The Last Generation of The World We Knew
I am the last member of my family to live in a cooler world.
If you were born before April, 1985, you are too.
That date was an unheralded milestone in the history of mankind. For those of us delivered into the world in the years and months preceding it, everything was too new to recognize that anything was amiss. For those born decades before, the weather seemed the least notable of world events over those thirty days. The government of India filed suit against Union Carbide after a gas leak in Bhopal killed thousands in what is still the worst industrial disaster in recorded history. The fifth permanent artificial heart was implanted. Carlos Lopes broke the world record marathon time. New Coke premiered. The West German parliament ruled Holocaust denial illegal. Islamic Terrorists bombed a restaurant in Spain that killed eighteen people and South Africa repealed its ban on interracial marriages.
What went unreported that April, because it was impossible to know at the time, was that from that month on every child on earth would be born onto a hotter planet. Global temperatures would never again return to the relatively mild range that humanity had relied upon for the majority of human civilization.
That the globe was heating up had been known to the scientific community for a decade or more. Those experts hired by Exxon Mobile knew as early as the late 1970s. Others began to take serious notice by the 1980s. Three years into the new decade, 1983 became the hottest year ever recorded in the history of modern record keeping. Following that spike, global temperatures dropped below the average for the final time before rising even higher as 1987 became the new hottest year. Far more noticeable was the unprecedented heat wave of 1988, which caused droughts in forty states and became the costliest disaster in the US since the Dust Bowl. Forest fires burned across the nation and the Mississippi river ran dry, grounding all barge traffic. On a 101 degree summer day in the nation’s capitol, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the Senate that 1988 was the hottest year ever recorded on planet Earth since reliable temperature measurements began 130 years ago. He also confirmed that the carbon that civilization was pouring into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels was to blame. As the New York Times would report
‘’Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,’’ Dr. Hansen said at the hearing today, adding, ‘’It is already happening now.’’
The Senate, Congress, and the President recieved the information, but little was done to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Climate researchers continued collecting and plotting their data and the last of us born into a cooler world grew from toddlers to adolescents. As we entered first grade learning to spell and left fifth grade knowing how to write full paragraphs, global weather patterns continued on with all their usual localized unpredictability. Some countries experienced colder months than in other years, or wetter ones, or dryer. But the Earth’s temperature never again dropped below what it had been in 1985. Ever increasing carbon emissions coated the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat as it reflected off the earth. Month to month, the climatic data points orbited above and below a line of temperature that was curving upward.
Throughout the nineties, we entered junior high and then high school. Polar sea ice expanded and shrunk with the seasons, but never fully regained its thickness from the previous year. A combined total of 110 billion tons of glacier melted into the ocean annually. 1998 became the new hottest year ever recorded, a decade after James Hansen’s testimony to the Senate. Vice President Al Gore tried to make climate change a main issue for the Bill Clinton presidency. However, Clinton faced a hostile and skeptical House and Senate. He did not want to use his limited political capital fighting for something that would only be felt decades down the road. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out it’s first report, which stated
“Emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases... These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an increase in global warming.”
As the new millennium began, we graduated from high school. Bill Clinton’s presidency had ended. Al Gore, who had been speaking about Climate Change as a major issue was defeated by George W. Bush (in the Electoral College). A former oil-executive now ran the country. Meanwhile, George W. Bush was president. In a Republican controlled White House and Congress, the reality of Climate Change was again up for debate. After reneging on a campaign promise to regulate carbon emission from coal-burning plants, Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty to regulate and reduce carbon emissions. During his first administration, they were accused by NASA scientist and now climate activist James Hansen of covering up or blocking studies detailing the negative effects of global warming, and later refused to cap carbon emissions. They were also accused of doctoring climate scientist’s testimony.
Despite the growing climate change skepticism, funded by the very same oil companies that had once funded climate change research, the planet continued to warm. Polar ice caps lost three times the amount sea ice each year than was lost in the 1990's. At the start of the decade, 2001 became the hottest year on record. The next year was even hotter. It was then topped by 2003’s temperatures, and then 2005, which also saw the strongest wind speeds ever recorded for a tropical storm with Hurricane Wilma.
From 2010 onward those of us born just before 1985 were firmly established in the work force. President Obama spoke out about climate change as a global threat as the first year of the new decade broke the record for hottest year. 2013 witnessed the strongest tropical storm ever seen with Typhoon Haiyan, before 2015’s Hurricane Patricia won that distinction. Despite the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change, and the agreement of 97% of the scientific community, oil companies continued to fund climate change denial and a US Sentator argued that there was no way climate change was real because he had a snowball. Meanwhile, from 2014 to 2016, “Hottest Year Ever Recorded” became an annual headline, and the IPCC released it’s fifth assessment. As the New York Times reported regarding climate change
“It’s here and now,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “It’s not something in the future.”
The group cited mass die-offs of forests, such as those killed by heat-loving beetles in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people.
If you are turning turning thirty two this April, you have never lived in a month that was cooler than the global average. The children who grew up in a warmer world are already creating a new generation that’s only known a hotter one. And the line charting the rising temperature is not straight. It’s curving upwards, ever steeper.
My nephew is the youngest member of my family. He was born in the spring of 2014, one of millions of babies born that year. I loved him from the moment I held him in that hospital room with his parents looking on. To me, he is the future.
He has not yet lived in a year that was not the hottest year on record.
If your child was born in the last three years, they haven’t either.
It’s past the time to act.
Here are some of my previous essays
My book Fighting Monks and Burning Mountains: Misadventures on a Buddhist Pilgrimage is available on Amazon
