our priorities

I'm in the middle of a rather amazing book: The Weather of the Future, by Heidi Cullen, a climatologist. She is one of many scientists trying to pin down the changes we can expect as our atmosphere absorbs more CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and our Earth warms. Her life work is about trying to explain the relationships between humans and our environment... the subtitle of the book being "Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet". The planet being our Earth.

So I was fascinated to read that a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that Americans ranked a list of 'concerns' in the following order, in terms of national priorities: the economy, jobs, terrorism (thanks much, George), Social Security, education, energy, Medicare, health care, deficit reduction, health insurance, helping the poor, crime, moral decline, the military, tax cuts, environment, immigration lobbyists, trade policy, and global warming. In that order.

The author goes on to discuss psychological explanations for that Pew list, and the fact that we all have a 'finite pool of worry'. "It's impossible to sustain concern about global warming when other worries, like an economic collapse or a home foreclosure, dive into the pool".

"In essence, we aren't fully capable of processing global warming in the traditional human way. So we need to find a new way to look at it, a new way to look at it and break it down." Amen.

This is how we're able to justify our sins: Since it's not a threat we can see, or smell, or hear, or feel, then we naturally (and this is basically our hard-wiring from generations of experience and survival) ignore anything that doesn't present an immediate threat. And so we go about our lives with a business-as-usual attitude: We drive our cars, we fly in airplanes, we turn up our home thermostats, we buy flowers from Ecuador and lamb from New Zealand. It's all good.

Except that it's not all good. It's all bad. The final two-thirds of the book is dedicated to 'the weather of the future' in seven areas of our Earth: The Sahel, Africa; the great barrier reef, Australia; the central valley, California; the Arctic, in two parts (Canada and Greenland); Dhaka, Bangladesh; and New York, New York. Her job is to take the science of warming and translate that to likely weather events. As you might imagine, the results are not pretty.

Corvallis, Oregon is not one of her chosen focal points, but it could have been. We've just experienced the wettest March in history (that is, as long as weather records have been kept). And this is likely to be our future: wet, warm, occasional Monster Storms, hot dry summers.

What to do? That is a very personal issue... each of us must decide what we can change, how we can act to reduce our footprint. Obviously, if we're to have any chance of avoiding the 12-degree temperature rise predicted for the northern hemisphere in the next 90 years, and the one-meter sea level rise, we must change, we must abandon the 'business as usual' attitude, the 'I'm entitled to live this way because I can afford to do so' attitude. That just isn't going to work, for us or for our kids and grandkids. It's something for each of us to think about, and work on. I highly recommend Heidi's book as an exercise in potential ethical responses to the climate dilemma.

Namaste.