Have You Had the Talk?

Have *you* talked to your Significant Other about climate change?

I read this article yesterday, and it sent me down a well-worn but infrequently travelled mental path. I saw "The Day After Tomorrow" when it came out in 2004 - I was 15 - and it left a profound although latent mark on me. At that time, I got an impulse to learn to knit - didn't go very well, I never learned how to start a new row. The impulse settled down and I moved on.

But the mark remained. I had seen humanity's ignorance and apathy drive the climate to deadly extremes. Spoiler: the movie ends with a big question mark - with only the warmer areas of the planet still habitable, now flooded with homeless white people from the Global North, what would happen? (I believe that an old roleplay on TUL had a similar background premise.)

And I knew full well that of all the apocalyptic science fiction movie possibilities, the climate roaring down to destroy the world As We Know It is one of the few that might actually happen.
And as I've gotten older, I've heard mounting evidence that it's rapidly leaving the realm of fiction and rushing towards the realm of cold, hard, globally-warmed reality. The afore-linked article just gave more solid numbers to what I've known for years.

Among them: 16 years. 16 years, if we keep burning through hydrocarbons at our current rate of increase, before we will have set the stage for the planet to warm by 2 degrees Celcius: the "okay, fine, you win - the planet is too hot, we admit that global warming exists" number. According to that article, we're already only .2 degrees C away from most of Africa becoming uninhabitable.

Oh. Here's another one, about Greenland experiencing a one-per-every-150-years melting event.

So how old will I be in 16 years? I'm turning 23 soon, so that would make me 39. It's the year 2012 now, so 16 years would make it 2028. At 39, I hope to have been teaching elementary school for years, and have three or four kids, four cats, a dog, a ball python, a car that will need replacing soon, and a house with a garden and a few years already paid off the mortgage. I hope to be living somewhere green enough to keep me sane, yet close enough to other people that I'll have a job and won't have to drive an hour just to buy food.

If the price of gas is already climbing ten cents or more a year, and if it was already as hot as summer in early May this season, how realistic is this dream? The life that P and I have been planning out for years now?

I really don't know. It's not a happy thought, and as I read the article out loud I found myself just as happy to become distracted by another adorable kitten picture online, helping cut the seriousness of the message. I don't want it to be serious. I don't want to have to sit down and say, "Love, what are we going to do when there's no more gasoline except for rich people?" And there's no more tropical fruit at the grocery store because it's too expensive to ship. And nothing's made of plastic anymore because the oil is too valuable as fuel. Will cars be running on electricity and ethanol, or will the highways be deserted? Will we all be at war over the last few oilfields? Will the US annex Alberta so it doesn't have to pay for our thrice-damned tar sand? I wish I knew. I've read my history, and I know that humanity tends to happily wallow in the ruins of its former greatness rather than exert itself to maintain anything properly.

I even didn't want to finish this post, because to send it out into the aether is to admit it. To take a stand and say: I acknowledge that climate change is going to screw all my future plans. I acknowledge that planning ahead for a time when nothing is as it is now, when I can no longer conveniently hop on my laptop with a glass of grape juice, is more practical than paranoid. I admit that all our little energy-saving efforts smack of OCD rituals: if I turn off the monitor, if I install compact fluorescent lighting, if I walk to the store, I will stave off the apocalypse and acid rain will not kill my family... and these little rituals are not enough. They will not stave it off, and nothing you or I or we can do while still living an even slightly mainstream lifestyle will be enough to stave it off.

Either we all start putting up a shitload of windmills and force our societies to STOP BURNING OIL AND COAL (and other hydrocarbons - even burning wood wouldn't really be any better), or we get ready for things to change.

Warm places will become hot. This includes most of the Global North - that's us, folks.
Hot places will become uninhabitable. Those droughts in the Horn of Africa last year? Yeah.
Cool places will become more comfortable. I suspect that areas like Siberia, Canada's Northwest Territories, Alaska, and Scandinavia will become more popular (and populous) over time. Actually: populous, yes - when the hot places, full of billions of people, get hotter, they're not going to lay down and die (and I wouldn't wish them to). They're going to emigrate, they're going to flee, and eventually we're probably going to flee them and go farther north. That's if we haven't already fled the rising temperatures in our own homelands.

I recently wrote a piece in which a character looked back at his life from the age of 56. I was shocked, frightened even, to think through all the scenarios I had thrown him into over the years and weave them into one logical timeline: it's here. An odd but dealable life came under attack from a tyrannical government, and he ended up hiding in a cabin in the woods for a decade. He almost lost his wife and child in the end. At the point of his retrospection, he was dealing with the aftermath of that government's overthrow, in which most of the trappings of civilization were pretty much gone.

I looked at what I wrote and thought: What?? How did this happen? I'd kinda figured that he would go into a usually boring but stable job doing some kind of computer work, and life would continue on in at least approximately the same pattern in which it had started for him: family, house, traffic, supermarkets, internet access.

This character is no Mary Sue, but his problems and struggles have tended to mirror mine over the years more than any other's. Will his, in turn, become mine? Will I find myself, as I reach my silver years, fighting harder than ever just to survive - rather than getting to relax and enjoy time with my grandkids?

I hope I'm just fear-mongering. I hope that more countries start going in the direction Germany has chosen (they get a full half of their electricity from wind power), and that it happens fast enough to make a difference. I hope the US smartens up and changes its slogan: "We need to end our dependence on foreign oil." I hope that ethanol farmers smarten up and start fermenting the talks, not the goddamn corn itself. I hope that electric cars stop being a novelty, that we change our building habits here in North America so we don't need a car to exist - and that other places in the world stop emulating our bad habits!

I hope. But I'm also going to learn to make a fire by hand, can fruit, and sew...