I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.

The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are.

But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don't think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we're now shifting the planet.

We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?

[Political actions] has to happen on the local and state level; we have to convince our cities to join the growing number of more than 200 American cities who have signed on to the mayor's climate campaign.

I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.