As of and after this Winter it's Climate Change, not Global Warming!

It's -16℉ outside our home. Reports are that  we're experiencing a "snow drought." Meanwhile, our place of origin (like a family of origin), Massachusetts' south shore, is getting buried in snow, flooded and frozen, all at the same time. Melting polar ice caps are leading to a more volatile polar vortex. These are some of the predicted consequences of a buildup of green house gases in the atmosphere leading to increasing temperature which, in turn, triggers more intense and volatile weather events.

between a rock and a cold, hard place

Photo by J. Harrington

Words matter. "Global warming" may create a misguided sense or warm fuzzies. It also lets idiots in the senate hold snowballs while denying climate change and incompetent presidential imposters joke about impending weather disasters. Hence forth, we'll do our best to follow this guidance from NASA:

But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.

Thanks for letting us get that off of our chest. Most of today we're going to be headed up North, to Duluth, to meet some folks and talk about sustainable mining, or even whether we can agree such a thing can exist. Maybe "mining in a circular economy" works better. Our introductory rant today is a sign we're awakening to how much words can matter and we hope to find the correct words to make mining less economically, socially and environmentally anathema. As with many issues, change is occurring, but too slowly. We need to help more, and more, folks realize "there is no Planet B!" and cheating does us all a disservice. There's real difference between a greenwash and a sustainable world. That difference depends, ultimately, on us and how much we care about those who come after us. Before we have descendants, we have children. Don't they deserve the best we can provide? Doesn't that begin with a planet that provides air clean enough to breath, water clean enough to drink, and a climate that's changing less than we're experiencing this days? How will we know we've made a global economy sustainable? It's challenging to even label sea food successfully. Words matter!

The Young Poets of Winnipeg

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase…
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
encouraged them to stretch, wouldn’t let their parents
attend the reading because parents might criticize,
believed in the third and fourth eyes, the eyes in
the undersides of leaves, the polar bears a thousand miles north,
and sprouts of grass under the snow. They knew their poems
were glorious, that second-graders could write better
than third or fourth, because of what happened
on down the road, the measuring sticks
that came out of nowhere, poking and channeling
the view, the way fences broke up winter,
or driveways separated the smooth white sheets
birds wrote on with their feet.

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