13 Reasons Why
Prologue
The wise old man gently knelt over the body. He checked her pulse. Nothing. She was cold. He gasped. It’s all over.
He rolled to the ground, quivering hands covering his face in shame. How did this happen? He sobbed. We knew this was coming. They warned us over and over. But like a train wrecked played out in ultra-slow motion, it still happened.
Sadness and shame quickly turned to a wave of guilt. Maybe he wasn’t so innocent. Maybe he was an accomplice. An accessory to her killing. His mind drifted back, looking on the younger versions of himself with 20/20 hindsight. It all started to make sense.
The scientists had given us just 8 years to act, before her death would become inevitable. But there had been a clear problem the whole way. All attempts to save Mother nature defied human nature.
Mother nature was dead.
Disclaimer: This is a story created to convey a very serious series of messages. Please use your common sense in identify the parts that have been embellished, fabricated, factually modified to be more interesting, and utter nonsense. Enjoy.
Reason #1:
Hey Scientist, I’ll have another drunken forest while you explain what my greenhouse warming has got to do with Al Gore’s global changing.
I was only a teenager when the media first really started talking about this thing called Climate Change. Although it was often referred to as Global Warming. Which one was it? It couldn’t be warming, because Chicago just had its coldest winter in history. And the Arctic ice caps reached their largest extents in 30 years this winter. It was all so confusing. To make it worse, some people were saying it was caused by humans and others said it isn’t. The adults were really making a meal of this.
Climate Change seemed to be the most confusing thing I’d ever had to get my head around. At a high level it should have been simple. The man-made CO2 traps the heat from the sun inside the earth’s atmosphere, causing the ‘greenhouse effect’. Wtf? I thought it was climate change. Is Climate Change a greenhouse effect or something else?
To understand required learning more. Independently, because the schools didn’t teach it.
I immediately began questioning the sanity of my decision. It turned out that for a better understanding we had to include methane, ocean currents, tipping points, anthropomorphism, extreme events, outliers, deforestation, farting cows, typical averages but more frequent extremes, electric cars powered by coal, 8 other greenhouse gases, sunburnt apples, polar bears, Kyoto protocols, carbon credits, Al Gore, melting ice, drunken forests, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, droughts, floods, Beijing, volcanoes, and the last ice age. This was sounding like that time Billy Joel denied any collective culpability for starting a fire.
Compare this to the last climate crisis the world the world faced 30 years ago– CFC’s. These aerosols were a single item causing a single problem that had a single and immediate effect on humans and had a single, immediately implementable solution — an alternative product. No thought required. Just ban one product and replace it with another. It seems we had nothing to compare this new issue to. No blueprint, no roadmap.
To add another integral to the algorithm, its complexity makes it tremendously hard to study. Meaning the facts are always changing, are rarely conclusive, and will always be this way. How can anyone expect people to know what to think when the goal posts are constantly moving while the referee is off sick and no one knows what game they’re playing anyway?
This all plays into the hands of the Dark Side. Couple confusion with changing facts from science, and you’ve written the recipe for dissent, basically throwing petrol on the argument against climate change.
So, I did nothing.
Climate change is the most complex thing most people have ever had to get their heads around. Adding more science to the arsenal doesn’t help clarify the public opinion for a solution.
Reason #2:
A problem set 30 years in the future is future Andy’s problem, not mine. Man, I wouldn’t wanna be that guy!
In typical fashion, I got a little older. The argument was raging. It was greenies vs growthies. Father vs son. Dog vs Al Gore. The science seemed incomplete. Or maybe was complete but the lobbyists were having a field day, pillows and mattresses bulging with cash supplied by the companies who had the most to lose, should this fallacy become fact. Advertisements littered my screen between the hi-jinks of Denny Crane on Boston Legal, informing me that ‘carbon is good for the environment. It helps plants grow’. It seemed fitting, just the type of preposterous argument the legendary Alan Shore would dream up in the court room.
A general consensus was emerging though. It seemed that this gig was real. No one was sure just how real because the facts keep changing, but real, nonetheless. We were being told that in some date in the future, life was going to be very tough. Wall Street raiders would take on a more traditional type of piracy as Manhattans Avenues become navigable by galleons, sloops, and junks. Kevin Costner would be applauded for his extraordinary vision in predicting ‘Water World’. And more seriously, my snowboard would be rendered obsolete and it would extremely unpleasant to be a citizen of Nauru without owing a scuba suit.
Terrifying, right? Not really. The date was so far in the future it was too hard to imagine. And besides, a problem due to land in 30 years means we have 28 years to procrastinate and 2 years to blame the opposition for not doing anything, before game time. Long time. That’s future Andy’s problem. Man, I wouldn’t wanna be that guy!
At the time I was probably reading a book about how humans have no foresight. We really are quite rubbish at seeing more than a handful of years into the future. This was lost on me because at the time I was a Uni student with no desire to see beyond Saturday night. But it probably made some good points relevant to why scientists telling us about the terrible things that will happen to us 50 years from now is like telling a burglar to wipe his shoes. We simply don’t care.
Climate Change was playing a long game, while I lived week to week.
As humans, this does not compute. The climate won’t suddenly turn bad next week, for us to then claim insurance and deploy a bunch of engineers to fix it. It happens over time and doesn’t give us the big shock that we need to make us do something.
So, I did nothing.
Trying to combat Climate Change by telling us how bad the future impacts will be does not work. It actually gives us a false sense of security.
#BreatheTreely
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