Advent, proverbially, is the time of waiting – waiting for the decisive moment when a certain child is born and a distinctive something new enters the world.

This year, with the third Sunday of Advent just past, it feels to me as if we are still waiting for Advent to begin.

The reason is simple: the weather, in New York and up and down the East Coast, refuses to change – refuses to become “seasonal.”   Ten days before Christmas, the daytime temperatures are in the sixties and the nighttime ones are hardly cooler.   My bicycle is on the road every day.  On Sunday, the West Side path was as crowded with joggers as it was on the weekend before the marathon – seven weeks ago.   The pine and fir trees stacked at Eighth Avenue and Jane Street looked like stage props.   Folks browsed in hoodies or less. 

It seems to me that something similar is happening with climate change.  That is, the climate is changing – probably irrevocably – but we as a society are still waiting for the season of climate action to begin, figuring that once the season begins we’ll get in the spirit of things.

We waited for high gas prices to ring in the season – but gas prices fell.

We waited for endless war in the Middle East to force us to change our ways – but the drawing up of shale gas has given us an escape clause.

We waited for Pope Francis’s climate encyclical to commit the church to climate action – and it came, powerfully written, and took its place in the calendar of dramatically rolled-out media events.

We waited for the climate conference in Paris to commit the world’s nations to climate action.

Now they’ve committed, in a small way – a way that, as Bill McKibben puts it in a piece at once balanced and strident in the Times, should be a floor and not a ceiling. But I suspect we’re still waiting – still waiting for the season to change.

Unfortunately, that’s the thing about climate change: it isn’t seasonal, it’s at once incremental and spasmodic.  The climate changes oh-so-gradually, and disasters are spasms of evidence.

When it comes to climate change, there’s no one day when things change once and for all.    Nor is there a season of waiting.   There are no more seasons, period.  There’s just the perilous times we are living in.