Voices from the Future

I walk down the street this morning on a lovely day.  The sun is warm on my cheek, but there’s just a hint of coolness in the air to make its warmness really pleasant.  The grass is green from all the recent rains, flowers are prolific all around, and the first dry leaves of autumn are cluttering a neighbor’s driveway.  Wait a second! It’s August, not October.  What are this weather and those dry leaves doing here? That’s the problem with climate change – for all the super-storms and record high temperatures, there’s just enough pleasant interludes to keep the nay-sayers happily convinced that they can talk climate change out of existence.  Of course they can’t.  The weather I'm enjoying is part of the rapid changes in the timing of seasons that's part of climate change.  This is the fluctuation of the thermostat as it seeks a new equilibrium.  But it’s nice to enjoy pleasant days like this; we may not get too many more of them for the next several hundred years.

We’ll adjust somehow to the changes eventually.  The coldest I ever felt psychologically was reading Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, when Ivan casually comments that it would be a good day because the temperature was only -17 degrees. A brother-in-law of mine who worked in the Antarctic describes many occasions of having fun outdoors in weather like that. And like horned toads, we’ll find ways to thrive in the blistering heat.  Now we can add surviving super-storms and drowning coastal cities to our repertoire.  But the world will be a crueler place, and survival will be challenging.  Evolutionary biologists tell us we as a species have evolved to manage climate change, so we'll find ways.  But we shouldn’t be forcing those tests on ourselves. 

The problem of course is that nay-sayers are really concerned with present costs, and the problems of weather 60 years from now are, well, sixty years from now.  Nay-sayers can talk them out of existence for at least that long.  They are like the statistician who stood with one foot in a bucket of ice and one foot in a pot of boiling water, and insisted that on the average he felt comfortable.  And I, and others of my generation, will not be here to worry about them.  But I have 4 grandchildren 6 years old or younger, and they will be here to face the problems in 60 years, when it’s much too late to have solved or ameliorated them.  The voices of the future are all around us, but they are too young for us to pay much attention.  We need Pharaohs willing to set aside part of the profits of seven fat years to fund the needs of seven lean years, and our legislators are no pharaohs.

One of the problems of the climate-change debate is that scientists are talking abstract things while nay-sayers are talking hard money.  We need ways to take the abstractness of climate models and make them real.  We need to give voices to our children, for it is their lives we are talking about.  We need to organize and fund a children’s’ crusade against climate change.  Ads featuring children on TV and the internet, awareness campaigns in the schools, all the tools of modern media need to be focused on how to present a gut-level message that will change hearts.  And children with placards at the polls ought to be part of it.  It’s their climate, and their world, we are changing.  We shouldn’t be allowed to forget that.  They will remember if we do.