tipping points

[Ed]

So I just went to this talk by Robert Cox, former president of the
Sierra Club, about environmental communication, with a little bit about
environmental justice. Apart from the scathing criticism of the Bush
administration, he managed to bring up an interesting pair of
discussion points (in my mind), relating to tipping points. First,
there are the tipping points that will take global warming and turn it
from something bad to something terrible; he listed three - coral
bleaching and acidificaiton of the oceans, dramatic sea level rise, and
the shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. On the
flip side, he brought up that there seems to be a growing popular
acceptance of the need to do something in the face of global warming, a
ground swell of support coming from state and local governments,
clergy, and even board rooms. It seems as though we are on the cusp of
global warming becoming what I think it needs to become, and that is
the crisis of our times. What I'm wondering is what is it going to
take to push it over the edge to the point where we can get a popular
movement really going? And related to this is the question of what has
prevented global warming from gaining traction with the general public
thus far? I've got lots of ideas here, but I wanted to get our
discussion rolling first.