There is now almost univeral agreement in the community of environmental scientists that the timeframe in which it will be possible to prevent large-scale irreversible changes in the climate system that would endanger the lives of billions of people is about ten years. The inconvenient truth here is that a gradual incremental movement toward renewable energy resources and away from fossil fuels will be too little too late. It is also reasonable to assume that the transition to clean energy resources in such a short period of time will not occur in a business as usual scenario in the present political climate. There is now growing recognition that climate change is causally related to the extreme weather events occuring globally and that these events will continue to escalate in scope and scale. Perhaps this will be the catalyst for the massive changes required to prevent a human tragedy in a scale virtually impossible to inagine.