As the goals of the Copenhagen summit on climate change get put back for another year, it is worth pointing out just how homicidal those people who applaud the delay actually are.
This is true even if you don’t believe all the evidence.
But let’s look at the evidence. Parts per million and carbon molecules and greenhouse gasses may be a little complicated and remote for some, but why are pictures of the polar caps melting difficult to comprehend? Or is NASA forging these? What about similar pictures of receding ice in mountain ranges all over the world? “I can’t believe my eyes” is a reasonable thing to say when you turn the corner and see your house burning or turn on the television and see planes flying into buildings. “I won’t believe my eyes” is different. And the reality is our world is on fire, we are under attack.
This is how the world ends. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with sound and fury signifying nothing more than our own desire to be heard, to pretend. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, George Will, Fred Barnes–you are killing us Here is a priceless sentence from The Wall Street Journal happily explaining the postponement: “There will always be one excuse or another, given that developing countries like China and India will never be masochistic enough to subject their economies to the West’s climate neuroses.”
Imagine parents telling kids they should smoke more, that their hacking cough and horrible wheeze is neurosis. What is masochistic for China and India to do is to follow our history, not swerve around it. And if they do follow, rather than swerve, we are all done for.
It is no real surprise that people living in mud huts or in the jungles of some forest don’t believe in Global Warming, but it is a hard denial to explain from people who live a modern life, who live in cities, who work at places like The Wall Street Journal or as United States Senators. How can you believe in the internal combustion engine that moves your car or the wiring that allows your laptop to compute and not in evidence as clear as leaves changing color or light disappearing in the west? It is fall. The sun is setting. How do you trust in the great cumulative knowledge of science, technology, and engineering that allows you to get on a plane but not trust in what those fields of knowledge now report over and over? How can people who we have elected to oversee our world be this far in denial? They are like Eskimos with no words for snow.
Nor do we really need scientists to tell convince us. Think of your living room if you forget to open the flu in your fire place. Or after your aunt and uncle, the one who “smoke like chimneys,” come over for the afternoon. Sure the world is a big place, but what if your aunt and uncle come over every day for thirty years? Think of Michelangelo’s great Sistine Chapel. Remember when they cleaned it a a few decades ago? Got all the soot off? One of the world’s great masterpieces had been made dark by little more than candle smoke. There are over 300 hundred cities on earth with more than one million people. Each is candle. Somewhere nearby God giving life to Adam is also a “Last Judgment.”
But O.K., don’t believe what all the people who actually study this stuff say. Don’t believe your eyes or common sense or what is self-evident. Call only cities of ten million candles that might matter. So what? Is there no limit to how we pollute? How many people the planet can support? How many precious resources can live without or expect to share? Wouldn’t it make common sense to live a more sustainable lifestyle even if we had never heard of Global Warming? Or if you took The Bible’s imperative to be good stewards of the earth seriously? Wouldn’t your food taste better if it grew nearby? Might not you and your kids be a bit healthier if you biked to work and they to school?
This is how the world is gonna end. Maybe in proxy wars over water, not oil, maybe because the food supply collapses, maybe because none of us can breathe. People will survive, of course, but with all kinds of new misery.
If we can’t change this, Mr. President, we have no hope.