It’s hard out there for a polar bear. The setting is Svalbard, an archipelago about 500 miles north of Norway. A big, lumbering male -- like there’s any other kind, ladies, amirite? -- wakes up from his long winter snooze and is hungry. For love. His super sniffer catches the scent of a female a "mere" 10 miles away, and with one shrug of his mighty ursine shoulders, he sets off. By craftily following her tracks, he conserves energy and picks up speed. Which is crucial, because there are a bunch of other horny man-bears out there who have already inhaled the same intoxicating perfume. And they aren't stepping aside.

A quick step back before we get to the fireworks: It's hard to believe, but it's been five years since the Planet Earth phenomenon first lit up American television sets (especially in the homes that were lucky enough to be early adopters of HD), reminding an ever more plugged-in public that we actually live in a big, beautiful world brimming with animals and forests and mountains and caves and all kinds of mind-blowing stuff. You know. Nature, man. The show, produced by the BBC and aired here in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel, was a breakthrough. Not for a generation had a nature series made such an impact, and suddenly it seemed like everybody -- families, classrooms, animal lovers, stoner 20something roommates (ahem) -- was tuning in.

The makers of Planet Earth are back with more mind-blowing nature porn (let’s call it what it is, folks), this time in the form of Frozen Planet, which concentrates on the snow- and ice-covered (although, less so nowadays, which is part of the problem) extremes of our world. So, throat-clearing accomplished, we now return to our action-packed recap (hey, if New York mag can do it, why can’t we?), and seriously, we’re only five minutes into this thing and already we’ve got sex and violence galore. Take that, Gossip Girl.

Our man-bear finally catches up to the Arctic’s Kim Kardashian, struts about, and shows her what he's got. She seems into him, sorta. They lock mouths (careful now!) and bat each other around a bit. "Polar bears," Jack Donaghy's voice snickers, "aren't above a little foreplay."

OK, second diversion here: I was really hoping that Discovery's promotional materials were exaggerating, for some reason, the role that Alec Baldwin would be playing in this whole project, and that the psychopathic rageaholic that Mitch and Murray sent down to terrify the likes of poor Shelley Levene wouldn't actually be the new voice of a series dedicated to raising consciousness about the endangered polar environment. ("Put ... that caribou ... down. Caribou's for closers only.") But my hopes were dashed on the smooth, seductive rocks of Baldwin’s justly famous half-whisper, half-growl.

What's the problem with Baldwin? Nothing, per se. It's just that he isn't, you know, Sir David Attenborough, the British national treasure who has been producing and narrating nature films for the better part of five decades, and in whose inimitable cadences passion and authority quite naturally reside. Was Discovery worried that Americans wouldn't be able to understand British English? Is this some belated payback for the unfortunate miscasting of Dick Van Dyke as the cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins? When Discovery pulled a similar narrative bait-and-switch for the American release of Planet Earth in 2007 (back then it was Sigourney Weaver filling in for Attenborough), my roommates and I pitched in and ordered the BBC version of the DVDs from Amazon. I'm willing to withhold judgment on Ice Cap Jack Donaghy until episode three. But after that, no promises.

So, back to the bears again. (We’ll stick with it this time, I swear.) With the promise of unimaginable connubial pleasures, the female bear leads her suitor up off the ice and onto a romantic mountain ridge. Twice, though, their coitus is interruptus by our man-bear's angry rivals, and our horny hero has to fight them off, one by one, in order to plant his seed. By the time he has finally sown his next of kin, his face and sides are horribly gashed, and he can barely stand up straight from hunger. Beaten and bloodied, but no less triumphant for his injuries, he bids the future mother of his children adieu -- for life.

He'll probably never see her again, Ice Cap Jack Donaghy tells us, nor his kids. Deadbeat.

Next we're off to the waters of the Bering Sea, just off of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. As the seasonal ice around the outside of the Arctic cap melts away (hey! I just wrote about this!), 18 million shearwaters are having a feeding frenzy. The krill must be half-price that day, as these seabirds have flown all the way up from Australia for the feast. They're not alone; humpback whales have made the trek from Hawaii. Bad time and bad place to be a krill. Next thing you know, though, we're in Greenland, where we're treated -- finally! -- to the first shots of truly mindbending beauty. Lakes of "meltwater" form on the top of Greenland's ice shelf, then carve winding rivers of sapphire blue through the shiny white expanse. All the stoners watching go, "ooooooh." Suddenly, the rushing waters drill straight down into the ice, dropping an unseen vertical mile. All the stoners watching go, "ahhhhhh."

Onward to the Northern Canadian tundra. How big do you think wolves can get? Seriously. Seventy-five pounds? One hundred pounds? Not even close. According to Ice Cap Jack Donaghy, the Northern Grey Wolf weighs in at 175 pounds -- that's almost two Keira Knightleys! -- and they travel in these huge packs. (Like wolves!) The pack we're watching is 25 strong, lead by a ferocious alpha bitch. (I can say that, right? She's a canis.) And they're hunting bison, which are 10 times their size.

As the wolves close in, the bison "circle the wagons," horns out. The wolves dart in and nip and bite and swarm and cause a general frenzy. The bison do what bison always do: stampede. But see, the wolves are wily. It's the old divide-and-conquer: All they really have to do is just get one bison, alone, off by himself. Which -- SPOILER ALERT! -- they do. A yearling can't keep up to the herd. And here's the first true stomach-dropping moment of the broadcast. (We just keep reminding ourselves: "They're animals! This is nature!") Seven, eight, ten, fifteen wolves lock their jaws on the yearling. It struggles. And then -- we swear we're not making this up -- an adult bison comes flying in from screen right and ... what do think is about to happen? He scares the wolves away and saves the yearling? Reasonably advocates for a form of non-violent conflict resolution? How about stone-cold knocks the yearling down to the ground and storms back into the herd! What the hell was that? A mercy kill? A strategic sacrifice? Collateral damage? Like we said: Nature, man.

Wanna know two pieces of trivia about Arctic geography? One: there's a 7,000-mile belt of unbroken forest, the taiga, that stretches around the North Pole. Two: it actually doesn't snow at the tippy-top of the planet, as snowflakes can only form farther south where the warm, moist air meets the cold Arctic air. We soon find ourselves here in the taiga, where we're treated to this episode's next trippy, stoner-pleasing sequence: Snowflakes forming around specks of dust. Words can't describe it. And, no, I have no idea how they filmed it.

The taiga is also home to my new favorite bird: the great grey owl. Ice Cap Jack Donaghy calls it the "master of silent flight" in his trademark whisper-growl (so cool … OK, maybe I’m warming to him). Apparently their talons can pierce through a hard snow crust three inches thick. Also, their feet look like Ewok feet.

Wait . . . wha? We're in Antarctica now? Okay! We're in Antarctica now! Though it may be described by some (Ice Cap Jack Donaghy is one) as "the Arctic's twin," in reality Antarctica seems to be just the opposite ... or maybe even its "anti-." Get it? Here's one way of thinking about it: If the Arctic is a frozen sea surrounded by land, Antarctica is a frozen land surrounded by ice and ocean. You're welcome.

Stop thinking about that for a minute, because there are penguins to look at. Adorable, hilarious penguins. You'd think that March of the Penguins would've pretty much closed the whole book on penguin documentaries, right? Nope. "Game on, Morgan Freeman" says Frozen Planet. I, for one, will be spending the better part of this week making sure that everyone I know has watched these goofy birds body surf -- or rather, project themselves like tubby little missiles out in front of the waves. Too cute. I can't even handle it.

So I don't at all appreciate what Frozen Planet make us witness next: a sea lion trying to eat one of these gentle little Gentoos. I don't want to spoil anything, but be forewarned: there are no less than four intense swings of emotion in this relatively short clip:

And there's still one more harrowing hunt that we have to endure. A Weddell seal with enormous, expressive eyes is just laying on some ice, bro, y'know, just catching some rays. Then this pod of four or five bloodthirsty orcas comes along and executes a complex and coordinated hunt. This isn't like a pack of wolves creating mayhem; this is a team of killer whales, whose name I now understand in a way that I didn't before, using advanced principles of physics and psychology to assassinate a seal. They literally choreograph this insane swim pattern in order to create a giant, swelling wave that knocks the seal from the ice floe. What follows feels like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie. But, y'know, with seals. Hard as it is to watch, it's every bit as impressive.

Watch this without getting misty. Seriously. Just try:

The second episode, “Spring,” also aired Sunday night. I'll be recapping it later this week and back for more after next Sunday’s episode (find them all here). Frozen Planet runs for the next five weeks on Discovery.

People spend a lot of time on Facebook -- comparing interests, sharing photos, stalking old high school crushes. Now they can also start seeing how their energy use stacks up against their friends' habits.

The Social Energy App, which launched yesterday, is a partnership between Facebook, the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), and Opower, a software company that helps customers connect with utilities. With Social Energy, Facebookers can easily track how many kilowatt-hours they consume each month and broadcast their numbers alongside photo albums, status updates, and wall posts. With a mix of peer pressure, competition, and positive reinforcement, Social Energy encourages users to lower their electricity consumption –- and then brag about it.

"People are particularly responsive to the idea of keeping up with the Joneses," says NRDC attorney Brandi Colander, who works on air and energy issues and helped develop the app. Why not harness that competitive instinct for a greener good?

Ten utility companies, which include ConEd and Pacific Gas & Electric, have joined the project already. Their customers, about 4 million Americans, can now pull their utility information directly into their smartphones. And what do we love to do with phones? Communicate with friends.

The app tracks your personal energy stats and shows how your friends are doing. For example, I can poke fun at my dad for how much more electricity it takes to heat my parents’ house in upstate New York. (You may be surrounded by trees, Mom and Dad, but my Brooklyn apartment is definitely greener!) Another feature allows users to team up in groups to tackle bad consumption habits together.

To start, Social Energy directs you to the Opower site, where you'll answer basic questions about your home and location and then upload information from recent electric bills.

Warning: when signing up, the app asks if it can post status updates for you. Only say yes if you’re confident you want to show the world how much you consume. If you opt out, you can change your mind later when you feel ready to share (perhaps after easing up on the A/C for a month).

Importantly, if you aren't sure how to improve your performance, the app won't leave you alone in the dark eating cold Pop-Tarts. Social Energy shares plenty of advice on how to cut consumption, which you can then pass on to your peeps. Some tips are pretty obvious: let clothes and dishes air dry, pick energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, etc. Others are much less so, but just as simple. For example, I’ve never thought about cleaning my refrigerator coils or using spotlights instead of overhead lighting while working.

“What we’re doing is using a social networking platform that people are already familiar with,” says Colander, explaining why she thinks Social Energy will succeed where other energy consumption apps and websites have failed. And if good old-fashioned competition doesn’t spark peoples' motivation, the new app might also give away prizes to those achieving the biggest dips in energy use. I’ll give a Facebook thumbs up to that.

Image: Opower

When the New York Times ran a snarky story (“Going to Extreme Lengths to Purge Household Toxins”) under a picture of my daughter, Maya, a few weeks ago describing my efforts to rid my home of toxic chemicals, you can bet the comments from readers were merciless. Readers accused me of trying to keep my child in a bubble and mocked me as yet another privileged, neurotic helicopter mom.

Truth be told, instead of a posh housewife, for years I was a cash-strapped public interest lawyer who roamed the halls of Congress with brokenhearted families after some federal agency had failed to protect them. I worked on the Ford-Firestone rollover tragedy and the discovery of lead in children’s toys from China, among other disasters for public health. So when I had my own child, it seemed important to think through the risks to her health for myself.

Still, the pointed comments got me thinking: are moms, and parents generally, bad or good at predicting risks to children? I’ve decided that while parents might not be perfect, we’re a good sight better than the Food and Drug Administration.

Contrary to stereotype, moms (and dads) are actually expert risk assessors. In fact, it’s no overstatement to say that risk assessment is a major part of the job. Parents constantly assess both the benefits and risks to their child, of say, crossing the street, eating that suspect ball-park hot dog, going to summer camp, or even, as at my house, playing on our splinter-filled back deck (allowed, but shoes required).

On the other hand, we have the FDA. Eleven states, and at least eight countries, including Canada, China, and the European Union, have already banned the chemical Bisphenol-A -- a dangerous chemical added to plastic food containers and can linings -- in some or all products. Hoping to head off more comprehensive rules, the chemical industry in the U.S. even asked regulators last September for a ban on BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups.

Nonetheless, the FDA recently decided to keep exposing all of us to BPA, which shows up in the urine of 93 percent of Americans. This was a big step backward from the agency’s public position in 2010, which said that BPA was of “some concern” with regard to health impacts like early puberty and prostate cancer. That statement was based on a 2008 report from the National Toxicology Program, which concluded that there is “some concern for effects on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children at current human exposures to bisphenol A.”

Four long years later (a period which included the birth of my daughter in 2010), the FDA’s disappointing decision to punt left in its wake a dizzying array of contradictory messages for the public on the safety of BPA. While FDA said that its recent decision was not a final determination and that it would continue to study the issue, the chemical industry’s flacks said the decision meant that BPA “is safe for use in food-contact materials.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, meanwhile, states that “[i]t is clear that the government… need[s] more research to better understand the potential human health effects of exposure to BPA, especially when it comes to the impact of BPA exposure on young children.” HHS also provides recommendations to parents about “minimizing BPA exposure,” including helpful information on BPA levels in various types of containers for infant formula and the advantages of breastfeeding. This is in marked contrast to the cursory, lame non-guidance from the FDA, which states “FDA is not recommending that families change the use of infant formula or foods.”

Really? No changes? It’s shocking that in the face of health concerns that even the government has acknowledged, FDA won’t provide any shred of guidance for pregnant women and parents about how to minimize exposure for their baby. How about the obvious: families should avoid baby bottles with BPA in them, ready-to-use formulas, baby foods with BPA in the lining of lids, and canned foods with a BPA lining. Or that pregnant women, like the one working the cash register at my local café last week, should avoid handling receipts and money, which have been shown to be covered in unbound BPA?

In the face of such indifference to the risks, I’ll just point out the clear superiority of parents as deciders. In fact, parents generally make balanced -- and protective -- choices, weighing both benefits and risks. Kids can’t and shouldn’t live in a bubble, sure, so parents do the best they can with the information that they have. But when they think about the downsides, they also make a very precise accounting, a moral and ethical accounting, you might say, that reflects the place in their heart occupied by their own child.

Parents everywhere take note: this kind of protective approach should also be the yardstick used by government when it assesses the risks to its citizens. When I worked on the Ford-Firestone rollover disaster, accompanying the mother of a dead 18-year-old boy to her senator’s office to argue for more protective auto safety rules, what she expressed most poignantly, besides the devastating impact of her loss, was her profound, tragic heartbreak that she “didn’t know” about this risk -- that she “didn’t know” that the government would allow things to be sold that were unsafe -- that she assumed, in fact, that government would view the life and health of her child in the same loving, protective way she did.

If only it were so. When the FDA and the White House plays politics with our health and lives, when regulators admit a chemical in our food supply is unsafe yet refuse to even offer adequate guidelines for parents to protect their babies and children, and when a potential threat to our health is so impossible to avoid, we need a new, and far better, ethic for assessing risks and the safety of families.

We should enact laws that require products to be proven to be safe before our children and families can be exposed. And in the case of FDA, we shouldn’t tolerate these ridiculous waiting games. The agency should meet its legal obligation to protect the public from chemicals that can reach our food supply and have not been proven to be safe. That would be a government that only a mother could love.

Image: Campaign for Safe Cosmetics

This garden season, I'm planning to introduce you to new cookbooks (and their authors) that embrace eating homegrown foods.

To kick things off, meet Alana Chernila, author of the new cookbook The Homemade Pantry. Alana is a writer, cook, gardener, mother, and a passionate advocate of the homemade over the industrially produced. (Full disclosure: I’m lucky that Alana is also my friend, and I’m thrilled that everyone from Martha Stewart to Amanda Hesser has discovered her work, thanks to the new book.)

For the sake of both health and budget, Alana gradually began making more and more of her family’s staple foods from scratch. But there's nothing preachy going on here. Alana is all about the joy of eating. Yes, she bakes her own bread, but she also makes her own mozzarella and marshmallows. With wit and calm, she can teach even a hesitant cook to swap homemade sandwich cookies for Oreos and from-scratch toaster pastries for Pop Tarts. She might even get you to try pickling or canning for the very first time. And she’s got a solution for those of us who steer away from commercial soda (loaded with high fructose corn syrup) that is perfect for spring gardeners: gingery rhubarb syrup to mix with seltzer. (Or add vodka for a cocktail -- more on that later.)

I love rhubarb for its old-fashioned feel and its astringent, sweet tart flavor. (It's reminiscent of sorrel, a distant relative.) The sweet in that flavor profile is thanks to cooking with plenty of sugar: to most palates, the stalks are unpalatably sour when raw. My rhubarb is just days away from a first harvest and will continue to produce all summer. Alana loves this old-fashioned is-it-a-fruit-or-a-vegetable, too, and offers several ways to use this early-season crop. (For the record: it’s a vegetable. But it was classified as fruit by the United States Custom Court in Buffalo, New York, in 1947 for the purposes of levying appropriate tariffs on it.)

Alana's western Massachusetts garden rambles out behind her house, offering a high, glorious view toward the Hudson Valley. Alana and her family have their own rhubarb patch, a handful of fruit trees, and beds dedicated to garlic and greens and space for other vegetables to come. It's rambling, unfussy, well-tended, and practical. But Alana says she (like me) is very much a beginner when it comes to gardening, and she's OK with that. "For me, gardening is the moment when I try to go easy on myself. It's therapy, and putting my hands in the soil seems to ease most difficult moments. I've been gardening for five or six years now -- I'm such a beginner! I don't plan as well as I could, and the weeds take over every year, but I love being out there, and saying, 'Well, next year I'll do better!'"

Gardening fits perfectly into the cravings that led Alana to write The Homemade Pantry. "The project really came about out of a desire to reclaim my ability to feed myself and my family well ... the satisfaction and thrill of taking the food system into our own hands (and doing it better) has really increased my quality of life. Growing my own food, and being connected to the farmers who grow my food -- this is, in some ways, the purest form of that reclamation. The joy of eating something wonderful that you've sown and nurtured and grown is pretty hard to match."

Take hold of your own spring refreshment with Alana's ultra-simple recipe for Rhubarb Ginger Syrup. To make flavored seltzer, add 2 T. syrup to each cup of seltzer. For a full-on soda experience, the ratio is 1/3 cup syrup to 1 cup seltzer. And how about that cocktail? Blend equal parts of the syrup and vodka (about an ounce each), add the juice of half a lime (or more, to taste), and mix with about 3 ounces seltzer for a fizzy, sweet, and sour drink. Serve over plenty of ice. Cheers!

Rhubarb Ginger Syrup

(from Alana Chernila's The Homemade Pantry, Clarkson Potter, 2012)
makes 6-7 cups

2 pounds rhubarb, cut into 1-inch pieces
8 cups water
4 T fresh lime juice (from 2 to 3 limes)
1 T fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
1/2 cup sugar or more to taste
A few sprigs of fresh thyme or a handful of fresh lemon balm, mint, or a combination of the two

Combine the rhubarb and water in a medium suacepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to low, and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the rhubarb is almost dissolving. Use a slotted spoon to scoop out the rhubarb. (You can save this, and eat it over yogurt or ice cream.)

Add the lime juice to the rhubarb water, along with the ginger and sugar. Raise the heat to medium-high and cook at a low boil, uncovered, for 20 minutes or until themixture is slightly reduced and thickened.

Remove it from the heat, add your herb of choice, and cover. Let steep for 5 to 10 minutes. Taste and add sugar if needed. Strain through a fine-meshed sieve into a jar or bottle and let cool. In a covered bottle or jar, this will keep for 10 days in the refrigerator or 6 months in the freezer.

Image: whitneyinchicago/Flickr. Cover art and author photograph from The Handmade Pantry courtesy of Clarkson Potter.

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35 percent of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it. There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day. If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot -- and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.

Pakistani farmers -- some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years -- will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.

Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia. In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.

In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in. In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers. In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.

And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.

In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station. In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of western children’s literature, The Wizard of Oz. “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.

This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on. But -- as with the tobacco industry before them -- the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird. Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly, wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is ... the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change -- and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.

So here’s a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story -- and it’s the most important story of our time -- we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
Image: Wikipedia Commons