In December 1977 I was in the grocery store checkout queue with my mother, my eyes at magazine height.
The cover of National Geographic magazine had a beautiful boat named Brendan in rough seas and a headline that read:
“The Year The Weather Went Wild“
There is a chance that I still have at least the cover of that issue if not the entire magazine.
Somewhere in my hoard.
That issue came complete with my first Green Christmas. Dark and desaturated with sand from one early storm in the gutters, mucked up against decaying slate curbs.
In terms of good childhood memories, a snowy Christmas always brings a healthy gulp of nostalgia. Perhaps some tear repression. Christmas was second only to snow days in excitement, nothing tops a snow day. Christmas was great, but reliable and came with a lot of events of appearance. Snow days were wonderful, without ritual, and unpredictable. Kids whose parents had to work were just left abandoned and we all found our own version of amuk.
As an adult when I get pelted with snowballs in my car it is simple karma.
Unexpected strength, frequency and seasonal length of weather events is unignorable. In my last post I expressed my vile and blunt repugnance for the notion that any version of the big three or four Godheads somehow condones our willful destruction of the only place we have for a chance at sustained existence. I know that a lot of them think this all goes on in death and want to hurry that up for all of us, and those people shouldn’t get to vote. Voting is about the future.
They don’t want one.
Maybe Climate Deniers have an escape plan.
A backyard rocket.
I guess I am expecting a lot if there is still a significant portion of resource consumers who believe that the Earth is flat.
Besides, well, everything you can observe by just being awake for the last twenty or thirty years, all a person has to do to understand that the planet is warmer is look at satellite images from 1990 and now. If you really want to cry go way back to the 60’s.
It used to dump snow in Vermont. It still would, but, ya know…warm.
See the white Mr. Coal? That was reflecting the sun once, now the brown land is warm. It feeds itself by design, and we give it steroids. Hold the heat in, and make lot’s and lot’s of it too. Everything we do creates heat. A/C makes crazy amounts of heat. How much heat does a Phoenix movie theater generate on a July day?
Ice traps co2, and that is now released too. Oh boy. I wonder what ancient pathogens will find their way down in the soil runoff. Climate change is something that can only build on itself until we address the two root causes of it.
It would be remarkably simple to address if humans could work as a tribe. Maybe the trend could be reversed in the time it took to create it. We just need to want to do it. Maybe we need a profound and hideous global disaster.
Everyone is waiting for someone else to solve the problem–or the rapture, whichever comes first. What if we all dedicated ten percent of our energy output to reducing the need for energy?
Here is something simple. Have less kids.
Even better, have none unless you believe in Climate Change. If you aren’t smart enough to see it you are absolved of any responsibility to pass on your genetics.
In most parts of life I am not pushing an agenda, but overpopulation is the biggest problem facing humanity. Climate Change is a symptom. I am pushing back on the problem to treat the symptom.
We got too good at creating ourselves as a species, and living too long, and now there are quite simply too many people.
I promise to die some day, and I lived my own philosophy by having one kid. Vasectomy was successful for my vision. Funny enough, on the day I was picked up by my wife from the surgery–a newly neutered, committed individual with a most uncomfortable crotch–my wife was beaming and my daughter smiling from her car seat, eating Cherrios or something.
“Sonny’s Walking!”. 11 months, 1 day.
Little things in life that chip away at my atheism. Perhaps there are angels, and they have a gentle sense of humor when they want your balls to feel as if you took one for the team for the crime you are committing. Sacrifice and joy. Commitment, and elated anguish.
Did she want a sibling?
I never thought to ask.
Now 14 she wants a car. She wants my old truck. I want her in something safer and newer. Realistically I wish she didn’t have to drive, but I started driving at 15 and I can’t really say no. If we somehow get cars to be less damaging to our health (on every level from petroleum to simple safety features, then I see no reason to abandon the concept). Climate controlled personal transportation is good. Convincing people to use it as a last resort is a harder problem.
Hopefully my daughters generation will see the end of the internal combustion engine in cars.
Given the choice of cars or snow, I choose snow, but I don’t believe that it is an unsolvable problem of mutual exclusion if people learn to see where it all breaks down and becomes Global Warming, or Climate Change as some call it.
It is a simple fact that the Earth can only absorb heat and greenhouse gasses within limits. The Earth itself has a specific mass that is basically limited, and it’s surface/crust/oceans is composed of elements that interact with heat energy is different ways. The ocean stores heat and Carbon Dioxide. Ice holds atmospheric gasses and melting peat bogs are releasing lots of methane.
Melting begets melting, the Wise One Noticedith.
Less snow in winter means less reflected heat and so winter is warmer, and each warmer winter sets up a successive warmer winter with few anomalies these days.
Perhaps a Senator will throw a token snowball for environmental activism as they retire from a career of taking bribes from the fossil fuel industry, their grandchildren asking liberal questions about health and security for America in the future.
Don’t forget–snow on the Capitol steps in January is proof that the ice caps aren’t melting.
If a five year old kid could see 42 years ago that National Geographic was on to something of popular concern, how is it possible that anyone who has been around for 70 years cannot see how dire things have gotten? Even if winters went back to nice again it wouldn’t be so bad for most people because technology has made everything so easy and comfortable now.
“Let’s give it a try Walmart shoppers. There is a special on healthy life if you reduce your consumption and have less kids. 9 in 10 items on these shelves is made outside the United States, and engineered to be garbage. It was brought here on a boat for you to buy and soon throw away. Don’t buy a thing that won’t wilt or rot–stop being distracted by fishing lures and please park at the edge of the lot–walk a little. Today only…We’ve deactivated the scooters for folks who ate themselves disabled so watch out for grumpy entitlement clogging the aisles!”
What is life if we don’t have the option for absurdity?
Hyperbole and Surrealism are good teaching tools for a receptive audience. I think this is why my morality is as pure as the cartoon I am. Cartoons are honest–or at least they try to be.
Children are a good audience. An honest audience. Let’s work to give them a chance to be as angry about snow and ignorance as I am. Let’s have an honest conversation about the health of our planet and the health of human morality.
In resource scarcity, we will see who loves their children, and who loves all children. They are not the same thing, and unless both are true, one is selfish.