Climate Change: Does This Have to be the Way the World Ends?

I have been thinking I wanted to put a small sheet of facts together about climate change to show some people who refuse to believe it is happening, and then I thought, what is the use?  The people I would hope to convince with mere facts would toss them aside like popcorn.  "Don't muddy the waters with facts, I want to bask in the clear waters of denial" is the mantra that these people breathe daily.

When people didn't understand thunder in ancient days, they made up plausible stories to explain it.  Bowling pins crashing around sounded like thunder, so explaining the sound by imagining sky god Thor going bowling. Then they weren't scared, they didn't have to go out and investigate, and they didn't have to worry about it.

This is the same reaction I see among those who deny climate change.  If they are worried in the least when they hear about it, on the next cool day they feel assured that it is all someone's imagination.  And if it snows, they can even laugh at those who believe that the earth is heating up.  And once they have made this connection, they don't have to worry about it any more.

But what the ancients, and the modern naysayers forgot, is the lightning.

We have to deal with the lightning.  No matter what we think of the thunder, lightning is another story.  It is scary, it is hard to understand and it is out of our control.  The best we can do, these nonbelievers say, now or in ancient days, is to close our eyes and ignore it and pretty soon it will be gone.

In ancient days, the citizenry did just that.  Whether by hunkering down, trying to hide, seeking shelter, and lying flat, they learned the ways to protect themselves from lightning.  Today, we use some of the same methods to deal with evidence of climate change--ignore it, deny it, wait for it to pass--but the lightning in this case is not just electric current in a passing storm, it is myriad problems associated with climate change that range from heat waves to pestilence, from drought to floods.  These problems create lasting damage--and have the potential to grow worse with each passing year.

Unfortunately, many of us in the United States do not care what happens outside of our realm.  If flooding occurs in Bangladesh, or polar bears begin to starve when the ice melts, we click our tongues and if we think at all about it, we think about how glad we are that we aren't Bangladeshians, nor are we polar bears.  We do not make the connection that the cause of these two tragedies are global in nature.  The same heat that is melting the arctic ice is the same heat that is contributing to the rise in sea level, that affects not only Bangladesh but all who inhabit coastal regions.   That means us, particularly the 60 percent of the US population that lives on the East Coast. In 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that the Atlantic Coast of the United States was the most at risk from climate change-related sea rise.

Even on the verge of this calamity, the cold snap that hit most of the United States this past winter has driven many of the climate change deniers back into their comfortable fact-free zone. And anyway, they rationalize, if the worst, happens, I'm safe.  My family is safe.  We will just move, or purchase more heat in winter, and we could hire someone to shovel our walks, or clean up storm damage in summer.

Famed climate change author and activist Bill McKibben, in a 2013 speech, said something that has stuck with me since.  He listed the dangers the United States is facing as its share of climate change, including super storms, floods, increased heat wave and asthma deaths, drought, and increased vector-borne illness.  And he confirmed--yes, he confirmed the nay-sayer's position.  The US is smart, he said, and the world is smart.  It can figure out how to adapt  to these things.  However, he continued, climate change is not going to stop at blows we can absorb.  It is the things that we cannot adapt to that we need to be worried about.  "We must prevent that to which we can not adapt," McKibben said.

"That to which we can not adapt."  Those words are very scary.  Climate change is moving on, even if we are not.  If naysayers in the US continue to stall, to make excuses, and to deny climate change, our goose is going to be, literally, cooked.  The temperature of the Earth's atmosphere is already at the point of our being able to absorb the blow.  Some say it is way beyond that.  But I like to have hope.  Many scientists say that by making drastic changes now, we can stop climate change before this occurs.    So why are we still standing around, wringing our hands and twiddling our thumbs?    As we continue to put off any action to save the world, I have to think that T.S. Elliot predicted our response in his poem, The Hollow Man.  You know how that ends.