. I, too, am guilty of waste, of inefficiency, of laziness. According to those various quizzes you can find around the Web, my wife and I do better at being environmentally conscious than most Americans - but here, better than most does not mean good except in the narrow confines of a wasteful economy and a culture built on a philosophy of "there's always more where that came from."

I suppose that philosophy might arise from a combination of our (speaking here of Americans as a whole, not every individual among our numbers) Judeo-Christian heritage and our European immigrant colonial background. The first told us

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. - Genesis 1:28

The second consisted of people who left a continent where they had to make the land respond and came to one holding an abundance they couldn't imagine using up.

A few years ago I read where someone said of the Biblical injunction "We should say 'Okay God, we've multiplied and subdued. Now what?'" That is indeed the essential question: Now what? We have been operating from a worldview that sees nature, sees the world at large, as something to be dominated, to be domesticated like a farm animal, to be tamed for our use and pleasure. We - broadening my view now to much of the industrialized world - have done much, accomplished much, we have learned much, we have even been beneficial at times. (Consider, for example, that those measures of life expectancy at birth in places around the world which we now justly regard with shame as a sign of how little our abundance has been spread would, just a few centuries ago, have been the average, the typical. Consider, too, that in 1952 there were 60,000 cases of, and 3000 deaths from, polio in the US alone. And that around the same time, there were 50 million cases of smallpox in the world each year. Now, as a result of treatment and vaccination programs, there are a total of 1100 polio cases worldwide and the last natural case of smallpox was in 1977.)

But we are very close to becoming Dr. Frankenstein, so absorbed with, so taken by, our own power of creation that we risk being destroyed by the very thing - industrial civilization - that we have wrought. We - all of us, me - have to change dramatically and quickly. As the old peace movement slogan has it, "if we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're headed." And personally, I don't like the way the scenery is changing.