Fire Without Ice

A common critique leveled against psychiatrists is that they over-diagnose; anyone who’s slightly out of the ordinary gets labeled, put into a box, and some medicine poured on top. Wherever you come down in this discussion, one slightly esoteric diagnosis is certainly not frivolous, it’s called “seasonal affective disorder.” It’s essentially a major depressive disorder linked to a particular season, usually winter. For some, however, summer is the problem. You might be skeptical that people exist, who get depressed because of the summer, considering it’s such a happy season for most. But they exist, I know because I’m one of them. The warmer months are always a drag to get through for me, so the fact that they are getting longer is worrying, even before I think of the foreboding reality that millions of people will likely suffer increasingly dire catastrophes if we do not reckon with perhaps the scariest issue I can think of for Halloween: climate change. Turn off the lights, imagine me holding a flashlight under my face, and let me tell you a scary story… In 1856, there was an American scientist named Eunice Foote. She conducted an experiment on carbon dioxide and heat: she placed two cylinders with thermometers in the sun; one cylinder was filled with carbon dioxide, the other with air. She published her findings in the American Journal of Science and Arts: “My investigations have had for their object to determine the different circumstances that affect the thermal action of the rays of light that proceed from the sun. […] The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas. One of the receivers was filled with it, the other with common air[. …] The receiver containing the gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling. An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.” Foote became the first scientist to explain why our atmosphere traps heat. Over 100 years later, giant oil companies like Exxon would be at the forefront of climate science. They hired hundreds of young and eager scientists to work on studying what the effects and consequences of CO2 emissions on an industrial scale would mean for the earth’s climate. As the science grew more certain throughout the ‘80s that we were playing with fire, and prominent NASA scientists started warning Congress about the urgent need to transition our energy grid to a cleaner alternative, the oil barons faced a choice: work to save the environment, while risking a few pennies out of their billions; or try to convince the scientifically illiterate masses that tree-hugging hippies were making the whole thing up. The science departments were disbanded, and the research projects into lithium batteries and other alternative energy sources were summarily defunded and canceled. In the following years, as profits went through the roof, the oil industry launched a massive anti-science propaganda campaign, finding a loyal ally in the American right-wing conservative movement, which was already trying to outlaw the teaching of evolution in school in favor of Evangelical creationism, besides also being religiously pro-business and anti-government. You can still smell the stench of Ronald Reagan. They claimed that global warming couldn’t be happening because God told Noah there wouldn’t be another flood. They claimed it was a ploy by radical socialists to steal your money with a tax on gasoline so they could give it to China. They pointed out that all the scientific papers were uncertain, and that anyone who suggested we act now without definitive evidence was a fear-monger—knowing full well that science deals with probabilities and will never claim anything is certain, which differentiates it from belief. Meanwhile, swimming up to their eyeballs in oil-lobby money, Republicans did their part in Congress; Jim Inhofe once brought a snowball into the Senate to prove everything was copacetic with mother nature. The most head-scratching part of all this was watching this anti-intellectual culture begin to take hold and thrive. I’m not sure about this, but I suspect the Tea Party might have been the first time stupidity became lauded as an ideological purity to such a pervasive extent. It was of course spurred on and encouraged by the billionaires, who created a depressingly effective bulwark against any mild climate policy. Even the most ridiculous arguments that basically debunked themselves gained real traction. One such example was the contention that scientists were inventing climate change to get research money from universities and the government. If scientists could be bought, why wouldn’t the industry worth over five trillion dollars buy their silence? As the political right has continued to evolve, so has our climate (and they both got worse). People can’t stick their heads in the sand forever—the way things are going it’ll turn into glass at some point—eventually, you see the effects of climate change in person. In Florida, ocean temperatures reached almost forty degrees Celsius, which one day will kill its coral reefs. The average yearly temperature keeps steadily rising, and our summers are now hotter since humankind first appeared on Earth. So, with groups like Extinction Rebellion and other activists amplifying the cacophony of worried scientists, the climate skeptics had to pivot to a new excuse. You might have heard it already, “Yeah, okay… maybe it’s happening, but it’s perfectly natural, though. Our planet’s climate has always changed, it’s not a big deal. Certainly not something for which to glue yourself to the road.” I’m not completely sure why, but while climate denial has always been extremely irritating, there is something about this faux-intellectual tone that I just can’t stand. This condescending attitude that all these “scientists” with their so-called “research” simply don’t understand the fundamental nature of our planet's climate, and this smarmy, self- satisfied confidence in something so asinine. These people don’t know anything about the history of our planet, how many of these idiots know we’re still in an ice age, do you think? An ice age means there is permanent ice on two of Earth’s poles. And in an ice age, the frozen poles expand and contract, these periods are called “glacial” and “inter- glacial” periods. What most people think of when they hear “ice age” is actually the last glacial period. Our current ice age began about thirty-four million years ago, early humans appeared less than ten million years ago. We have never known a “greenhouse” earth (which is what we call an earth without permanent ice), but it is not the norm for our planet, ice ages are roughly only fifteen percent of Earth’s history, and humans have not evolved to thrive on a greenhouse earth. One of the reasons you won’t find many dinosaur fossils near the equator is because it was unlivable—the equator was a giant desert where no plants could grow and it was scorching hot. Hippopotami once populated the River Thames in England, and Antarctica once had rainforests with palm trees. Occasionally, however, the conditions would be just right for enough plants to grow, plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, thereby lowering the Co2 level in the atmosphere, cooling the planet, and starting an ice age. These massive climate shifts often bring with them “mass extinction events”—there have been five in Earth’s history. In the Late Permian mass extinction, a volcanic eruption set off a “rapid greenhouse effect,” which ended up killing 96% of species. The one part the ding-a-lings get right is that this is technically a natural phenomenon—where it falls apart, however, is that this time we’re doing it to ourselves. We should be heading for another glacial period over the next couple of million years, except we are slowly pulling ourselves out of our ice age. Humans have not evolved, nor prepared for life on a greenhouse earth—most people cluster in cities near the equator, think of India, China, Indonesia, and Nigeria; these countries may one day become uninhabitable. Most plants will also perish in the blistering heat, or because of wildfires, which means less oxygen and food. Additionally, half of all our oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean—if you take two deep breaths, one of them is from plants and the other from phytoplankton—guess what, they thrive in cooler temperatures. Food and water scarcity will also become a real problem for most places, so we might go back to the good old days of imperial war when we fought over food and land fit for farming. Oh, how exciting. Also, if Western conservatives think the refugee crisis is bad now, wait until people start fleeing aridification and famine. If we had more time, we could develop technology that will help us either to survive on a greenhouse earth or to preserve our ice age indefinitely—we have already figured out how to control the weather to a degree, with “cloud seeding” for example, imagine what we could do in two million years. Unfortunately, while it can still be done, we won’t get there with things like “carbon offsetting” or recycling. While plastic may claim to be “recyclable” only around five to six percent of all plastic is recycled. It’s simply more profitable to make more plastic, especially because it takes fossil fuels to do that. You don’t see your plastic waste only because private companies ship it to Indochina where it ends up in rivers and fields. Western countries pay those third-world governments to let us use their countries as landfills. Recycling itself was created by fossil fuel companies as a public-relations strategy. Just like how British Petroleum introduced the “carbon footprint” concept so that people would blame themselves, as opposed to the companies. So-called “carbon offsets” are even more gross; the premise is that if you, for example, take a flight, or ship a parcel to your house, you can pay a little extra to have the company plant a tree, which will “offset” the stinky pollutants your consumerism is responsible for. So… the problem? Here’s how it works in reality, a carbon offset company buys a plot of land with trees on it, threatens to sell it to, let’s say a paper company, and allows American Airlines or Amazon to pay them money to keep the trees unharmed, and both companies pocket half of your generous donation to save mother nature. Studies show that if companies keep drilling and fracking, we will destroy our ice age. So, unfortunately, dealing with climate change is not as easy as buying an electric car, it requires us to reckon with even bigger plagues on our society, like the framework of capitalism. If we continue to live in a world run by the rich, where profit and capital dictate investment, as opposed to a concern over a fragile environment and the wellbeing of mankind, aliens will one day excavate our culture and realize we died from a completely avoidable disaster of our own making, because of embarrassing, obsequious fealty to greedy conglomerates. So “you best start believing in ghost stories,” to quote a skeleton pirate with an appetite for apples, “YOU'RE IN ONE!”