The Adirondack Park “…is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States…”  It’s protected by the NY State constitution and the publicly owned lands within it are to be kept “forever wild.”  One of the many gems of the park is Lake George which Thomas Jefferson described in 1791 as “…without comparison the most beautiful water I ever saw. Its water is limpid as crystal and the mountainsides are covered with rich groves of fir, pine, aspen, and birch down to the waters edge.”  Jefferson would be proud today to see that the lake is essentially as he knew it.  There’s a tremendous amount of recreational hiking, camping, boating, and tourism, but the lake has been well protected over many generations.

I went to camp on the lake and climbed quite a bit in the High Peaks of the Adirondacks when I was young.  I attribute much of my environmental sensibility to having been exposed to these magnificent waters, forests and mountains when I was a kid.

My wife, daughter and I spent the past several days on Lake George, mixing up the recreation with a little history and local culture.  We had a boat ride from our spot on the lake out to the Narrows.  While we were touring, a Great Blue Heron flew up and landed on the shoreline.

One of our half-day trips took us up to Fort Ticonderoga, a place rich in the history of the French and Indian War as well as the American Revolution.  Another outing was devoted to the Adirondack Museum.  This is a wonderfully laid out, hugely informative tribute to the history and culture of the Adirondacks.  (On a visit a few years back, we went to the Wild Center, another fantastic destination that is the natural history museum for the Adirondacks, and which was founded by a former NYSDEC colleague of mine.)

I’m reading a book on the history of the American environmental movement, A Fierce Green Fire, for a course I’ll be teaching in the fall.  It was just perfect to be up before breakfast, gazing out at Lake George, and thinking about how committed environmentalists have worked so hard for over a hundred years to preserve the earth, air, and water.

Looking at climate change as much and as often as I do, I have come to have a heightened sense of the danger looming and the urgency of our situation.  Therefore, knowing that snow reflects solar radiation back into space, thus diminishing the radiative forcing on the earth, snow is something that has come to have an even greater positive association for me than it previously did.  Snow has a high albedo and so when I’m in it, I am reassured.

I grew up spending a lot of time outdoors, hiking and skiing, among other things, in the Northeast US.  This was one of the reasons I was so highly motivated to fight acid rain back in the 1980’s - because I had a connection to the mountains, forests, and the waters of the Northeast and didn’t like the idea of their being murdered by acid rain.  I still get out.  We were skiing over Presidents’ Week at Killington.  High-carbon footprint?  Yes.  But Killington, much to my relief, has a pretty thoroughgoing and sound approach to energy and the environment.  They offset, for instance, 100 percent of their electric use through the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs).

We just had a big snowfall this week in NYC.  The calming effect of the snow is palpable.  Here’s a photo of the American Museum of Natural History after the snow with the banner for the big climate change exhibit juxtaposed against the Theodore Roosevelt statue.

Photo Mike Segar/Thomson Reuters

I’ve posted my thoughts on what’s happened this past year and what the tea leaves tell me for the coming year here:  2008 in Review.  Highlights?  Obama’s election and his intentions as exemplified in his policy pronouncements and his picks for top positions, more serious environmentalists in key slots on The Hill and a focus on getting key legislation done, a landmark agreement in the EU, considerable further progress toward a final international treaty, and stunning developments in the technology and deployment of renewables and energy efficient systems.  Take a look.  Let us know what you’ve been seeing and your predictions.

These photos are too good not to put up here.  They come courtesy of Bill Romatzick.  We met Bill and his wife, Sue, both experienced divers, on our vacation.  The first is the flying gurnard which I spotted in the sand on a snorkel trip.  The second is a sea turtle.  The third is a spectacular picture of a spectacular creature:  a spotted eagle ray. 

Bill, not incidentally, is on the energy efficiency beat, having had a big hand in building a cogeneration facility at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

While on vacation, we spent, not surprisingly, a ton of time in the water.  There were some perfectly lovely rock reefs right off the beach from where we were staying and that was a great way to get my daughter (7½) going on snorkeling.

Here's the thing:  When John Muir started the Sierra Club in 1892, he knew that the best way to get people excited about preserving the wild places of the earth is to get them out seeing, feeling, tasting and touching nature.  He took folks from San Francisco to Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy, then when they were back in town, they worked to protect these places.  When I was a kid, I skied in New England and hiked in the Adirondacks.  I came to appreciate these wonderful places and when I was old enough, I set to work as an environmental activist.  I turned pro later, working for 11 years for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, and I've been writing all the way along.

It's the same thing with the ocean.  Once you get people into the ocean to see the reefs and the fish and the extraordinary beauty and vitality, you're going to make environmentalists of them.  If you are just going to the beach or the lakes to vacation and swim, you're still going to feel the ineluctable emotional gravity of nature.  You become , and maybe it's trite , part of nature. 

In St. Martin, there's a growing environmental movement.  The French government, for their part, have created a marine preserve.  Here's Creole Rock, a sweet little snorkeling and dive destination that's part of the preserve.

We had several dive and snorkeling trips and saw all sorts of wonders:  stingrays and eagle rays, sea turtles, scorpionfish, octopus, eels, barracuda, starfish, snakefish, trumpetfish, even a flying gurnard, plus the more prosaic but still entrancing array of parrotfish, sergeant majors, wrasses, and all the others.  The coral formations are also, in many places, stunning.

We went out a couple of times with a great crew from Octopus Diving, our second dive on our second trip climaxing with a full-tilt boogie thunderstorm.  This was my first time being 45 feet down and seeing pelting rain and flashing lightning up above.  Nobody else seemed too concerned so I was relaxed about it.  I was concerned however about my kid up top in the boat.  When we surfaced, there was the kid, though, and one of the fabulous pair who run the shop, jumping up and down and hootin' and hollerin' in the pounding rain, the boat rockin' and rollin'.  Back on board, I was assured that we had an "anode" to protect us from the lightning.  (Phew.)

If you want to know more about the ocean and climate change's impact, you couldn't do better than to start with Betsy Kolbert's article in "The New Yorker" from two years ago, The Darkening Sea.  You can also see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change material on the ocean from its Fourth Assessment Report.

If you want to step back and look at some of the basics, here are some good sources: 

This from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report from the Fourth Assessment Report.

From the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Feeling the Heat.

You can also go to the BBC Weather Centre's site on climate change for some clear, simple basics.  

I recently added this site to the links section here. It's a pretty extraordinary tool for accessing information. It is described as "a knowledge management project for international negotiations and related activities on climate change run by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Use it in good health.

(More in this space on bottled water soon.)

It's been a year since the Foreign Policy Association and I started this blog.  There have been 140 posts before today covering a range of topics from developments in legislation, to international relations, to renewable energy, to all sorts of business initiatives, and much more.  It's been an education for me and, I hope, for you, dear reader.

Looking back at my first post, Welcome to the FPA on Climate Change, I'm glad to say that I've stayed on course fairly well.  I wrote then "The parlous state of our planet's health is being addressed, albeit in fits and starts, but the recognition of the terrible problem we've created is deepening and solutions are being actively sought."  I said there was " going to be a lot of news from Washington."  There sure was.  I said:  "Hopefully, we are in what Thomas Kuhn would call a "paradigm shift' and there are going to be more and more positive developments in renewable energy and energy conservation, land use, and transportation."  There have been many positive developments indeed and the pace of them seems to be accelerating.  I summed up my views of 2007 in December with this post, Year in Review. 

I've noted the feeling that has come over me more than once during the year in which I feel as if I've woken up from a long sleep, as Rip Van Winkle did, to find a world that I previously might not have dreamt possible.  The extraordinary viability and continuing growth of these positive developments is something I hoped would come true when I strolled along Fourteenth St. in Manhattan on the very first Earth Day almost 40 years ago.  My youthful hopes were severely battered along the way and, to tell you the honest truth, I despaired of our ever being able to aspire to half of what we've got cooking now. 

Yet, here we are, truly truckin', and we can look to Mr. Natural, courtesy of Bob Crumb, to know that we simply need to "Keep on Truckin'."

The Heartland Institute organized a gathering of the clans this week in New York City.  Skeptics of various shades and stripes sat in on panel discussions and heard speakers make pronouncements along a spectrum of opinion.  "Registration for the event exceeded 550" according to one of several press releases I received.  I had hoped to go for a few hours, but other priorities won out , plus I'm under the weather, as it were, with a cold.  Andrew Revkin, the "NY Times" climate change beat reporter (and the author of Dot Earth, the popular blog), wrote this article today:  Cool View of Science at Meeting on Warming.  (I've written about the skeptics before here.  I reference a terrific article there by Sharon Begley at "Newsweek" - The Truth About Denial.)

Revkin writes that "The main targets at the meeting were former Vice President Al Gore, who has portrayed global warming as a "planetary emergency,' and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has issued four sets of reports assessing the human impact on climate over 20 years."  You know how those uppity Nobel Peace Prize winners are.  Al Gore truly is one of the most popular "targets" of modern times.  I've also written that, at least as far as climate change goes, there are any number of prominent folks in the world, who will tell you what Gore tells you, and sometimes more.  See If You Don't Like Al Gore, Then

Revkin's story on the conference was preceded on Sunday by Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell.  The "hook" here is a blog post from one Marc Morano, communications director for the Republican minority on the US Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, in which he claims that Earth's ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way.  Michael Schlesinger, a scientist quoted in the "NY Times" piece, is skeptical about the skeptics:  "any focus on the last few months or years as evidence undermining the established theory that accumulating greenhouse gases are making the world warmer was, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a harmful distraction."

"Nuff said.