July 11, 2021
On an unnaturally hot late June day in the Northeast, my eight-year-old grandson was walking back to a broiling car to continue a long trip. It was in the mid-nineties and he and his three-year-old sister were complaining about how miserable they were when, out of nowhere, he said, "This is why climate change is important!"
Startled, his mother agreed, and then he suddenly added, "And imagine what it's going to be like when I'm 50 years old!"
Imagine indeed! When it comes to climate change, my grandchildren have long been on my mind. I've certainly worried about the nightmarish world they might inherit, if we -- my generation and the ones just below mine -- don't do what's needed to stop this planet from becoming a hothouse of the first order. And yes, since I do my best to follow the news on the subject, I'm aware that, from a melting Greenland to an overheating Middle East, this planet is indeed changing more or less before my eyes.
But here's what I didn't imagine: that, at my own advanced age (I'm almost 77), I would live to see something of the genuine blast-furnace effect of that phenomenon. Now, it seems, I couldn't have been more wrong. Not just my children and grandchildren, but I am likely to be living through climate change in a big-time way. After all, this is happening remarkably fast, as the recent soaring temperatures and fires in the northwestern U.S. and Canada have so shockingly made clear, as has the staggering mega-drought, unprecedented in human memory, that now extends across significant parts of this country. As Jonathan Watts of the Guardian observed recently when it came to weather events in the Canadian and U.S. Northwest that were already exceeding the worst-case scenarios of climate scientists, "More people in more countries are feeling that their weather belongs to another part of the world." How painfully true. Canada, it seems, is now the new Persian Gulf.
And given those blazing temperatures in our own backyards, including the Northeast where I live, who had time to notice that the ground (not air) temperature at one spot in Siberia (Siberia!) hit 118 degrees recently as heat waves scorched the region; or that, however grimly historic last year's 30-storm Atlantic hurricane season was (as its naming system ran through alphabets), we've just experienced the earliest fifth-named storm of any year on record? And who even registered the record number of Arizona senior citizens dying in overheating mobile homes in the midst of the ongoing heat emergency there or the scourge of grasshoppers swarming across the American West?
How germane, then, was my grandson's unnerving comment. As TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today, as she reports in from the burning West Coast (the "world's most extreme heat wave in modern history"), make no mistake about it, global warming is here and, if we don't act fast, god knows what it may be for our grandchildren. Tom
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