“And God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” Genesis: Chapter 2, verse 28.

And there it is – the command that has energized the Judeo-Christian world through the millennia – to take charge of the earth’s riches. And take charge we did, managing to destroy major portions of God’s great gift.

Wake-up calls began to be sounded more than sixty years ago with Rachel Carson’s radical-at-the-time book – “Silent Spring”, chronicling the effects of DDT on the natural world; “Limits to Growth” sounded an even more serious alarm forty years ago on the carrying capacity of the earth. Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, detailing the alarming rise of CO2, was considered just too inconvenient at the time and it too slid into history.

Mother Nature now seems to be preparing to take back the gift of the earth and one wonders how many cataclysmic events it will take to get our attention. Here’s a far from complete tally of recent events: a devastating tsunami in the South Pacific; another tsunami and earthquake in Japan, knocking out nuclear power in that country; Katrina, a hurricane that nearly took out a major American city; Hurricane Irene that destroyed a number of towns in upstateNew York. Or finally, Hurricane Sandy, a storm that took out countless coastline communities in the Tri-state area, plus the much vauntedNew York Citytransit system. The earth is talking back. Is anyone listening?

Climate change is a looming disaster that we could have mastered had we been able to admit a role in its creation early on. To be sure, dramatic alterations in global climate have been the profile of the earth since the beginning but the relentless rise in carbon dioxide directly related to the increased use of fossil fuels is a difficult trend to ignore.  Nonetheless, there is still disagreement about the severity, if not the reality, of global climate change as it relates to the use of fossil fuels. No agreement on a solution at the federal or the global level is likely any time soon. The latest DOHA (Qatar) UN climate conference has settled into its typical doldrums, with most major questions unresolved as the conference winds down.

This decade has again been the warmest on record, maintaining its upward trajectory. Economists, corporate honchos and politicos can think quite comfortably about the global economy when it comes to business transactions and how to find the cheapest place to produce goods but have an excruciatingly difficult time accepting what else is going on in the world, such as what the weather might be doing beyond our borders and the possible implications for our own neighborhood. Scientists and policy makers without a vested interest in saying otherwise claim that we are headed for a catastrophe of unknown dimensions, that we had better start planning for a very warm and turbulent future.