Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.

Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.

In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.

If you look at the polling data, long before anyone had thought about Iraq, it was the [George W.] Bush Administration's decision in the first few weeks in its tenure in office to abnegate the Kyoto treaties that set our international perception into a nose-dive. People around the world looked on in amazement as the biggest part of the problem decided it wasn't going to make any effort to help with the solution.

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that's how one would do it - lots and lots of people saying "we're severing our ties".

When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision.

We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them.