It is hard to quibble with climate change when the freaky weather is freaky good. Less than three weeks after the Great Blizzard of 2011 stopped traffic literally in its tracks on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, it looks like April outside. Mountains of snow have disappeared into the ground and thin air as tree buds fatten and little green shoots of precocious flower bulbs poke up through the dirt. It’s like one giant “nevermind…”  The bill for all the plowing and salting and towing and snow-day-ing hasn’t even come due and the evidence has vanished.

We are flirting with 60 degrees. There are robins. The chill is gone from the wind. Our local groundhog, whose prediction came a day early this year—the zoo was closed on February 2—was right: early spring. Scratch that. Earliest spring.

Yes, it’s going to get cold again. Snow will fall. Water will freeze. But it won’t last. The earth is now tilted in our favor.

“When we ring the siren, at some point we do bring the ambulance,” says Amy Larkin, director of Greenpeace Solutions, the environmental organization’s lesser-known division that works with industry to find and implement climate-friendlier answers. We recently caught up with Larkin, and her colleague, engineer Claudette Juska, after they taped an Worldview interview here in Chicago. Their focus: F-gases, a.k.a. “the worst greenhouse gases you’ve never heard of.”

If you have ever used a refrigerator, flicked on an air-conditioner or strolled the freezer aisle in a grocery store in the U.S., you are guilty-by-unavoidable-association of helping to warm the world through F-gas-driven cooling.

It is a very big deal. F-gases account for 17% of the world’s global warming impact, says Larkin. “That’s not annual emissions. That’s cumulative impact.” In other words, they tend to hang around in the atmosphere. The story gets even more jaw-dropping when when you learn that not only are there alternatives, but they been tested and used by hundreds of millions of people in other countries for the last 20 years.

What gives?

Go Meave Leakey! With the addition of a single word tucked into a sprightly 6-million-year time-travelogue of our species’ history, the reigning matriarch of archeology’s most famous family blithely breezed past the troublesome—and artificial—division between man and nature: “Homo sapiens and other animals…,” said Leakey.  Not man and beast, but man as a beast, too. Which isn’t to say we are not unique. Noted Leakey, “We are the only species capable of destroying the biosphere,” which may very well be the most dubious distinction ever.

This shift away from an “us versus them” mindset emerged as a subtle but important theme at the recent TEDxMidwest conference in Chicago. From design and architecture, to conservation and reforestation, a new paradigm is emerging, one that offers genuine hope for slowing climate change, biodiversity loss and even improving health care.

Leakey’s casual comment may not have seemed all that radical, but it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Look up the word “zoonosis” and you will learn it is an animal disease that can also affect humans. By implication, then, humans are not animals. This is what every doctor is taught.

The arrogance of the definition regularly comes back to bite us—sometimes literally. Nearly 2/3′s of human maladies are zoonotic, including ebola, SARS, influenza, plague, cowpox and West Nile virus. Yet despite countless “teachable moments” over the last several years, budgets and databases, along with veterinarians and doctors, remain largely segregated. Score one for the pathogens…

Of all the horrifying stories to come out of Pakistan in this long waterlogged summer of raging floods, perhaps the most tragic is why the disaster become a full-blown, future-blighting catastrophe: Deforestation had left the country stripped of almost all its forest cover. Trees that would have soaked up rain and slowed the flow weren’t there to do so. Nor were roots in place to keep land from sliding away.

Adding insult to injury, according to Al Jazeera, money from illegal logging near the Afghan border in Malakand found its way into the pockets of the Taliban. And in a literal cascade of bad to worse, the ill-gotten timber, stashed temporarily in ravines, magnified the destructive power of the flood-waters, shredding bridges and roads in the hurtle down river.

When the waters eventually recede, an eroded landscape will emerge. Whatever fertility the ground held will have been leached away, much of it to end up as mucky silt, clogging Pakistan’s over-extended, under-maintained massive irrigation network.

The devil really is in the details: Fine print can kill. In 2005, as part of Bush/Cheney Energy Bill, a then obscure natural gas mining technique -  hydraulic fracturing – was given an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Corporations were now allowed to keep the chemical contents of fracking fluid, used to break up shale deposits, a proprietary trade secret. Since Halliburton, where Dick Cheney had been CEO prior to becoming vice president, was one of the few producers of fracking fluid, the exemption became known as the “Halliburton loophole.”

Freed of any legal constraints, the fracking gold rush was on. It didn’t matter how many dozens of carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic compounds environmentalists discovered and documented in the “secret sauce,” the energy companies had the law on their side. Indeed, they had the law in the bag.

Since the BP gusher started spewing millions of gallons of crude oil and methane into the Gulf of Mexico more that three months ago, there have other high profile spills, including one of China’s largest, near the city of Dalian, that created a 170 mile slick. Closer to my home in Chicago, a pipeline break released over 800,000 gallons into western Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, which flows into Lake Michigan.

Last year, Australia took a one-two punch, first with a tanker spill that fouled 40 miles of Queensland’s coast, then an oil rig blow-out eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Nigeria, oil spills have become such an every day nightmare – an estimated 7,000 between 1970 and 2000 - that the tally is measured in units of “Exxon Valdez” (over 50 and still counting).

What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.Wildfires have consumed hundreds of square miles. In Moscow, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. (update 8/8/10:Peat fires send Moscow pollution levels soaring, a third of the wheat crop lost, exports temporarily banned)  (update 8/10/10: Russians defend nuclear sites from fires) Or…

The bottlenose dolphin swimming the Gulf of Mexico was “splattering oil out its blow hole.” The obscenity of such a thing was too much for marine conservationist, author and founder/director of the Blue Ocean Insitute, Carl Safina,whose voice broke as he told the story in the middle of a lecture at the TEDxOilSpill conference. No matter what BP may promise in its ubiquitous ads, there is simply no way to make something this horrible “right.” But as speaker after speaker noted, BP could start making things at least a little less wrong by coming clean with information.

The TEDxOilSpill Expedition team – photographers Duncan Davidson and Kris Krug, videographer Pinar Ozger and writer Darron Collins – were kept far from the water’s edge by BP’s private security firm, Talon,  whose staff controlled the beaches. When Collins literally crossed the line by stepping over a miles-long orange boom dozens of yards from the water line, he was accosted by a team right out of “Monsters Inc.,” who set about washing his feet and decontaminating his shoes with great flurry and fanfare.

Despite my general rule that once a day is designated for a cause, the cause is likely lost (or at least in serious trouble), I found myself rooting mightily last Saturday for Solarday. Missed it? It is only in its second year, but with global aspirations and the power of the sun on its side.

The power of new sun that is, not the fossil kind captured by plants millions of years ago and transformed into oil, coal and gas. Old sun is best left underground, underwater, under salt seals, in mountains and far, far away from tail pipes and smokestacks. Old sun warms the Earth in all the wrong ways. New sun offers a way out of Dodge.

The “teachable moment” in the Gulf, now stretching into its third month and threatening to stretch for years, frames the debate in the starkest of terms: oils spills versus sun spills. Which one would you prefer to soak up?

We have loads of clean / cleaner energy options beyond solar (photovoltaic, water heating):

If only there were a rewind button.

From the first, almost cheerfully do-able estimate of 1,000 barrels of oil spewing daily into the Gulf of Mexico to a…

• jaw-dropping 5,000 barrel revision

• horrifying 19,000 barrel update

• are-you-kidding-me? 25,000 barrel recalculation

• and an it’s way-way-way-more-than-the-Exxon-Valdez admission

…the bad news on the BP catastrophe has gone so far off the dial, it has zoomed past “worst case scenario” to “pretty much the worst case ever.”

Dispersants that present environmental issues of their own have only made the situation more complex. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil,” according to Admiral Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the clean-up. It will takes months to scrub the surface. Years at least to scrub the wetlands.