Does the Ice have to Melt for us to Learn to Swim

Yesterday's New York Times op-ed suggests we will never change until the disaster comes. Sounds like rational choice isn't very rational to me...
Is there another way? Similarly, a power company will wait till the branch hits the wire before it does anything, and an insurance company will pay to replace a roof, but not to trim a tree before it falls on the roof.  Maybe Thomas is right. If he is, what leads me to make the environmental decisions now (and I do make them now), before the crises comes...or have I decided the crises is upon us? I think it is one more case of my actions not fitting with predictions for popular behavior, which must say something about me and about predictions of popular behavior. Maybe disaster has nothing to do with it. Maybe I am celebrating something wonderful.

Disaster at the Top of the World

By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON

Aboard the Louis S. St-Laurent

STANDING on the deck of this floating laboratory for Arctic science, which is part of Canada’s Coast Guard fleet and one of the world’s most powerful icebreakers, I can see vivid evidence of climate change. Channels through the Canadian Arctic archipelago that were choked with ice at this time of year two decades ago are now expanses of open water or vast patchworks of tiny islands of melting ice. 
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