The Heat is on

Global Warming is changing our Climate and a loss of a hero

Sep 05, 2024

Ross Gelbspan in 2007. Credit: Fred Hayes/WireImage for Sundance Film Festival, via Getty Images

The other day I watched two of CAL FIRE’s fire trucks with sirens screaming as they hurried north on Highway 1 on their way to another fire somewhere outside of town. The same day another local fire popped up. This time it was inland, in the Ukiah Valley where our county seat is. A section of Highway 101—a major highway— was temporarily closed, and an evacuation order was issued for the zone involved. Classes at the local college were cancelled for that evening. The fire was contained, and emergency measures were cancelled.

In July, the 80-acre Grange Fire in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley caught everyone by surprise and luckily the damage could have been far worse. Electric power was down, a telecommunications cable was damaged by knocking out our internet, and the local radio station, which was in the evacuation zone, went off the air due to damaged equipment. Fires are on the rise here in the west. Be it due to such things as human folly or lightning strikes hitting dry grass. Yet there is something else in play— global warming and climate change.

Its the Climate Crisis!

I am reading again the updated edition of “The Heat is On, The Climate Crisis, The Cover Up, The Prescription” by a former colleague of mine Ross Gelbspan. Bill McKibben, environmentalist and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming and author of The End of Nature wrote, “ Until you read this book, you’re ill equipped to think about the Planet’s Future.” I agree. Do read the book!

I met Ross back in 1999 during the Greenhouse Network gathering at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. At the time, the Greenhouse Network was one of the few national action climate citizen leader training projects. This was before former U.S. Vice President Al Gore took his Inconvenient Truth traveling lecture tour on the road (which I later attended at U.C. Berkeley) and before his founding of the Alliance for Climate Protection and The Climate Project.

Hot Enough for Us?

Al Gore gave a review of Ross’s second book Boiling Point, where Ross maintains that, unchecked, climate change will swamp every other issue facing us today.In his second book Boiling Point, Ross Gelbspan warned us that unchecked, climate change will swamp every other issue facing us today.

Al Gore wrote the following in his Aug 4, 2004, NY Times Review : Hot Enough for Us?

''The Heat Is On in a remains the best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists who began to make themselves available for mass media interviews as so-called skeptics on the subject of global warming. Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IU4.16G5.MF58TIqkam2d&smid=url-share

I lost my copy of The Heat is On - on loan to someone somewhere. Ross gave us all a copy and it was signed by all of us who were at the Greenhouse Network at that gathering in 1999. I did find another copy, at a local bookshop.

The Heat is On by Ross Gelbspan, Perseus Books —Ask for it at your local library.

Remembering Ross

Ross was a no-nonsense guy. He had a great smile. His passion was infectious! His research was spot on and meticulous. He was a Boston Globe journalist at the top of his career and in 1984 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. He retired as journalist and continued in trying to wake us all up to the Climate Crisis.

Ross died at the age of 84 this February, 2024. His Washington Post and NY Times obituaries lauded Ross for criticizing those who lied to the public and sowed misinformation as well as those who gave a forum to those who fabricated lies about the qualified peer reviewed scientific data on the dangers of Climate Change.

Brian Murphy of the Washington Post wrote of Ross, “Ross Gelbspan, a journalist and author … followed the money trail of climate change denial, exposing how the energy industry and lobbyists pushed narratives to counter overwhelming evidence that use of fossil fuels was driving global warming.”

I remembering seeing Ross again in Marin County years later and we both shook our heads that we were still at this—trying to help people grapple with the evidence that global warming is real.

I did not see or speak to Ross often. But there was a bond that many of us had with Ross. I remember calling him around the time of another one of California’s largest fires. Looking out my window at the eerie orange and smoke-filled sky. I said to Ross, “ This is nuts, so many are still not connecting this to Global Warming and Climate Change…remember? … we saw the first IPCC working Group II climate projection models, even the CIA was seeing Climate Change back then as a global and national security threat. And here we are, and the climate model predictions are no longer predictions- this are our reality.”

Looking out my Window -Photo by Mary Rose Kaczorowski 2020

I am looking at one of the letters from Ross that I received dated May 16, 2022. I am sure that he would not mind that I share some excerpts from it with you:

Ross wrote:

“As for the climate crisis, it seems clearer and clearer that nature’s health and runaway capitalism do not mix. It seems inevitable we’re going to endure a slew of climate-induced global disruptions-more crop failures, water shortages, conflicts engendered by increasing numbers of refugees whose homelands are no longer survivable and shocks to economic and political stability from increasingly destructive extreme weather events.

But I do agree with you big time- that the only real hope lies in the enthusiasm of young people. The generation of new and coming adults seem refreshingly non-ideological, very pragmatic and focused on problem-solving regardless of any political taint. So many of my contemporaries feel guilty about the future that we are leaving them. I feel immensely sad- but not guilty. I told my wife that if she wants to spend money on a headstone, all I want on it is: ‘He Tried.”

I know I have a photo that I took of Ross somewhere. I can’t seem to find it quickly. So here is one that I found on the internet that I like for his kind smile.