Texas governor Rick Perry recently initiated his own solution to climate change that allows fossil fuels to continue to be burned without limits.  The solution that governor Perry has put forth is rooted deep in the traditions of indigenous cultures from around the globe, and according to the governors actions, he believes is a more realistic solution to climate change than reporting, pricing, and limiting greenhouse gas emissions. 

In the face of the worst drought in his state in over a century, governor Perry called for 'days of prayer' to end the climate crisis; if only it were that simple.

"I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life."  [ABC]

The problem with Perry's solution is that [if it were to work] it is only a temporary fix; longer term trends in climate models indicate that Texas, as well as other areas in the U.S. southwest are forecast to dry out in the coming decades. Praying for rain would need to be a full-time job with a whole staff of professional pray-ers.

It is a long slippery slope that humanity has begun down in the 21st century; first, denying its existence, then being slapped in the face repeatedly by increasingly more dramatic weather anomalies, Republicans like Perry are now scrambling to frame the new climate reality in a context that they feel their base can understand. 

Our predicament over the course of the next decade and beyond is tenuous at best, and given the power and success of the forces fighting against risk mitigation in the present, it is becoming painfully obvious that the time for mitigation has passed. Maybe more prayer is what is needed; but we need not be praying for more rain, we need to be praying that governor Perry and the Republican leadership begin to value human life more than they value the campaign contributions of the fossil fuel industry.

Countless warnings have been given by scientists over the course of the past decade or so.  So far, though, global governments have chosen to ignore these warnings and proceed full-throttle toward the seemingly inescapable calamity that is humanity's future.  That future is not only ripe with atmospheric imbalances but also saturated with chemical contamination at levels that produce mutations of life on Earth.

The forces of nature are carefully balanced against each other; one holds the other in place, and so on, until a stable reality is created.  There are three main cycles that regulate life in any ecosystem - the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles.  Within these stable systems humans created the modern global society that we currently live within, the pinnacle of our achievement as a species; but in the past 150 years, humans have altered the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles in such dramatic ways on a planetary scale that life on Earth is now being forced to adapt to a new reality.

The modern world was built upon a shaky foundation, one which violated the laws of physics, one that ultimately destabilizes the forces of nature.  The foundations of capitalism are based upon the unlimited resources and therefore unlimited growth principle.  It is becoming apparent that a world of seven billion people's wants and needs has run up against the ability of the planet to meet those desires.

Climate change and all of the political rhetoric that has jumped its bandwagon has become just one piece in the larger picture of what is happening to the Earth's ecosystems and its inhabitants.  On its own, it is a term that does not capture the extent to which human beings are drastically altering the workings of the planet on a chemical level.  It is mainly a description of human impact on atmospheric gases resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, but recently has been branching out into other disciplines in order to flesh out other effects that seem to trickle forth from dramatically altering the carbon cycle. 

Climate scientists have incorporated snow and ice specialists is their study of ice cores to look for other times in the Earth's past where similar levels of atmospheric gases were present on Earth; geologists have studied fossils to determine what kind of mass extinctions took place during other ages when the climate changed significantly; and biologists have added data about the current extinction rates of species around the globe to try to draw comparisons from other extinction events in the past to that going on today.

Like with the human being, once chemical contamination of a living body reaches a certain level, it becomes more susceptible to disease. The Earth is a living body. On a planetary level, like with the human being, disease starts off in the smallest organisms and works its way up to larger organs. Once it reaches full saturation, the cascading effects of contamination wash over the entire system, snuffing out life and releasing the spirit from the body.

What we are currently experiencing is a chemical contamination of the entire Earth system.  We have been spreading chemicals around the planet at levels that far exceed any natural variations.  We have drastically altered all three of the major governing systems of life [carbon, nitrogen, water].  At no other time in Earth's history were so many toxic chemicals concentrated in so many regions of the globe.

The effects of human contamination of the environment have already shown up in bees, bats, frogs, and fish in high profile media stories. Studies of changes in smaller organisms, like phytoplankton, have even received some media attention as of late. Also included in the media coverage have been stories about the pine and aspen die-offs in the western U.S. and Canada, water contamination in the Northeast, topsoil erosion in the Midwest, water scarcity in the southwest, and dead zones at the mouth of virtually every river system on Earth.  In fact even forecasts that the entire boreal forest in Northern Hemisphere is under threat have been made by scientists.

Add to this two record breaking droughts in the Amazon rainforest in the past few years and the CO2 saturation of the world's oceans, and it becomes strikingly clear that a tipping point, an event-horizon, is quickly coming into view.

While the underlying focus of climate change mitigation gets at the root of one of the major sources of human contamination, it fails to incorporate into its strategy mitigation of other sources of chemical contamination that occur when global energy and agricultural systems are brought up to the scale necessary to meet the needs of seven billion people.

Another problem with the use of the term 'climate change' to describe the underlying challenges humanity will face in the 21st century is that it is easily spun by fossil fuel funded marketing specialists claiming that the Earth's climate has changed in the past and life on Earth evolved and adapted to make way for humans.  This group of climate change deniers are also the same people fighting to replace the teaching of natural evolution in school with divine creationism theories.

Of course the Earth's climate has changed in past; but the main difference between those changes in the past and the current shift in climate is the speed at which it is occurring.  Add to that the nitrogen imbalances and water cycle shifts, and the formula for global chaos as humanity shifts their respective geographical locations to a more erratic new reality is securely in place.

Does nature have a right to exist on its own, or is its only right to exist a function of its relative value to society?  Should oil companies be able to fight against higher fuel efficiency in cars and trucks to increase revenue in the industry; should coal companies get to redefine debris from mountaintop mining and call it 'fill' so as to avoid Clean Water Act violations; should natural gas companies be able to inject secret chemicals into the ground; should nuclear power companies be able to release radioactive water in the sea and store nuclear waste onsite near vigorous population centers; should genetically modified foods be introduced to the environment on massive scales before their effects on pollinators are studied?  Should taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the environmental cleanup associated with these industries all the while subsidizing more destruction?

What recent events across the planet have been showing us is that we are moving into a new age.  The Holocene is the epoch in which we are currently living, and it has yet to be divided into corresponding ages because it is but 11,000 or so years old.  Geologists have proposed calling our age within the Holocene the Anthropocene, but it is a more reasonable view to see the Anthropocene as already passed [our first 11,000 years of human civilization]; we are at the pinnacle of the Anthropocene [a.k.a. the end of an age within the Holocene epoch].  We are shifting into a new age where the planet has no other option but to continue to fluctuate wildly until humanity's contamination is cycled through the natural systems.  The next 10,000 years will likely see, not a rise in human population, but rather a steep decline as is forecast for all other living systems on Earth.  Prayer and Physics are two distinct options for dealing with and explaining planetary changes.

Going on in a parallel universe to these dramatic Earth changes is the political reality.  In the face of runaway arctic warming, the thawing of permafrost, warming oceans, shifting rainfall patterns, increased drought, rising sea levels, extinction levels above statistical averages, as well as the well-documented effects of chemical contamination in our air and freshwater resources on human health, governor Perry proposes prayer as a solution to the environmental crisis humanity faces.  Meanwhile, international talks on real risk mitigation for the human species remains stalled because of Perry and his fellow Republicans' actions in the U.S. Congress.  It is becoming apparent that in the U.S. Congress, risk management has been replaced with blatant ignorance regarding Science in general. Republicans seem to think that scientists should concentrate more on the financial bottom line rather than facts associated with observation, and that priests should be in charge of the country's national energy policy.

Governor Perry's rain dance request is a perfect example of the discord between environmental and political reality.  Perry is more famous for his stance against the EPA in the recent past, as well as his threats to secede from the U.S. [yes, in the 21st century] if the EPA goes ahead with carbon regulations.  He is now attempting to lead his state through one of the worst droughts in its history with a rain dance.  Power outages, agricultural disruptions, livestock losses in addition to sweeping wildfires raging through the state are now the reality that governor Perry is forced to try to explain, and since he and his Republican colleagues have ruled out Science of any kind, they are only left with religion to explain the only version of reality that he understands.

In the modern world, there are cause and effect explanations for natural events.  Droughts across the southern U.S. are generally caused by La Nina, a shifting of warm waters in the Pacific Ocean. This La Nina has been particularly intense.  Climate models, which were bashed by fossil fuel funded marketing specialists since their inception, forecast these exact drought scenarios that are now playing out across the globe. In fact, the Middle Eastern uprisings were even predicted using forecast climate data as it was applied to agricultural output.  The only difference between the models and reality is that reality is presenting the scenarios in real time at a much faster pace than the models predicted.

Left with nothing else to explain the drought in his state, governor Perry recently led is constituents in prayer for rain.  While praying for things is generally a good thing, direct action is much more effective.

Scientists have concluded after decades of research that human chemical contamination of the atmosphere, Earth, and water systems is what is causing disruptions to the stability of life on planet Earth.  There is a singular choice here.  We are in for several centuries of rough changes on this planet, but if the human species is going to survive in the long-term, the poisoning of our planet has to stop now.  Many environmentalists have been praying for decades for the healing of our land, and all we've gotten from Republicans is more Rick Perrys.

Current readings of CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere are at 392 ppm; the last time levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were this high was 3 million years ago, long before conditions on the planet gave rise to human beings.  In fact, the past 2.5 million years on Earth have been characterized by the cyclical glaciations.

It looks as though this pattern is going to be broken and that the forecast for the future is more warming. In fact, if we use the fossil records of the past as an indication of how much warmer it will get, current CO2 levels indicate that it could be 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average across the planet [28 degrees Fahrenheit warmer at the Poles] with sea levels 82 feet higher than they are today.  This does not even mention what such an influx of freshwater into the ocean circulation system will do to weather patterns across the planet. This is if we stabilize at 400 ppm and keep praying.

People will have to migrate from where they have grown comfortable.  Communities that were birthed from certain industries will go bust; ghost towns will be the norm.  When the financial system can no longer bear the weight of the planet's failing ecosystems, what kind of natural environment will we be left to escape to, depend on?  Will the planet simply be too toxic to support life once the power shuts off?  What happens to all of that stored nuclear fuel with no power to pump the water to cool it? How much chemical contamination can the planet take before it is unable to support life anymore?

If Texas governor Perry were to ask his constituents to pray for anything, it ought to be for less ignorance and more insight into the underlying problem [and possibly more Science textbooks].  This moment in Texas ought to be used to pray for a solution to the underlying environmental problems that will give people in the future a fighting chance at overcoming the rampant chemical contamination of the Earth that we in the present are leaving them to deal with.