In
1977, I was in middle school in Michigan, and a science teacher shared a
tidbit off-curriculum.
Some scientists had postulated that as a result
of "pollution," heat-trapping gasses might one day lead to a warming
planet. Dubbed "the greenhouse effect," the image was clear in my
12-year old mind: people enclosed in a glass structure, heating up like
tomatoes coaxed to ripen. It was an interesting concept, but something
in the very,
very distant future.
Fast-forward ~ 30 years later. The year was 2006, my daughter was
three, and my dreams of a White Christmas were going to hell in a hand
basket. There wasn't a snowflake to be seen in Brooklyn and it was
DECEMBER - a far cry from childhood memories of jumping off the roof into
fluffy mounds after a blizzard.
Something was awry. An Inconvenient Truth had
just been released, and those graphs and slides were suspiciously
coinciding with what we were beginning to see in the form of extreme
weather, à la Hurricane Katrina. Any number of idioms might well have
marked the juncture: "canaries in the coal mine" comes to mind.
"The disconnect is almost understandable: we are
hitting tipping points of no return, etching our fate in glacial ice
while the full consequence of our inaction remains hidden from view." So why weren't we coming together to nip this in the bud? Why were we failing to embrace what appeared to be so obvious?
The deterioration of our planet - the only home we have ever known and
an assurance we used to take for granted - is bound to elicit a wide range
of emotions in different individuals. Mourning is personal, but as a
species, could it be that we are making our way through the stages of
grief as outlined by the late Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross?
Psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren, M.D. doesn't
necessarily think so. She points out that the Kübler-Ross framework was a
response to people who hear devastating news and feel
personally very involved, extremely vulnerable and know that the diagnosis is essentially inescapable. "That's not where most people are with climate," Dr. Van Susteren
states. "It takes a long time for some people to lay down the sense
within that something is true."
Yet she speaks of a collective anxiety that is insidious, even if we haven't managed to connect all the dots. "There isn't the slightest shred of doubt in my mind, that everyone
on some level is anxious, deeply anxious, about climate change," the
forensic psychiatrist says. She attributes her belief to decades of
experience with people who have difficulty knowing what they are feeling
on a deeper level, and she understands that anxiety comes from many
headwaters.
"We can be anxious about ISIS, we can be anxious about our kids ...
our health, our finances and all the rest. The confluence is such that
it becomes amorphous and we walk around with a great deal of
indescribable unease. And it can be either very difficult, or people
will outright deny - depending on how deep or great their walls are - that
it is coming from an overwhelming sense that the world is turned upside
down from climate."
Denial
Denial has been rampant since the earliest years of climate change
awareness. Virtually every day brings reports of a new catastrophe.
Bolivia's second-largest lake recently dried up and we won't soon forget
the melting of tennis shoes at the Australian Open. Sure, there are
cycles of nature to consider. But when you find yourself crossing Main
Street in a rowboat on a regular basis? Or happening upon femur bones
off the bank of Virginia's Tangier Island because the cemetery is
underwater?
The disconnect is almost understandable: we are hitting tipping
points of no return, etching our fate in glacial ice while the full
consequence of our inaction remains hidden from view.
Dr. James E. Hansen, renowned climatologist and former Director of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan speaks to the
matter of timescale. "The problem is that the inertia of the system is not our friend,"
states the founder of and Adjunct Professor in Columbia University's
Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program Earth Institute. It has
caused the effects to appear only slowly. "That has been the
fundamental difficulty. It looks like something in the far future."
Sitting across the table from the 75-year old scientist, it becomes
rapidly clear that his greatest concern is for future generations. That,
he says, was the point in writing his book,
Storms of my Grandchildren.
It also inspires his participation as guardian for future generations
in a current landmark federal climate change lawsuit against the
government for failing to protect children's constitutional rights to
life, liberty, and property - a case that Dr. Van Susteren has
collaborated on as well.
"These children are going to be around late in this century, so even
though the large effects are not so soon, we can now see that they are
going to occur if we don't rapidly phase down emissions," states Dr.
Hansen. "And I think some of them - mainly the sea level issue - is [coming]
sooner than has been assumed by many." Hansen believes people are moving in the direction of accepting that
climate is changing and that humans are at least a factor if not the
dominant factor.
But there is also the matter of our wiring.
"Denial is something that allows us sometimes to get through the
day," says Dr. Van Susteren. "And in some cases that's really good,
that's adaptive, but in other cases it's going to kill you ... and
this one's going to kill you."
Anger
While many in the denial camp have now set their tents up elsewhere,
stragglers remain, buttressed by a heavily financed machine that has
deliberately cultivated and preserved that pesky first stage of
mourning. ExxonMobil and The American Petroleum Institute have long sowed doubt
about the science behind climate change, taking their lessons from the
tobacco industry playbook.
The Koch Brothers estimated by Forbes to be worth $44.2 billion each,
have funneled mind-blowing sums through "charitable family trusts" and
"think tanks" to influence policy and public opinion, planting seeds of
uncertainty among the general public, and blocking attempts to regulate
emissions, thereby ensuring that their pockets remain literally coated
in oil.
What does it mean when our Senate Majority Leader urges the country's governors to
defy regulations to reduce carbon pollution?
Some powerful forces have been messing with our opportunity to
process the truth, and move beyond the stage of denial toward a stance
of action. From where I sit, the angriest entities at the moment are
those whose political and financial fortunes are at stake.
The truth is that our children, and their children, will be the ones
to really know the rage. There's no telling how the devastation will
play out, as the regions least responsible for the demise become
uninhabitable; and the world as we know it, perhaps ungovernable.
"Right now, the path is, as the Buddhists like to say: if we're not
careful we're going to end up where we're headed," offers Van Susteren.
She believes we are headed to a place where the world will look at our
country and recognize that our per capita emissions, the droughts,
floods, and searing hot days will be "because we gaily or callously, or
with willful ignorance went about our ways, consuming what we wished,
emitting what we felt like."
Bargaining
When the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997, the atmospheric CO2 level
was 368 ppm. Today, it stands at 404 ppm and I'm scratching my head
because living in the Holocene has been good (think of it as "life with
benefits"), and I'll be sad to lose Miami to the rising sea.
The lengths we've gone to with our bargaining, pollution trading, and
decades-away targets are staggering. This year brought April in Paris
and 175 countries signed a historic climate accord. The deal, which
supports the cap-and-trade system, strives to keep global temps from
rising more than 3.6°F by 2100.
Hansen, a proponent of an alternative Carbon Fee-and-Dividend model,
argues that the UNFCC and IPCC scenarios assume negative emissions in
the second half of the century, and that this will saddle young people
with the task of having to phase out fossil fuels.
"They're going to have to somehow achieve negative emissions, which
means you're going to have to suck that CO2 out of the atmosphere," says
the scientist. "We have to make clear what the burden is, that we're
leaving for young people."
The bottom line is that we best make haste. If a heat wave in Phoenix
sounds brutal, consider Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which are slated for a
heat index of 177°F during this century if we don't mitigate the
magnitude of warming.
Depression
In 2010, the NIH issued "A Human Health Perspective On Climate
Change." The report portends dark consequences ranging from sexual
dysfunction to the migration of large communities, hostile political
environments, conflict, and war.
"Climate change has the potential to create sustained natural and
humanitarian disasters beyond the scale of those we are experiencing
today," reads the NIH report. "Extreme weather events, sea-level rise,
destruction of local economies, resource scarcity, and associated
conflict due to climate change are predicted to displace millions of
people worldwide over the coming century."
But the future grief on our planet will not be like that of a natural
disaster, according to Dr. Van Susteren, when there is a low point and
then the worst is over - when people grieve, work together and then pick
up. "The fingerprints of humans are all over the frequency and intensity
of climate disasters ... what will happen when future generations look
back and know that we could have taken action - that we knew - and we
didn't?"
Dr. Van Susteren can't shake off a sense of shame when she speaks about how future generations will feel: "That we abandoned them willfully, negligently, intentionally, and out of dereliction of duty."
Acceptance
Hansen, who first brought global warming to the attention of the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee 28 years ago, seemed
initially taken aback by the proposition that humanity might be working
through a framework typically associated with death and dying.
"That model sort of assumes that ... the consequences are all
inevitable," expressed the man who is arguably the planet's most
reliable champion of climate health. "So I'm not yet willing to accept
that, and here’s the real story - that this is tragedy. Because it's
avoidable."
Hindsight may prove the only true vantage by which to see how we've
worked through the scaffold of bereavement, and it will be left to our
progeny to judge whether we conducted business as usual, or reversed
course when approaching the most critical thresholds.
Meanwhile, the cauldron simmers with a stew of emotions, actions and
inactions. The realities hit closer to home with every Hurricane Sandy,
each new Zika hot spot on the map, and with the ever-dwindling array of
animals, from the Monarch butterfly, to the pelican and stork and 1300
other types of birds whose collective song, or lack thereof, might well
serve as warning: we, too are a threatened species.
© 2016 Scientific American
Within the ether of strangers - all the humans who inhabit the world
at the same time as we do, but whom we have not yet met - there exists a
large outermost circle of acquaintances.
