ON FIRE

I never met my grandfathers. Both of them died before their time. Such was the fate of many with a genetic disposition to heart disease back then, when little was known about arterial plaque. But it's safe to say that even in their day enough was known to link heart disease and diet.

Greta

Naomi Klein's book devotes some space to Greta Thunberg, a teenager from Stockholm who has become the face of the youth movement for climate action. Diagnosed as autistic, she calls autism her superpower. It gives her the ability to see the world straight and to speak bluntly about what she sees.4 Addressing the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, she boldly asked "How dare you?" — meaning how dare they steal her future by doing nothing about climate change.

Greta understands what many adults do not: that We cannot much longer continue living the way we have been living. Drastic changes are needed, and soon. More and more people are coming to understand this. The only question is, will enough people come to understand it soon enough? Speaking politely and raising no ripples have accomplished nothing useful. The time for decorum has passed.

Greta's bluntness has has brought her torrents of online wrath from people who choose not to hear what she says, but think what she demands is destructive. Not so. She demands only that we accept the science and then work together to avert the destruction that races toward us.

"Once you have done your homework," Greta Thunberg says, "you realize that we need new politics. We need a new economics, where everything is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking . . . We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way." – Page 53

Because our house is on fire. And only a fool fights in a burning house.5

Enough was known about something else to raise red flags. I refer to the link between between atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising mean global temperatures. This link was not common knowledge back then — but it was known. Indeed, as far back as 1896 Svante Arrhenius published the idea that burning coal would warm the Earth — something that he, being in Sweden, thought was a good idea. Most other scientists scoffed. The very idea that puny humans could change the balance of nature!

But in the 1930s American scientists began to measure a significant rise in average temperature. Again, most scientists dismissed it as due to some natural cycle. It fell to Guy Callendar to propose that global warming was beginning, and he too thought it would be a good thing.2

I'll skip over all the back-and-forth on climate science in the twentieth century and cut to the chase. It's 2021, and Earth, our only home, is now two degrees Fahrenheit (2°F) warmer than it was when my grandfathers were born. Most of that rise is due to carbon dioxide humans have added to Earth's atmosphere. Everyone alive today can see the impacts of that warming. However, many do not wish to see; they prefer to remain willfully blind — or at least act as if they are blind, for various reasons.

But a new factor has been added. The youth of this planet are making their voices heard. And well they should, for they will have to live under the conditions their grandfathers created (and which we are still creating.)

What are those conditions? Suffice it to say they will be grim. Good food and clean water will be harder to obtain. Many coastal areas will have been swallowed by the sea. Heat waves and fierce weather will be more common. Places where millions live today will be uninhabitable, and the nations of Earth will have to deal with hordes of climate refugees.

These young people who see the problems climate change will bring — problems which have already begun to appear — have not learned to rationalize as too many adults have.3 When they strike and march and speak out for climate action, the adult world smiles and applauds and goes on with business as usual. What will it take for the message to sink in, for meaningful action to begin? Past history teaches us that things will have to go smash to make that happen.

But there is an alternative. We still can, with hardships no worse than our grandfathers endured in World War II, stave off the worst of what's ahead. But only if we start thinking and acting as if we are all in this together. Because we are. (No, we won't all have to start living "like a cave man," as someone claimed in a comment to a recent New York Times story. Making these changes will bring costs. But here is the tradeoff in simple terms: We can pay some now, or pay much more later.)

Alas, another kind of thinking and acting still holds sway. It is thinking that refuses to believe the world will ever change, or even that it is changing. It is acting as if everything is fine, and the only problem is the people who tell us otherwise. Indeed, those people frequently face threats of bodily harm or even death. While physical attacks against climate scientists and activists are (so far) rare, verbal abuse is common. Still more common is absolute denial of the plain facts revealed by climate science. Follow reporting on this unfolding story in the Washington Post or The New York Times, as I do, and note how often comments make flat statements like "There is no evidence that the world is warming" or "Severe weather is no more frequent now than it ever was." Such thinking is incomprehensible to me. Why would anyone dismiss the work of thousands of scientists and decades of reporting by mainstream sources and the changes happening right where they live — all of which point to a steadily worsening situation?

Insanity is the word that comes to mind. It comes to mind more often these days, and not only in connection with climate-change denial. Some people seem determined to ignore obvious evidence — about any subject, to throw logic out the window, to cling to favorite beliefs even when that puts them at personal risk. Once upon a time, they could afflict only those close to them; now, when all of our lives are entwined by international travel and social media, they can spread affliction to the whole world. The COVID-19 pandemic of the past 18 months has underscored that truth, showing how badly small groups of people can mess things up for the rest of us. Democracy cannot long endure unless most citizens understand its benefits and do their bit to keep it going. The same is true of civilization. Recent events have shown us how much harm a few people, or even one wrong man in a powerful position, can cause.

The climate-change clock has been ticking since the days of our grandfathers, measuring off year after year of gradual warming. It continues to tick, now marking an ever faster progression as changes outpace the scientists' projections. Time grows short. So does patience. Everyone faces a choice: remain at loggerheads until the crunch comes, or start to cooperate. We should start to cooperate, dropping the metaphorical fire we're throwing at each other to fight the metaphorical (and sometimes actual) fires climate change brings us.

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This page was last modified on 28 April 2021.