A friend of mine says a lot of Vermonters are about to get a rude awakening over the next couple of weeks as the traditional sugaring season disappoints. Maybe you and your friends are sugar makers.  Does the bare ground bush you are tapping look anything like a normal March?  More like mid April, I’d say.  How soon before the bud gets into the sap?  Regular winters like this could ruin the maple sugar industry.  Other friends wonder how the businesses people who depend on winter tourism could survive another snow-bare winter.   By mid-December, only eight of Vermont’s 20 Alpine downhill skiing resorts and two of its 30 Nordic cross-country resorts had opened. On Christmas Eve, the temperature in Montpelier was 68 degrees.

I hear activists and climate scientists ringing the warning bells, but who else is doing so? Everywhere I turn, there are people who don’t want to think about our changing climate.   Some people whistle by the graveyard proclaiming that this warm winter is simply a one-time event created by a strong El Nino.  They seem to have not noticed that the warmest ever winter we’ve just witnessed was simply following a growing trend of warmest-ever summers, springs and fall seasons.

If I try to talk about rational responses to our challenging future these folks  perform the psychic equivalent of covering their ears because they don’t want to be “bummed out by my negative thinking”. They aren’t prepared to face the overwhelming challenges of rapid climate change, which will include increased storm wreckage of our fragile infrastructure and pervasive economic disruption.

It turns out that there’s a psychological condition that explains this refusal to deal with the consequences any looming emergency such as global warming: it’s called normalcy bias. According to Wikipedia, normalcy bias is a mental state that people enter when facing a catastrophe:  “It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster and its possible effects. This may result in situations where people fail to adequately prepare and, on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations.” We think that because a disaster has never occurred, that it won’t; and when one does occur, we fail to react appropriately.

My wife is also curious about this bias.  She is a writer who is currently collaborating on a book about stopping epidemics.  A big question in the book is; why can’t people and governments take measures to control the threats of a pandemic before it becomes a disaster?  Medical science knows what to do with these challenges, but politicians refuse to act; just look at the painful history of the Reagan and Bush Administrations’ criminal refusals to deal with the exploding national and international AIDS crisis.

I seriously believe we are facing a worse and more pervasive emergency in global warming.  Vermont’s collective response to this crisis is going to require a lot more adaptation than we are comfortable accepting at the moment.  Only a couple of years ago, I remember seeing a maps that showed how Vermont would have a climate like North Carolina by the end of this century. The winter we just passed winter in Vermont looked more like what’s normal in West Virginia.  According to a new Australian study just published, we could find ourselves in a North Carolina climate by the end of this decade.  A few more of such winters will wreak havoc on our state’s economics and pastoral lifestyle.  Moreover, as the South and West get hotter and dryer, people will start to move north en mass. We don’t have the housing or infrastructure to support waves of climate refugees, and we don’t even want to discuss this possibility.

It’s time to overcome our normalcy bias and start looking ahead to a more challenging tomorrow. I find it unimaginable after all the climate change challenges of the past few years such as Irene, Sandy and this winter, we can’t understand that tomorrow will no longer look like yesterday.  Its time to start making painful choices if we want to develop a Vermont that is going to allow our children, and theirs, survive and prosper in a globally-warmed world.

If we were rational, we would immediately pass a carbon tax for both heating fuel and gas of about $100 per ton of CO2.  We need this tax, and neither because instituting it would be a virtuous model for other states, nor would it help stop the warming .  We need the money to immediately invest in our infrastructure and our efficiency so we will be prepared to meet momentous new demands looming in front of us.  Along with that, our state and institutions must immediately shift away from investment in fossil fuel stocks because the more coal and oil we dig out of the ground, the more destruction we’ll sow and reap.  As the damage becomes clearer, the return on these investments will plummet.  Such fossil fuel disinvestment will allow us to preserve that capital as the real cost of carbon pollution becomes obvious to everyone.

Global warming is not happening in the future; it’s happening now, all around us. A couple of generations ago, Vermonters had no problem with sacrificing today to build a better tomorrow for their children. We need to remember those value of sacrifice and frugality, before our children curse our names because we failed to believe a crisis was upon us before it was too late.

Dan Jones is a managing partner in Net Zero Vermont and a former chair of the Montpelier Energy Advisory Committee.