Friends tell me that their California friends are buying land in Alaska because, well, heck, in a couple of decades California will be too hot. Like them, many of us are finding a way to make peace with global warming, now labelled less alarmingly as “climate change.”

David Suzuki and colleagues talk about our society reaching a “tipping point” when it will become socially unacceptable to contribute to global warming by unnecessary spending and resource use. I don't know. Will that really happen?

Or will it happen in time to make the difference we need? Consider me. Daily I hear news about global warming. But what am I really doing to make a difference? I plan to do a bit of flying before the year is over. I drive a small car, a 1995 Tercel, which doesn't require much fuel. Generally I stay below 100 kph, which means I use less fuel per unit of distance than if I were to go, say 120. On the other hand I do a lot of driving, about 200 km per day.

The house I live in with my family is not small, and it does get heated in the colder months, although with “heating zones” we selectively heat the parts of the house we occupy, and not the rest.

At the same time, Mongabay.com reports that glaciers all over the planet are receding at alarming rates. Mountain people in Peru who have depended on glacial ice water for centuries will be out of luck in the foreseeable future. The web site says that Banff, Jasper and Yoho National Parks lost 25 per cent of their glacial surface in the 20th century.

Glaciers are seen as an excellent indicator of the speed and intensity of global warming. The degree of the losses to individual glaciers around the world in the last few decades is described using phrases like “one third” and “40-50 per cent,” and in terms of tens of metres of lost thickness. But I'm still driving, flying, pressing the print button in my computer and eating food flown in from (the soon-to-be-wasted?) farms of southern California.

Ironically, on the same page that carries the article describing these alarming developments, you can see ads for vacations to Iceland. And I am certain the ads do not recommend parking the jet liner and rowing from Boston to Reykjavik.

And that illustrates our problem, or at least, I feel safe in saying, mine. Our technology, wealth and travel are just too good to let go.

In the meantime, we're risking an apocalypse. Not many of us are going to be able to crowd into Alaska. I need to make more changes to my own life and I think we all do. So, what can we do this week to at least weaken the apocalypse we have created and slow its momentum?
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