I'm visiting my family in New Jersey, and they live right by the bay. Taking a walk on the beach last night, there's still so much damage from Hurricane Sandy. As horrible as these climate-driven weather catastrophes are (and I'm not trying to minimize that, really), it seems like these events are what seems to be the tipping point for Americans to get behind. It's grim that we collectively seem to lack the empathy and imagination to do care about climate change until it impacts us directly, but now that we are starting to experience the super storms, fire, etc, there does seem to be more of a sense of urgency than we've seen before.
On a positive note, when I first started walking these NJ beaches, they were FULL of trash- it's so, soo much better these days.