Sunday I played a concert in Bakersfield on what was the smokiest day in Vermont history. More of Quebec has gone up in smoke in the last 20 days than in the previous 20 years. For a time, little Burlington Vermont had the worst air quality of any recording station in the United States.
And last fall, in nearby Sheldon, I played on what was the hottest November day ever. As I said in the writeup of that concert, it will surely not be the last all-time temperature record of this project.
Only a year into this project, I feel the part about “calling attention to” the climate crisis at my concerts is already markedly less called for than when I started—rapidly becoming altogether superfluous.
I’ve always feared that by the time the change in climate was undeniable to ordinary perception, it would be too late to address. Meanwhile, some of the best climate scientists and communication experts say it’s never too late to prevent ever worse outcomes. I want to believe them! But tipping points are tipping points. When systems like the polar icecaps, or the carbon-rich permafrost, or the Amazon forest change state, the effects might be orders of magnitude larger than any human reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, or any human effort to strengthen carbon capture. The falling-off-a-cliff analogy could pertain here, and there's no return from that, not in a human-relevant timeframe.
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