Gray: The ice man cometh — and never leaveth

Day 5: I’m officially out of socks and underwear. As I build my one-millionth fire, using the Sunday newspaper, I notice in the advertisements from JC Penney that all the guys in the ads look really happy. That’s because they are wearing clean underwear. I go to feed the fish and realize they are frozen; literally frozen in the water. I’ve been feeding dead fish for nearly a week. When this is over, I’ll definitely need therapy.

Is this guy trying to argue that carbon trading makes sense even if carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant?

While that future sounds grim, it is at least partially avoidable, if the White House, Congress and other world governments rise to the occasion. There are key assumptions in the report that are not inevitable or unchangeable. For example, it predicts that new energy technologies to replace fossil fuels "probably will not be commercially viable and widespread by 2025."

Well, maybe not, especially if governments do not make the right kind of investments in research, or stubbornly resist the call to put a fair price on carbon emissions, which would quickly make other energy technologies more cost competitive.

But given the pace of change over the past 16 years, is it really so far-fetched to imagine dramatic changes and improvements in energy 16 years from now?

There is no time to waste chattering about whether a snowstorm or two says anything about global warming. The United States, and other countries around the world, must move away from fossil fuels, or risk a future where they are all fighting over a diminishing resource needed to power their economies.