For many of us, the field portion of the Polaris Project was just the beginning. While the scientists have haystacks of data to sift through, I have a stack of 20,000 photos waiting to individually perused, ranked, tagged, and grouped – a task for days and days.

Why do we do it? Because, rather quietly, more countries have set record high temperatures this year than any other single year in history. We have seen the hottest April, May, and June, hottest 12-month period, and hottest decade in the recorded history. Record flooding has destroyed millions of livelihoods in Pakistan, in the type of event that is predicted to become more and more common as temperatures rise. Russia and British Columbia are being devastated by forest fires sweeping through drought-strained forests. A new paper in Nature shows a 40% decline in phytoplankton in the oceans since 1950 because of warming seawater. The phytoplankton are a vital carbon sink, oxygen source, and the foundation of the entire marine food web.

But more on the fires – we flew over a dozen or more on the flights between Cherskiy and Moscow. The smoke was thick from the plane, but satellite views show that smoke is stretching across thousands of miles of Russia – equivalent to a haze from San Fransisco to Chicago. “practically everything is burning,” according to Russian president Medvedev. “…our country has not experienced such a heat wave in the last 50 or even 100 years… Overall, we need to learn our lessons from what has happened, and from the unprecedented heat wave that we have faced this summer. None of us can say what the next summer will be like. The forecasts vary greatly. Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.”

This is it folks. Climate change is not some vague threat of milder winters or melting ice. It is wildfires, floods, and hurricanes gaining power and frequency. It is crops, homes, and lives being lost. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.