There’s a special kind of dread that breeds in the path of a hurricane.
They call it the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – that brightly coloured funnel on the weather map that traces the possible paths of a storm. It’s a statistical mishmash created from dozens of predictions of varying quality, and when you see the dark red centre touch your part of the map, you can almost feel the barometric pressure dropping. You might have days to prepare, days before you know whether it’ll really hit you and how badly. You might not have days to get out, not if the roads are clogged and the gas stations are mobbed; certainly not if you have to work and don’t have cash on hand. You hunker down as best you can, waiting for the first rainbands and the next, for the eye to pass over and the eyewall to return.
Two months before Hurricane Irma, I take my seven-year-old daughter down Alligator Alley: the stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the Everglades, the massive wetland that covers most of South Florida. It now spans only half the three million acres it once covered, thanks to the breakneck pace of agricultural development and suburban McMansions, but that’s still enough to make the maps look as though the Florida peninsula was dipped into a vat of green. Eight million people – a third of the state’s population – draw their drinking water from this wild and desolate place.
Travelers are advised to bring plenty of water, food, a canister of gas, and a first-aid kit, since there are no hospitals or restaurants and cellular coverage is minimal. Alligator Alley has only the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations and a few rest stops with bathrooms and vending machines. Flocks of turkey buzzards populate the picnic pavilions. A few feet from the parked cars, solid land drops off into sawgrass marsh. It would be easy to step out into the swamp and disappear: this is a protected reserve for the Florida panther, for birds and fish, and of course for alligators. Back when the Everglades was bigger, wilder, enslaved Africans escaped from sugarcane plantations and ran for their lives into those tall, sharp blades. Those who survived found aid and alliances with the local Seminole people.
I tell my daughter about this as we drive from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami to my parents’ house near Clearwater. We watch towering thunderheads sweep across the sea of grass, pouring furiously on us and then retreating into darkness, leaving a rainbow in the rear-view mirror. I want to take her to the Seminole reservation, to skim across the water in a noisy fan-powered airboat so she will remember this place. There is a museum there, too, with recreated houses on stilts, connected by little bridges. It’s a testament to human adaptation, to learning how to live in three feet of alligator-infested water. These are things I want her to learn – but the sun is brutal and the mosquitoes already have the taste of our blood, so we stay in the car. With no way to stream music, we sing our way through endless hours of the same view: water, sawgrass, power lines strung along the horizon, straight road ahead.
I remember what my cousin Ross, an Orlando comedian, told me about deciding to home-school his sons: ‘I want them to see Florida while it’s still here.’ I tell my daughter to remember, remember this. I want her to tell her grandchildren about it – as though it isn’t the height of arrogant optimism to imagine her grandchildren.
‘I want to go to space,’ she tells me. Seven-year-olds have a way of changing the subject abruptly, so I go with it. She’s always wanted to be a veterinarian. Why this sudden shift? ‘So we can still be alive even when the earth burns up.’
The impending planetary catastrophe is often on her mind. She thinks about death a lot. This is normal, of course – children ask the most important questions, especially at funerals, and God help the adults who don’t answer them seriously. She declares her desire to be buried, not cremated; she wants her beloved companion Doggy Pillow buried with her, so no one can bother it. ‘What kind of species will take over the earth after we’re gone?’ she asks. I admit I don’t know. ‘I don’t want them to mess with Doggy Pillow.’
If it has occurred to her that I will probably die before she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But the planet will die before she does, that much seems clear – the planet as we know it, at any rate, the one that supports us and feeds us and slakes our thirst.
Her love of animals makes her a natural conservationist, and in the Anthropocene even books for children must address what is going on. Do you like sharks? Did you know that sharks can displace their jaws to snap at prey? Did you know that sharks are disappearing at an astonishing rate? My daughter declares that she will save the oceans by putting up signs telling people not to litter. It sounds no less effective than carbon offset trading.
She is surprised when I tell her about the icy, snowy Pennsylvania winters of my 1980s childhood. Her Pennsylvania winters are not like that. This February the ice-cream truck came by and we ate our cones on the back porch in the sunshine. Her friend’s ice-skating birthday party was cancelled due to a lack of ice.
Why, she asks, don’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be freaking out?
We read a book about second-graders who want to fight global warming. ‘What really freaks grown-ups out is not being in charge,’ the characters say. ‘If grown-ups weren’t scared of nature, they’d probably try harder to save it from global warming.’
We are freaking out, of course: quietly, while the oligarch-in-chief dismantles what little inadequate infrastructure might even notionally allow us do something on any major scale. We perform our anger, our disbelief, but the world is too busy ending to witness our performance. We go to work with an extra layer of sunscreen or an inhaler for the allergic asthma that flares when the trees, jarred from their seasonal rhythm, release their pollen all at once. We are scared of nature. We are most definitely not in charge.
At the end of June, a news conference: prominent figures from the UN and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, with an urgent message. Runaway irreversible climate change, the headlines read.
The Paris Accords, from which President Trump has made an undignified exit, were never enough, never even intended to be enough. They aimed for a rise of no more than 1.5° Celsius – but research indicates that this is unlikely, given that ‘average global temperatures were already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38°C in February and March’ in 2016. ‘Sharp and permanent’ reductions to carbon emissions are needed in the next three years if we are even to mitigate the consequences. Chris Field of Stanford University, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, comments that ‘the 1.5°C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.’ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is blunt: ‘The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.’
Three years. We thought we had twenty.
In July 2017, climate change seems imminent but still more or less distant. It’s possible, especially if you are a politician, to ignore something that is three years away. We inhabit the deep red centre of the cone of uncertainty, but the skies are still clear. We are the doomed Russian aristocrats who spent the summer of 1917 partying with wild abandon, their ears popping with the pressure of a brewing revolution. It’s not the proletariat or peasantry rising up to relieve us of our luxuries, though: it’s the earth itself, sea and sky working in coalition, trees and air conspiring.
We look at the numbers: If we cut all carbon emissions to net zero in the next twenty years – a feat that would require the overthrow of capitalism – we might, might, escape with a sea-level rise that is only catastrophic, with only mass migrations and hunger and thirst, with only a drastic reduction in our species instead of extinction.
Three years for a change so drastic as to be completely incompatible with capitalism. It feels impossible – but then, what changes felt impossible in 1914? In 1932? We laugh now at Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we had reached the ‘end of history’. Yet climate change presents, if not an end to history’s course, then a sharp and dangerous corner around which we cannot see. History’s pace quickens as the climate warms, events piling onto one another with disorienting speed, norms changing irreversibly. We will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.
They call it the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – that brightly coloured funnel on the weather map that traces the possible paths of a storm. It’s a statistical mishmash created from dozens of predictions of varying quality, and when you see the dark red centre touch your part of the map, you can almost feel the barometric pressure dropping. You might have days to prepare, days before you know whether it’ll really hit you and how badly. You might not have days to get out, not if the roads are clogged and the gas stations are mobbed; certainly not if you have to work and don’t have cash on hand. You hunker down as best you can, waiting for the first rainbands and the next, for the eye to pass over and the eyewall to return.
Two months before Hurricane Irma, I take my seven-year-old daughter down Alligator Alley: the stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the Everglades, the massive wetland that covers most of South Florida. It now spans only half the three million acres it once covered, thanks to the breakneck pace of agricultural development and suburban McMansions, but that’s still enough to make the maps look as though the Florida peninsula was dipped into a vat of green. Eight million people – a third of the state’s population – draw their drinking water from this wild and desolate place.Travelers are advised to bring plenty of water, food, a canister of gas, and a first-aid kit, since there are no hospitals or restaurants and cellular coverage is minimal. Alligator Alley has only the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations and a few rest stops with bathrooms and vending machines. Flocks of turkey buzzards populate the picnic pavilions. A few feet from the parked cars, solid land drops off into sawgrass marsh. It would be easy to step out into the swamp and disappear: this is a protected reserve for the Florida panther, for birds and fish, and of course for alligators. Back when the Everglades was bigger, wilder, enslaved Africans escaped from sugarcane plantations and ran for their lives into those tall, sharp blades. Those who survived found aid and alliances with the local Seminole people.
I tell my daughter about this as we drive from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami to my parents’ house near Clearwater. We watch towering thunderheads sweep across the sea of grass, pouring furiously on us and then retreating into darkness, leaving a rainbow in the rear-view mirror. I want to take her to the Seminole reservation, to skim across the water in a noisy fan-powered airboat so she will remember this place. There is a museum there, too, with recreated houses on stilts, connected by little bridges. It’s a testament to human adaptation, to learning how to live in three feet of alligator-infested water. These are things I want her to learn – but the sun is brutal and the mosquitoes already have the taste of our blood, so we stay in the car. With no way to stream music, we sing our way through endless hours of the same view: water, sawgrass, power lines strung along the horizon, straight road ahead.
I remember what my cousin Ross, an Orlando comedian, told me about deciding to home-school his sons: ‘I want them to see Florida while it’s still here.’ I tell my daughter to remember, remember this. I want her to tell her grandchildren about it – as though it isn’t the height of arrogant optimism to imagine her grandchildren.
‘I want to go to space,’ she tells me. Seven-year-olds have a way of changing the subject abruptly, so I go with it. She’s always wanted to be a veterinarian. Why this sudden shift? ‘So we can still be alive even when the earth burns up.’
The impending planetary catastrophe is often on her mind. She thinks about death a lot. This is normal, of course – children ask the most important questions, especially at funerals, and God help the adults who don’t answer them seriously. She declares her desire to be buried, not cremated; she wants her beloved companion Doggy Pillow buried with her, so no one can bother it. ‘What kind of species will take over the earth after we’re gone?’ she asks. I admit I don’t know. ‘I don’t want them to mess with Doggy Pillow.’
If it has occurred to her that I will probably die before she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But the planet will die before she does, that much seems clear – the planet as we know it, at any rate, the one that supports us and feeds us and slakes our thirst.
Her love of animals makes her a natural conservationist, and in the Anthropocene even books for children must address what is going on. Do you like sharks? Did you know that sharks can displace their jaws to snap at prey? Did you know that sharks are disappearing at an astonishing rate? My daughter declares that she will save the oceans by putting up signs telling people not to litter. It sounds no less effective than carbon offset trading.
She is surprised when I tell her about the icy, snowy Pennsylvania winters of my 1980s childhood. Her Pennsylvania winters are not like that. This February the ice-cream truck came by and we ate our cones on the back porch in the sunshine. Her friend’s ice-skating birthday party was cancelled due to a lack of ice.
Why, she asks, don’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be freaking out?
We read a book about second-graders who want to fight global warming. ‘What really freaks grown-ups out is not being in charge,’ the characters say. ‘If grown-ups weren’t scared of nature, they’d probably try harder to save it from global warming.’
We are freaking out, of course: quietly, while the oligarch-in-chief dismantles what little inadequate infrastructure might even notionally allow us do something on any major scale. We perform our anger, our disbelief, but the world is too busy ending to witness our performance. We go to work with an extra layer of sunscreen or an inhaler for the allergic asthma that flares when the trees, jarred from their seasonal rhythm, release their pollen all at once. We are scared of nature. We are most definitely not in charge.
At the end of June, a news conference: prominent figures from the UN and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, with an urgent message. Runaway irreversible climate change, the headlines read.
The Paris Accords, from which President Trump has made an undignified exit, were never enough, never even intended to be enough. They aimed for a rise of no more than 1.5° Celsius – but research indicates that this is unlikely, given that ‘average global temperatures were already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38°C in February and March’ in 2016. ‘Sharp and permanent’ reductions to carbon emissions are needed in the next three years if we are even to mitigate the consequences. Chris Field of Stanford University, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, comments that ‘the 1.5°C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.’ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is blunt: ‘The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.’
Three years. We thought we had twenty.
In July 2017, climate change seems imminent but still more or less distant. It’s possible, especially if you are a politician, to ignore something that is three years away. We inhabit the deep red centre of the cone of uncertainty, but the skies are still clear. We are the doomed Russian aristocrats who spent the summer of 1917 partying with wild abandon, their ears popping with the pressure of a brewing revolution. It’s not the proletariat or peasantry rising up to relieve us of our luxuries, though: it’s the earth itself, sea and sky working in coalition, trees and air conspiring.
We look at the numbers: If we cut all carbon emissions to net zero in the next twenty years – a feat that would require the overthrow of capitalism – we might, might, escape with a sea-level rise that is only catastrophic, with only mass migrations and hunger and thirst, with only a drastic reduction in our species instead of extinction.
Three years for a change so drastic as to be completely incompatible with capitalism. It feels impossible – but then, what changes felt impossible in 1914? In 1932? We laugh now at Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we had reached the ‘end of history’. Yet climate change presents, if not an end to history’s course, then a sharp and dangerous corner around which we cannot see. History’s pace quickens as the climate warms, events piling onto one another with disorienting speed, norms changing irreversibly. We will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.
by Sarah Grey, Salvage | Read more:
Image: NOAA
