Not for Orphans

There is a charming bit of Dorothy Parker lore in which Miss Parker, an orphan, is staying with friends who, as she is coming down the stairs to breakfast, are red in the face from a heated argument about whose mother is worse. Embarrassed to be seen so disturbed, they ask Miss Parker if it isn't too warm in the house. 'Not for orphans,' she replied. In the heated exchange about global warming, I feel a bit like an orphan. I am not particularly worried. Let me explain why.

First, let me say that I think 'climate change' is a better term than 'global warming'. Certainly the average temperatures are going up, but more days of higher temperatures with fewer days of lower temperatures will drive up the average. But if the warming were even around the globe, there would probably be fewer big storms generated. Some of the biggest events of climate change which we have already seen may be an increase in big hurricanes.

My first reason not to be worried is not a very valid one, but it still influences my perspective. I am seventy-two years old and I have lived through several potential world-ending crises that have come and gone. There was the cloud of impending nuclear war, with duck and cover drills at school and the movie 'On the Beach' to scare us. Then came overpopulation. The depletion of the ozone layer was in there somewhere. Acid rain was going to turn us all to grey goo. I can understand why younger people are rather worried. Climate change is their duck and cover moment.

But, one might say, climate chance is different. It isn't like any of those other things. No, it isn't. Nor do I deny it. The earth has been warming for the past 12,000 years. I am sitting on a hill side in Northwest Washington that was under a deep cover of ice not that long ago in terms of the age of the earth. The curve seems to be rising more steeply lately, and in the time period during which humans have been letting a lot of carbon dioxide (and other gases) loose into the atmosphere. It is always sketchy scientific methodology to assume correspondence to causation, but of course 'most competent scientists' agree that it is human activity which is the cause. I am skeptical of science by democracy. If it had been left to 'most competent' scientists, we might never have heard of Albert Einstein's equations which explain almost everything that we can observe happening in the universe. But even then there is that pesky 'almost everything'.

The earth's climate is a very complex system. Even fairly regional weather patterns are very complex systems. Ask John von Neumann, who supported the development of early computers in order to make better weather reports available to the allied air forces that were bombing Germany. Eighty years later, with much better data reporting and much more powerful computers, the forecast for rain on my little hill has dropped in the last three hours from 62% to 34%, and I won't really know if it rains tomorrow until tomorrow happens.  For all I know there is some sort of synergistic force in the world's climatic system which will either stop the warming trend or ignore any of our efforts to curb it. (The other great impetus for modern computers, led by John Maunchly among several competitors, was to compute firing tables for artillery. Although Maunchly's Eniac wasn't completed until after the end of World War II, it was more successful at projectories than weather.)

Assuming that it is human activity which has caused the spike in rising temperatures, then it is almost certainly too late for us to do anything much about it. Instead of preparing for the results of the climate change we are wring our hands about, we run around blaming other people and proposing draconic governmental programs. The panic-propelled programs might not do much to stop climate change, but one may be sure that their draconic powers would not be given up.

Many people panicked about climate change act as if the idea that changing the ratio of gases in the atmosphere might have some sort of effect on their lives was hidden from them by the companies that came to their doors in the night and forced them to buy cars and fly to exotic locations to have fun. They had never thought about the fact that one way of committing suicide is to sit in a car with the motor running in a garage, nor that one might think of the earth as a garage in which we all live, in which we all share each other's exhaust.

Now, however, climate change has been presented as a crisis, and something must be done. Not of course done by me, but forced upon everyone by some wonderful bureaucracy.

I don't think most people are as concerned about what they are calling the crisis of climate change as they are about proclaiming other people guilty. I bases this notion on the evidence that my friends who claim to be terrified by climate change are most often the same ones who send me photos of their skiing trips in the Swiss Alps or their new electric cars. How cute. The fuel that powers your Tesla is burned in somebody else's back yard, and transported over great distances to your green power outlet.

So: I would not be at all surprised if in the next few years the climate changes dramatically. Species will become extinct, just as they have for as long as there have been species. People will have to migrate to new homes, as people have done since Lucy's kids left their African Eden. Miami may be flooded. I don't think anyone has claimed that the civilization of Miami surpasses that of Atlantis, also said to have flooded. But humanity may survive. The destruction will perhaps not be greater than that occurring to Berlin or Coventry or Tokyo in World War II. There will perhaps not be more refugees than following that war. Perhaps the death total will be no higher than it was in World War I, although since the population of the earth is about seven times what it was at the start of World War I, a smaller percentage of fatalities would still be a large number.

The inconvenient truth is, I don't think people really care much about human or other deaths. I have already suggested my evidence: the great popularity of wars, and not just wars among 'savages', who certainly fought ads savagely as they could with their limited technologies, but among the world's most civilized people. We seem to have much more concern to blame other people for our problems, to expect other people to solve them, and to escape the consequences ourselves. (Clue the substitutionary atonement meme.)

The pleasant truth is that there are some men who do solve problems, often accidentally, it is true, and therefore the very real possibility that we will be able either to temper climate change or life with it and prosper.

The stark truth is, the universe will continue. I suspect that the world will continue with humans, and with the next evolutionary creatures that already seem to be making their appearance on the darwinian/de chardinian stage, which we call AI. Little sea creatures will survive that will feed on the rich molecules of what we, from our aesthetic position, call plastic waste. Bigger creatures will eat them. It will soon be turtles all the way up again. Then we will probably drink again the fruit of our vine, and lie naked in our tents. Then we will be around to see the next rough beast that slouches towards our new Babylon, our new Atlantis. Or we may not be around. The AI may have inherited the earth, a species sui generis, a species of new orphans.