Year 4, Month 1, Day 23: Preacher Went a-Hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord.

The Miami Herald runs a McClatchy article on the increasing desperation of the people who actually give a shit:

WASHINGTON — Just before he and other environmentalists marched to the White House on Tuesday, climate change activist James Hansen warned he wouldn’t be able to be arrested with them this time. Hansen, a NASA scientist by day and an activist on his own time, had to be available for a press conference in the afternoon announcing that worldwide temperatures in 2012 were in the top 10 hottest ever recorded.

“I’d be honored to be arrested with you,” Hansen said. A few hours later, he declined to discuss politics on a conference call with reporters, but he outlined how he and other government scientists arrived at their calculations as well as their concerns about future warming trends.

But as President Barack Obama approaches his second term, some of the country’s largest and most influential environmental groups and best-known advocates have drawn up blueprints for the White House to address climate change and its attendant problems: rising sea levels, droughts, more severe storms and acidic oceans. Despite doubts from others about how much could be accomplished in the coming years, they’re calling for the president to crack down on big polluters with tougher emissions rules, to reject the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands, and to stick to higher new fuel efficiency standards for cars. Other groups want the White House to encourage energy innovations that would curtail emissions.

And some, like the religious leaders who rallied Tuesday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, said there’s nothing left to do but pray. Among their prayers: that Obama would hear their pleas and have the courage to emerge as a leader on climate change.

The prayer angle led me to go Old-Testament cute for this letter. Sent January 16:

While prayers may have benefits for those who are doing the praying, their efficacy in the measurable world remains unproven. Perhaps environmentalists’ fervent supplications will soften the hearts of our corporate and political pharoahs, who have thus far been obdurate in their refusal to consider the implications of a runaway greenhouse effect on the complex civilization humanity has built over many thousands of years. And then again, perhaps not.

Ultimately, our fate will not rest in the hands of a deity, but in our own collective ability to restore sobriety to a society drunk on fossil fuels and distracted by ephemeral entertainment. Massive investments in science and technology are necessary; human ingenuity just might solve some of the most pressing problems of climate change, but only if it’s well-funded — and treated with something other than the arrant disdain showed by the anti-science pharisees now occupying the halls of congress.

Warren Senders