The air here is so clear that it is incomprehensible, friend.

We are sailing on the vessel Tecla, with the swirled gray gneiss and black granites of Greenland rising vertically before us. A whale surfaces, blows, black back wheels revealing a sickle fin before sliding back beneath the waves.

It looks like a minke whale, a mostly black whale about thirty feet in length. Just like the minke whales I had seen out of Rajkavek Iceland. However, it’s a sixty-foot fin whale twice as far away.

My mind had calibrated distance and size watching minke and fin whales off of Provincetown Massachusetts. Greenland’s crystal clarity tricks the mind.

There are none of the reference points for size, no trees, no human structures of any kind, no shoreline of sand or cobble. With massive rock and sea before us, the visual clues we’ve come to rely on are just not there. Everything seems so near, and yet, all is at a great distance.

To reach Greenland’s shore what you estimate will take an hour or two, actually takes six to eight hours as the land looms higher and higher.

The effects of global warming have only magnified the difficulty to comprehend what lies before us – we’ve done nothing to help ourselves. On a colossal planet, we are so small, so minuscule. We fool ourselves into believing all can be seen with our telescopes and microscopes, radar and sonar, spacecraft and computer chips.

But, humanity can never see it all. We must also comprehend how it works. How the burning of fossil fuels, the release instead of the capture of carbon, adds to the greenhouse gasses wrapped around our planet. This fog of Earth retains heat. Energy is turned back, taken up by the ocean to fuel the increased ferocity to storms. We don’t make hurricanes; we make hurricanes capable of lifting and hurling large refrigerators out of kitchen windows (witnessed repeatedly on Tortola BVI), of shredding and flattening all the buildings.

Just as we’ve created such violent storms, we’re capable of fixing our messes.

• I’ve had the pleasure of working with a business called Entelligent. We’ve developed predictive analytics, crunching lots of data, for smart climate investing.
• Recently, the UN announced its pension fund would divest in coal-related industries and add our impact investing instrument to their portfolio.
• There are new companies committed to taking carbon out of the very air we breathe and feeding it to microorganisms that photosynthesize to make ethanol to fuel cars and trucks.
• Jet fuel from atmospheric carbon is still in research and development. Investors are lining up including the U.S. Department of Energy.
• Iceland is now powering its automobiles and trucks with ethanol from the air. They want to phase out the need to transport fossil fuels.

We have the technology. Now, we must use it to do better. To protect our environment from rising sea levels and wild animals from mass extinction.

Together, we can. More soon,

Rob