Two dear friends of mine are planning to climb Mt. Blanc in September. I'm concerned because 9 climbers just died in an avalanche there. My friends are very safety-conscious, so they're going to evaluate the situation when they get there and make a final decision.

In reading the article, I noticed that global warming was mentioned near the top as a probable cause of the avalanche, with melting snow creating unstable conditions.
Then I read another article in The New York Times the same week, a long story that started on Page 1 about the terrible drought in the West that's forcing a lot of ranchers to sell their cattle early and at a loss. No mention of climate change, even though both increased droughts and flooding are two primary consequences of climate change.

Today, a quirky article in the Times said a new assignment for the Coast Guard in Alaska will only expand "as global warming melts these once ice-locked waters."

I find it gratifying that, at least in our nation's liberal newspaper of record, references to global warming and climate change to explain various phenomena are starting to make regular appearances, even if they often still aren't mentioned.

Bill McKibben has a new article in Rolling Stone, in which he mentions 3 numbers:  2 degrees Celsius is what most governments have agreed the planet can't warm above without risking catastrophic climatic changes; 565 Gigatons  is the amount of carbon we can spew into the air and not go above that 2 degree rise; and 2,795 Gigatons is the amount of carbon already contained in the proven global coal and oil and gas reserves. Since that larger number is five times greater than 565 gigatons, and since the fossil fuel industry and most politicians seem intent on exploiting every last ounce of coal, oil, and natural gas, "We have a problem, Houston." (And Houston, being on the Gulf coast, will assuredly have a problem with rising sea levels due to global warming).

Another number McKibben noted that I find scary is that May marked "the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7x10 to the 99th, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe."

If you already believe that global warming is real, and human-caused in large part, these numbers could either energize you or paralyze you, but if you don't believe it's real, then I don't think these numbers -- or any numbers -- would convince you. Just ask my brother. More on that to come.

My entrance into grandmotherhood (on July 4) coincided with an interview I did with environmental journalist and author Mark Hertsgaard, whose latest book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, came out last year and was inspired by the birth of his own daughter, Chiara, who's now 7.  He says parents are the most under-mobilized constituency around this issue, which he calls "bizarre" given the stakes for their children.

He and other parents have just launched a new group called Climate Parents, whose goal is to have parents (and grandparents, and anyone else who cares about kids)  apply political pressure to move the world off fossil fuels, starting with ending the billions in subsidies American taxpayers are providing to them. He says, "It is remarkable, and bizarre, that our tax dollars are now being spent, in the billions, to subsidize ExxonMobil, the single richest, most profitable corporation in human history. We are subsidizing them to wreck the climate for our kids."

Hertsgaard says tackling climate change on a personal/family level (changing light bulbs, biking or taking transit more, etc) are all worthwhile things, but don't get caught up in them because alone they won't come near to making the difference government policies can make.

And just to add fuel to his fire, so to speak, a new study came out this week, as reported in The New York Times,  tying specific events to climate change, and saying, for example, that the severe heat wave in Texas last year was made 20 times more likely than in  the 1960s, due to climate change. (The link to NYT isn't working but it's from July 11 and is headlined "Global Warming Makes Heat Waves More Likely, Study Finds.") The study will be published soon in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Association. I guess the bad news is that it's happening; the silver lining is that we now have more data to connect the dots.

Having a new little one in our family certainly makes me think more concretely about life on Earth 50 or 80 years on...and I don't feel optimistic. Maybe I need to join Climate Parents so I can fight depression with action.

So the House and Senate have finally reconciled a version of a reauthorized transportation bill that was almost three years overdue. It passed on June 29, the day before the latest extension on the existing law was due to expire. And what you think of it may depend on who’s telling the story.

The New York Times editorialized July 1 with the neutral headline, “At Last, a Transportation Bill,” but the gist of it is that what got finalized – and what President Obama will sign – is pretty good and could have been so much worse. The House version, besides cutting all dedicated funding to bike-ped projects, added unrelated anti-environmental riders that would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline bringing filthy bitumen (“tar sands”) down from Alberta to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, and prohibited regulation of toxic coal ash from power plants. Click here for my blog post in E Magazine about that.

The Times calls the final bill “serviceable,” noting that both those riders were knocked off. It also creates a Gulf Coast Restoration Trust Fund and sends 80 percent of the civil penalties BP must pay from its 2010 oil disaster to coastal restoration. Click here for an interview I did recently with Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network, in which he hopes for that outcome – the trust fund without the anti-environmental riders.

But check out Transportation for America’s take on the bill.   Here are some highlights:

“As a result of this ‘compromise,’ the bill dedicates zero dollars to repairing our roads and bridges, cuts the amount of money that cities and local governments would have received, makes a drastic cut in the money available to prevent the deaths of people walking or biking, and ensures that you have less input and control over major projects that affect you and the quality of your community. Despite record demand for public transportation service, this deal cut the emergency provisions to preserve existing transit service, does little to expand that service and actually removed the small provision equalizing the tax benefit for transit and parking.”

It goes on to mention “a few positives,” though:

“A new grant program will fund community-led planning for neighborhood revitalization around transit lines.  And a major increase in federally backed loans could help regions that raise their own transportation funds stretch them farther and build out ambitious transit plans faster.  While we didn’t end up with the bill that we were all hoping for, it is clear that this bill represents the last gasp of a 20th century transportation program that has run out of steam.”

And here’s what the League of American Bicyclists had to say:

“On Friday, Congress will vote on a new transportation bill that reverses years of progress on biking and walking policy and cuts by 60 to 70 percent funding for local safety projects such as sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes.”

So, by proposing a radical bill that was so unpopular it couldn’t make it through the House, the Republicans  still won pretty big time.