Tag Archives: global warming

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: Humans Behaving Stupidly

In real life, it’s not so easy. When actors in life’s drama do dumb things, we can’t revise the narrative to avoid disaster.

We’ve all experienced the frustration. We’re reading a book or watching a movie or television show, and one (or several) of the lead characters in the story does something that’s just plain stupid. Blind to the peril before them, unwilling to heed the advice and warnings of others who know better, they rush headlong into danger, placing themselves and their loved ones at risk. We shout at the screen or curse the pages, knowing that terrible consequences will result from this patent idiocy, but on the characters go, compounding foolishness with carelessness and neglect and hubris until calamity befalls them. Deserved calamity. Chickens coming home to roost. Just desserts.

As a writer, I have to guard against doing this. Because the fact is, often bad choices by our lead characters can feed our narratives. “If only Character X would do this, then Characters Y and Z could do THIS, and wouldn’t THAT be cool!” Good editors — and I’ve worked with several — point out these moments and tell me to make certain Character X has a REALLY good reason for doing that not-so-smart thing. Because if they don’t have a good reason, this action will tick off my readers, putting them through that frustration I mentioned above.

And as an editor, I often have to flag moments in the manuscripts of my writers (or my clients) where they have led their protagonists down a foolish path, making them do things that serve the plot but not their own self-interest. “Make sure this is a reasonable, rational course of action,” I’ll say, “because otherwise this moment feels contrived, like something no clear-thinking person would do.”

Usually, in a fiction manuscript, the fix is fairly easy. We can get the characters to where the narrative needs them to be in a way that doesn’t feel so foolhardy and reckless. We can rewrite until it makes sense AND makes for a good story.

In real life, it’s not so easy. When actors in life’s drama do dumb things, we can’t revise the narrative to avoid disaster.

This past week saw climatologists record the four hottest days in human history. Monday’s record global temperature was measured by the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction at 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 degrees Fahrenheit), exceeding the previous record, which was set back in August 2016, by about .09 degrees Celsius, or .16 degrees Fahrenheit. That might not seem like a lot, but for global averages that usually vary in tiny increments, this was a significant jump.

Monday’s record lasted one day. Tuesday was hotter. Wednesday was hotter still, and Thursday was even hotter than Wednesday. Thursday’s global average reached 17.23 degrees Celsius, exceeding Monday’s record by nearly .22 degrees Celsius, or more than twice the margin by which Monday’s global average exceeded the old record.

The records don’t end there. June 2023 was the hottest June on record. 2023 is shaping up to be the hottest year in recorded history. The last eight years have been the hottest eight years ever documented. And of the twenty hottest years measured by climate scientists since the mid-19th century, all of them — ALL OF THEM — have occurred in the first twenty-three years of this millennium. Ocean temperatures are at record highs, sea ice volume is at a record low.

Scientists across the globe used words like “terrifying” and “unprecedented” to describe last week’s temperatures, and several pointed out that while measurements of global temperature only go back to the beginning of the Industrial Age, evidence from other climatological data suggests that global temperatures could now be at levels not seen in more than 100,000 years.

And yet, none of the scientists interviewed by the major news outlets seemed overly surprised by what happened last week. Frustrated, yes. Surprised, not so much. And who can blame them?

When I was a senior in college, I took an environmental science class that was geared toward non-science majors: “Major Issues in Environmental Policy,” or something of the sort. During the course of the semester, our professor returned again and again to the threat to the planet posed by global warming and the unchecked increase in greenhouse gases being pumped into our atmosphere by automobiles, power generation, manufacturing activity, industrial agriculture, and other human endeavors. He warned of rising global temperatures and the resulting consequences, which included more extreme weather, greater risk of flooding, drought, and wildfires, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, etc., etc., etc.

Everything he predicted in that class has come to pass. Everything.

I took the class in 1985.

To be clear, last week’s record-setting heat was caused by a combination of factors, some related to human actions, others naturally-occurring. The spike in global temperatures resulted from a confluence of decades of climate change and the warming effect of this year’s powerful El Niño, a cyclical climate fluctuation caused by warmer than average currents in the Pacific. But researchers believe El Niño and its sister phenomenon, the climate cooling La Niña, have been occurring for thousands of years. Human-induced climate change in the X factor here.

And we, I am sorry to say, are the infuriatingly myopic characters I mentioned at the outset of this piece. We have been warned of the danger facing us time and again by people who know better — by climate experts, by NASA, by NOAA, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by the World Meteorological Organization, by a scientific community desperate to head off looming cataclysm. For half a century or more we have been told that this day would come, that our planet is hurtling toward a crisis from which it may not be able to recover.

We have delayed and denied. We have made excuses and engaged in the worst sort of incrementalism. We have watched as “once in a century” storms become routine, as horrifying wildfires blacken our landscapes and turn our skies apocalyptic shades of orange and brown. We have ignored all the warnings, and have thus saddled our children and generations to come with the responsibility of cleaning up our mess.

The events of last week merely confirmed what climate scientists have known for some time now. Climate disaster isn’t our future, it’s our present. It is here. At this point, knowing all we do, there is no good reason to ignore the science. Our own self-interest dictates that we must take action now. Because unless we, the characters in this tragedy, act immediately to change the course of humanity, to convince our political leaders that we care about our land, our water, ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, we will destroy the earth. An act of foolishness, of hubris, of neglect and carelessness and ultimate stupidity.

And who will be left to curse the pages of human history?

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: Shutting Out the World

I have struggled some in recent weeks to come up with topics for my Monday Musings posts. One reason for this: I don’t want to overload readers with essays about family issues and mental health, though both are much in my thoughts these days. A second reason, I realized today, is that I have, in the interests of my own well-being, shut out current events from much of my thinking. If you look back through my posts in 2020 and early 2021, I wrote a lot about the state of the world and the state of our nation. This year, not so much.

It’s not that I have blocked out all news. I listen to NPR every morning. I check headlines daily. I have not stuck my head in the proverbial sand. But neither am I obsessing over world events right now.

And can you blame me?

Republicans are poised to take back both houses of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections. They have gerrymandered their way to disproportionate representation. They continue to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election. They attack the Administration and its progressive allies for rising energy and food prices, knowing full well that these are not the Administration’s fault. They exploit cultural conflicts over race and gender identity for their own cynical purposes, endangering the safety of Blacks, trans youth, educators, and medical professionals. And their tactics are working, so they have no incentive to stop.

Vladimir Putin is playing the most dangerous game of Russian Roulette since the Cuban Missile Crisis, moving the planet closer to global nuclear conflict than at any time since the end of the Cold War. He and his generals are responsible for heinous war crimes — genocide, some would argue — in Ukraine. And despite fighting valiantly for their freedom, their homes, their families, their very lives, the Ukrainian army likely cannot hold out indefinitely. The end game will be hideous and horrifying.

The planet is dying. There is no softening that reality. It’s dying. The wildfire season has already begun in the Western U.S. — months earlier than usual — and it promises to be historically bad. Again.

Prices are rising, thanks to Putin’s war. And the stock market is tanking. Each month, we receive our brokerage statements, the latest figures on our retirement savings, and we file them away without looking at them. There’s nothing we can do, and we have no intention of getting out of the market, so . . . It’ll rebound eventually, right? Right??

But by all means, let’s all get our panties in a twist over yet another egotistical billionaire buying yet another social media platform.

Yeah, so this is why I have been avoiding current affairs topics in my Monday Musings posts. I don’t have the energy. I would never say I don’t care. I do. I care passionately. But I feel like there is nothing I can do that will make a significant difference. I can give to international aid organizations. And I do. I can give to environmental groups and to progressive candidates. And I do. I can drive a Prius and use LED bulbs and set the house thermostats with energy conservation in mind. I do all those things.

But like so many people — perhaps like you — I am weary. I have too much on my personal plate right now. Family crises, work deadlines, things I have to get done, things I want to do. Last weekend, while at a convention, I might have been exposed to Covid. I’ve taken a couple of tests this week, the most recent today. Both negative. I’m probably fine, thank goodness. I will admit, though — and I’m not proud of this — that a tiny part of me hoped the test would be positive, giving me an excuse to just stop and rest and do nothing.

In a way, this post has wound up being about current affairs after all. Because the truth is, I am far from alone in feeling the way I do. We as a society are exhausted. And that exhaustion manifests as both apathy and irascibility. Many of us want to shut out the world. And when we can’t, many of us turn to contentiousness, to behavior that serves only to deepen divides that are already too deep.

Spring is here. Our little corner of the Cumberland Plateau is exploding with color right now: the myriad greens of young leaves, the whites of Dogwoods, the pinks of Wild Azaleas, the brilliant reds and yellows and blues of migrating tanagers, warblers, and buntings.

Covid is less of a threat that it was this winter, and warmer temperatures should mitigate the dangers even more. The housing market is beginning to normalize, which might help calm inflation in the months to come.

Maybe the fire season will prove less destructive than feared. Maybe Putin’s war effort will continue to fall short of his ambitions, leading him to settle for a partial victory rather than total conquest. Maybe the midterms won’t be quite the bloodbath some anticipate.

The fact is, as bad as things seem right now, they could be worse. They could always be worse. And in the meantime, there is beauty in the world. In the colors of spring, in the love of family and friends, in creativity, in work well done, in down-time enjoyed.

And this, in the end, is why I have chosen to avoid a certain kind of post this year. Life has been hard, but it also continues to be good. As I age, I find myself gaining a level of perspective I lacked as a younger man, when I was a sky-is-falling kind of guy. I don’t want to focus on the bad and the hard and the tragic. That stuff is always there for us, if that’s where we want our minds to go. These days, I choose a different emphasis.

Have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: A Planet In Its Death Throes

Pray for the forest, pray to the tree,
Pray for the fish in the deep blue sea.
Pray for yourself and for God’s sake,
Say one for me,
Poor wretched unbeliever.

— James Taylor, “Gaia,” from Hourglass

This is what it looks like when a planet dies

milkovi SF Bay Bridge
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge under skies turned orange by wildfire smoke. Photo credit: Milkovi, Unsplash

Cataclysmic fires along the American West Coast and the Australian East Coast, in the Amazon and on the Steppe. Once-in-a-millenium events occurring annually. Orange skies over California and the Pacific Northwest.

Storms of unprecedented destructive power striking with unnerving frequency, rendering the term “storm of the century” essentially meaningless.

Deepening cycles of drought and flood. Cities across the world literally being inundated by oceans and seas. Glaciers vanishing faster than even the most aggressive projections told us they would. Coral reefs dying. Species going extinct.

My older brothers turned me on to birdwatching when I was seven years old — a gift that has enriched my life for half a century. And over those same fifty years, North America’s population of birds has declined by nearly 30%. Habitat loss, pesticide use, careless architecture, and, yes, climate change — all have played a role. The result? Three billion fewer birds.

In the spring of 1985, my senior year in college, I took an ecology course for non-majors. It offered a survey of critical environmental issues facing the world, and discussed them in terms history and literature majors could understand. At the time, a scientific consensus had long-since formed around what was called at the time “the Greenhouse Effect,” what we later called global warming, and now global climate change. That was thirty-five years ago.

In 1896, a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius theorized that the unfettered burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, would lead to a warming of the planet. Four years later, in 1901, his colleague, Nils Gustaf Ekholm, coined the term “Greenhouse Effect” to describe the phenomenon. In fairness, Ekholm thought it might be a good thing, as it would stave off future ice ages. But the concept is not a new one.

For decades, global temperatures have been rising to record setting levels, only to be topped the following year. Global temperature records were first kept in a systematic way around 1850. Of the 170 or so years for which figures exist, nineteen of the twenty hottest have occurred since 2000. 2020 is on pace to join the top five.

I am willing to engage on most political and social issues. I enjoy a good discussion, a vigorous debate. There are, though, a few topics on which I will no longer engage. First among them is bigotry of any sort — racism, sexism, homophobia, trans bias, religious bias, etc. Climate denial is a close second. (And this year, Covid denial has joined the list.)

This is no longer theory. It hasn’t been for a long, long time. Climate change is real. Our planet is dying. If we do nothing — if we as a global community continue on the path we’re on now, we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren a burnt husk of what was once earth. Future generations will live in a world that staggers from ecological crisis to ecological crisis, from catastrophe to catastrophe, from flood to drought to famine to pandemic and back again.

We have had ample opportunity to address the issue, and we have squandered one after another. We have absented ourselves from vital global treaties and doubled down on the sort of short-sighted consumerism that got us into this mess in the first place. Like James Taylor in the song quoted at the beginning of this post, I have no faith in our ability to save ourselves. We are a society that cannot bring ourselves to wear cloth masks for the common good. How are we supposed to make the economic transitions necessary to change economic course?

And the tragic thing is, addressing climate change could be a tremendous boon to our standing in the world, to our economic fortunes, to our commitment to education. This is the challenge of our time. It demands bold thinking, new industries, innovation and invention. Implementing the necessary changes would generate hundreds of thousands of jobs, replacing and more the jobs lost in the coal and oil industries. Fitting ecological imperatives to our national love affair with cars and trucks could revitalize the American automotive industry. Does anyone really believe that the internal combustion engine, invented more than a century ago, is the be-all and end-all of technological ingenuity? Of course not.

But we have to have the will to change, the courage to say “Saving our planet for our children is worth whatever sacrifices we might have to make.” And, from what I can see, we don’t.

I wish I could end on a more hopeful note.

November’s election is about more than ending corruption, about more than beating back hate and prejudice, about more than the Supreme Court, about more than taxes and health care and social justice. It is about saving our planet. It is about keeping ourselves from a slow and painful march toward extinction.

Please vote.