By CECIL BOTHWELL

 As another “warmest winter ever” rolls on in some parts of the country, and the film “Chasing Ice” (2012) reveals the ongoing collapse of glaciers around the world, and Atlantic storms visit record damage on our coasts, anyone who entertains serious doubts that the global climate is undergoing accelerating change is simply delusional. 

Not only is it getting warmer fast, it is getting warmer faster than most scientific models predicted just a few years ago.

The only meaningful question we need to ask is “What is to be done?”

On the coasts we should be considering every plan for building (or rebuilding after storms) with the assumption that sea level will rise significantly by the end of this century.

How high has been the subject of numerous educated guesses, from a foot to several feet, perhaps depending on whether the Greenland ice sheet slides into the ocean.

It is no longer rational to build at low elevations fronting on the ocean. Where our infrastructure investment is large, we need to be designing and funding dikes, but in less intensively developed areas we ought to sound the retreat as the sea claims our buildings.

Here in the mountains the physical situation is no less dire, though we obviously aren’t going to be underwater anytime soon. But landslides do happen and could become more common and intense as rainfall patterns change.

Weather modeling suggests that rainfall events will tend toward deluge in a warmer climate, because warm air holds more water vapor.

In mountain regions air is forced up where it cools so that water condenses and falls. We can expect more very heavy rains (and at the same time, more extended droughts, since water evaporates faster, and trees transpire faster, in hot weather.)

The mountain version of dike building is careful land-use planning and regulation of development on steep slopes. As a glaring example, the avalanches that block traffic on I-40 with some frequency are a direct result of carving that highway through gorges in the mountains. Left to themselves mountains are fairly stable over humanly meaningful time frames. The mud slide at Ghost Town in the Sky was directly related to develpment on that mountain. And so on.

So we can take action to protect ourselves from potential physical changes, and we should.

Now, most scientists are convinced that much of the current planetary warming trend is a direct result of human activity, chiefly through burning of fossil fuels. As Bill McKibben has explained via his activist group 350.org, it appears that if carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere remains above 350 parts per million, we will arrive at runaway heating sooner or later.

The chief cause of the runaway effect will be the release of methane gas currently trapped under frozen tundra—now melting at a record pace, and a change in the chemistry of the oceans, which sequester less carbon as they acidify.

If we really care as much for our children and grandchildren as most people claim, reducing our carbon output is job one.

The City of Asheville has adopted carbon reduction goals for city operations for several years, and we continue to exceed our annual target of a 4 percent decrease. 

We’ve tightened up buildings, improved interior lighting and climate controls, implemented single-stream recycling, invested in more efficient and alternative fuel vehicles, and perhaps most visibly, begun to replace all of our street lights with LEDs.

These new fixtures will provide better lighting, less glare, and reduce the City electric bill by something like $365,000 per year. That is fuel that is not being burned, and, yes, it’s a big deal.

But now the City is aiming to extend that sort of planning into the community, to fashion policies that help citizens reduce their residential and business carbon footprints. And here’s the real deal, you will be getting help on saving energy, and that is going to save you money, too.

You can help save the climate, and keep the change.

(I’ll tell you more about what you can do in next month’s Daily Planet.)

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Cecil Bothwell is author of eight books, including “Whale Falls: An Exploration of Belief and Its Consequences,” and a member of Asheville City Council.