Climate Change Is A Children's Issue

The older generations, having lived through the Great Depression, World War II,  the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, look down from their great heights of wisdom gained from the School of Hard Knocks and see climate change as just another thing to live through.  Dennis Miller, a former Exxon employee and supporter of Donald Trump lives in North Carolina.  "The climate has always changed and what's the bad part of it getting a bit warmer?  I like warm days," he says. 

The younger generations, however, consider any existential threat alarming, but Miller believes they have been misled, especially in thinking that humans can do anything about it, up or down.  Miller's granddaughter, Gemma Gutierrez has a sense of despair and outrage over global heating being met with indifference and dismissal by her elders. 

Kids not yet able to vote feel powerless, but they demonstrate in the streets and on social media to make their voices heard.  Some, like Greta Thunberg, find they can make their voices heard all the way to the United Nations.  And then they turn 18 and vote!  Youth voter turnout was 10% higher in this election.  And 61% voted for Biden.

Now Biden has to deliver on his climate promise.  The Sunrise Movement, a progressive climate group led by young people, want to see if Biden will hold to his word that climate change is his number one issue.  Biden's popularity among 18-29 year-olds 6 months ago was abysmal, but his stance on climate changed all that. 

Climate change is not something happening in the future.  It's happening now and is well underway.  Children are already being harmed.  As wildfires sweep across the land in ever greater size, intensity, number and duration, children's lungs are filling with smoke.  It matters where a child lives.  California's Central Valley, with some of the state's most polluted air, was particularly hard hit by record-breaking wildfire smoke.

It also matters what color and how rich a child is.  Can a family afford an air purifier?  Can they afford air conditioning?  With windows open, smoke comes into the house, and kids breath it all day and all night.  Smoke, particulate matter pollution, damages children's lungs.  It causes asthma and compromised immune systems.  The effects of air pollution caused by wildfires, which are in turn exacerbated by changes in climate, give kids an impending sense of doom.  They wonder if they will live to see the future.

But even kids that can avoid air pollution by staying indoors with air purifiers and air conditioning are affected adversely.  Mental health is affected too.  As we all know after this year of covid-inspired "sheltering" in place, a normal human, child or adult, goes stir crazy. 

It is no wonder that people of child-bearing age are becoming more and more likely to forego having children.  600 people aged 27 to 45, in a recent study, were considering the direction of the climate in their reproductive choices.  They fear any child brought into this world will have to survive what could be apocalyptic conditions.

The older generations are walking on.  The younger generations are waking up.  Under new management, climate change can be slowed, stopped, reversed, before there's no place on Earth left where humans can live.

References:
The Guardian, "Climate crisis breaks open generational rifts in US families" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/02/climate-crisis-differences-old-and-young-families
The Guardian, "A youth group helped Biden win. Now they want him to fix climate crisis"  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/16/joe-biden-climate-crisis-ennvironment-energy
New York Times, "Wildfire smoke harming children" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/26/climate/california-smoke-children-health.html
The Guardian, "Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/climate-apocalypse-fears-stopping-people-having-children-study

Where Do We Go From Here?

 I stepped out of the shower this morning and looked at my body in the mirror.  Not very exciting, but that's okay.  We humans are animals that have to eat and poop and make babies.  Well, we don't have to make babies, but we carry the equipment to do that, and half of us carry the equipment to feed babies, with us all the time, 24-7.  Isn't that interesting?  The thing that makes us not animals is the way we can have thoughts and communicate those thoughts via finger movements to paper (or stone or a computer screen) in front of us, via sound waves across a table or over the back fence, and via electromagnetic waves across continents and worlds.

So where do we go from here?  The last four years have seen so many monkey wrenches thrown into the mechanics of civilization, that we may never recover.  It looks like Trump will leave office, though I'm not betting on that outcome yet, but he will not go quietly.  And he has hoards of followers who love him for his hatred of all things un-White.  And his feigned hatred of all things unchristian.  I say "feigned" because he actually hates Christians too, but he doesn't let that be known.

He has done monstrous damage to our society by getting us to hate each other, mistrust each other, suspect each other.  We have found his fear, the source of all his anger and hatred, to be highly contagious.  And our fear of each other triggers anger, violence, and murder.  Literally, all the way to murder.

May God help us.  Except he won't.  We haven't made him powerful enough.  He will die with the human race.

Maybe we can go somewhere better from here.

Clogging The Works For Others

Some time ago there was a notice from the City of Santa Rosa that wet wipes were clogging the machinery in the water works.  This degrades the city's ability to provide quality drinking water and keep the sewer system running smoothly.  When the pipes are clogged, you get a nasty sewer backup.

So there was a plea to stop flushing wipes, paper towels, facial tissues, and feminine hygiene products down the toilet.  Their mnemonic catch phrase was "only flush the 3 P's: pee, poop, and (toilet) paper."  Personally, I never flushed paper towels or feminine hygiene products, but I stopped flushing kleenex and so-called "flushable" wet wipes.

Then came the coronavirus and people started using a lot more wet wipes for disinfecting purposes, and the City had to remind us all again that there was no such thing as a "flushable" wipe.  Not enough people stopped.  The original reminder had to be repeated yesterday.

Will enough people stop it this time?  If not, there could be a sewer backup or a disruption in our potable water supply.  And that would affect everyone, not just the rebellious or stupid ones.  I can stop doing something that's going to cause me harm but I may not be able to stop someone else from causing me harm.

There's a parallel here.  Worldwide, there are a couple million coronavirus cases.  Of those 2.5 million confirmed cases, over 800,000 have been resolved -- 650,000 recoveries, and 170,000 deaths.  That says 80% recover, but 1 in 5 die.  See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ for the latest numbers. 

So, do I care if some states don't issue statewide stay-at-home orders?  My state issued one pretty early on, and we're still losing people, but not as fast as some other states.  Our president has ordered all immigration to stop, so maybe no one from another country can bring their infection to us.  But the highly contagious virus is already here and states can't block non-residents from entering their states.  So someone from a re-opened state could infect some of us in a locked-down state.

I wish there had been a coordinated, nationwide response to this pandemic.  Even it if was late, and a lot of people had to die unnecessarily, at least we'd be on the same page.  There might still be demonstrations against any lockdown.  The organizers of the first of those demonstrations advised people to wear their masks and keep their distance from each other.  That didn't happen.  And the signs the demonstrators waved and the chants they sang were directed against Democrats.  And then our President egged them on with his "LIBERATE" tweets.

I mourn that something that should be treated as a medical and economic emergency had to turn political.  We're going to lose a lot more people -- old people, people of color, poor people, most through no fault of their own -- before this is over.  If it is ever over.

COVID-19 Could Help The Climate

One thing the COVID-19 pandemic has done, on the positive side, is prepare us for crises.  But, while the novel coronavirus is sweeping through the human population of this planet like a wildfire in Northern California, climate change is more like a slowly heating pot of water that we're all sitting in like frogs waiting to be boiled to death.  Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and global average temperatures are rising just as relentlessly, if not as rapidly, as coronavirus cases.

As of March 30, 2020, at 10:15 am Pacific Daylight Time there were 755,367 cases worldwide, with 36,273 deaths.  See Coronavirus Update for current figures.

Countries that have been under lockdown in response to the pandemic have seen a noticeable drop in greenhouse gas emissions.  Scientists have pointed to this as a lesson in how to prepare for, or avoid, the worst impacts of climate change.  CO2 comes from industry, electricity production, and transportation.  All of these have seen reductions since the stay-at-home measures have risen in scope.

"If we can think about how to prepare for climate change like a pandemic, maybe there will be a positive outcome to all of this," said Christopher Jones, lead developer of the CoolClimate Network, an applied research consortium at the University of California, Berkeley. "I think there are some big-picture lessons here that could be very useful."

Pollution-monitoring satellites operated by NASA and the European Space Agency observed drastic decreases in concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), which is also released by cars, power plants and industrial facilities, from Jan 1 to Jan 20 and again from Feb 10 to Feb 25. Studying NO2 concentration in the atmosphere can help scientists understand other heat-trapping greenhouse gases that drive global warming.  Both China and Northern Italy have recorded significant falls in NO2.  

Another noxious gas that has shown significant drops is carbon monoxide (CO).  The BBC found that in New York City, CO was down nearly 50% compared to last year.  

But experts warn that observed reductions are temporary and that as cities, countries and economies bounce back, so, too, will emissions, unless some major changes are adopted.  Jacqueline Klopp, co-director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University in New York City said the pandemic could make companies and governments realize that other threats to humanity, including climate change, could be just as devastating and that it's imperative to develop protective measures. 

"As we move to restart these economies, we need to use this moment to think about what we value," she said. "Do we want to go back to the status quo, or do we want to tackle these big structural problems and restructure our economy to reduce emissions and pollution?"

Last month a poem written by Kitty O'Meara, a Senator in the Irish Seanad (Senate) hit Facebook and immediately went viral.  It's titled "And the people stayed home".

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

Let's heal the Earth!