A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.

I do a certain amount of work in religious communities on these issues. It's not the central focus of my work but it is certainly an area where I have worked a lot. It has gotten much better over the years, especially over the last couple years. There wasn't a religious environmental movement 15 years ago, but there is now - in the Catholic community, the Jewish community, the mainline Protestant community, and in the Evangelical community.

If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.

[Barack Obama] done some good things, he's done a couple of bad things. He's obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and... lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he's been weak on it.

Permafrost in the soil [is melting], in the boreal and arctic areas in the world, and, probably even more alarming in the last six or eight months, the data on what is happening to the ice shelves in Greenland and the west Antarctic has begun to cause people to radically reassess the earlier conviction that those ice shelves were stable on a kind of century-long time scale.

We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change.

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.