Tuesday, February 8, 2005, 8:19am
Tuesday, February 8, 2005, 8:19am
I woke up feeling unexpectedly fine yesterday and was able to get my work done from home. Sunday night hardly foreshadowed this.
Today is yet another day. I still feel fine and as expected the train is full of high school kids skipping school for the Patriots Super Bowl Victory Parade winding through downtown Boston later today. At Ashland Station the train engineer – of all days – overshot the regular stopping point. A singular open door lined up with this particular milling crowd of uninformed teenagers and instead of cleverly avoiding the rush, I wound up at the back of it watching 25 sets of feet boarding ahead of me. Most of the crowd turned right, while I turned left passing through adjoining vestibules into the next car back. The trick in finding a decent seat is the same as for most Easter egg hunts – either be first in line or search in a less crowded direction.
At Natick Station another high school crowd piles in. A few heads rise, a few shoulders squirm in preparation. Yet rather than scattering and cramming into available seats the kids this morning would rather stand in clumps yakking quietly by the doors, and from this an informal dichotomy emerges – the kids standing in animated discussion while the rest of us sit inside bubbles of our own making – reading papers and books – or tapping away on keyboards wondering what is to become of that next generation.
Compared with previous ‘victory’ trains the background chatter is subdued, and if I hadn’t already known about the parade I might have assumed an ordinary school holiday. If anything is to be concluded, it might be how three football championships in four years have drained the excitement from the occasion.
After considerable reaction to the teenage invasion, the man sharing my seat at the window has found a measure of peace. What matters to me? I still have my elbowroom – which ten hours a week aboard a train is worth a lot more than I might have imagined a few years ago.
Approaching the Pike I’ve moved onto the very non-crucible topic of glaciers – where 2985 are in a state of active retreat worldwide, and only fifteen are holding steady or gaining ice. Active retreat translates into a complete melting within another dozen years in many places depending on these glaciers for their year-round water supplies.
Not more than five years ago my own father signed a right-wing manifesto labeling global warming as nothing more than a left-wing fairytale. I wish my dad and the several thousand other amateur climate scientists signing that document represented a small minority. Yet a lot of people would rather perpetuate a myth than face a contravening reality.
Realists – whether liberal-leaning or conservative-leaning – tend to observe actual data – like melting glaciers, and collapsing ice shelves, and thinning summertime sea ice, and melting subcontinental ice caps, and global temperature rise, and a host of other indicators. Empiricism is not a conspiracy – and if it is being seen this way, then we have a much bigger problem than global warming.
The need of some to subordinate themselves under a political ideology in the face of mounting evidence is an amazing force when seen among people I would expect to think more clearly than this. Dad was a chemist fully aware of the scientific method. Yet much to my dismay, he signed that absolutist manifesto anyway.
If anything survives of this train journal I would like to say to future generations that the mechanism and trend lines of fossil fuel induced global warming is already well-observed among those willing to conduct honest research. We don’t know its full extent, but we do know enough to take it seriously, and we know the catastrophic upper bounds of possibility are indeed possible.
Yet today, those running the most polluting country on earth are doing virtually nothing to limit carbon and other greenhouse emissions and instead acting as much as possible to limit further debate and action.
So if you are reading some early 21st Century politician’s memoir saying otherwise, well, like most things politicians say — it ain’t true.
We already know that strong greenhouse effects are possible and likely. We already know that seas could rise ten feet or more in the next century and up to 300 feet if all the ice melts on the Earth. This generation cannot feign ignorance of the possibilities, even if we lack a precise prediction. We evacuate whole cities ahead of hurricanes working with similar uncertainties.
If the great ice caps begin to melt in earnest – and they surely will at this rate – within 200 years there will be no more Boston or New York or Washington or Baltimore or London or Shanghai or Tokyo or any of the other great coastal cities on the planet. The whole of Florida will be history. The whole of Bangladesh with 150 million souls will become a deeper penetration of the Bay of Bengal. The former peoples of Atlantis and Pacifis and Oceanis will try to relocate inland, and they will succeed one way or another. But the upheaval and the pain in the process will be beyond description.
And so to you of future generations, you will be completely justified in spitting on our graves – if you can find them buried below the inundating seas – justified in hating us for not doing our job as ordinary citizens in saving this planet for you – for knuckling under the will of those insisting on manifestos of acquiescence.
But enough of this haranguing – until I understand more about the forces of thought behind this. I’m going to accomplish much here.
