It has been raining. Not forty days and forty nights yet, but close enough. Several of my neighbors have been complaining that the rats are climbing on board their arks. No rats have made it into my little craft, which I think is pretty snugly closed, but a bit of water has made it in. When my gopher wood dries out a bit, I need to get me some of that pitch, which i hope will work on the without. Pitching within tends to keep water hidden in places one doesn't want water.
It strikes me that the story of Noah and the ark is one of the earliest examples of some crisis for which humans in our hubris are hasty to take the blame. (I wonder if the rats are telling their youngins that the rain is the result of their over indulgences.) It often tends to be some some person in power who is jealous of anyone else's having power who points out the crisis. In the time of Noah it was the Lord God himself who made the announcement, although it would be a few more years before he bragged about his jealousy for power. 'And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth.'
So Noah set out to obey the radical plan to fix the earth. It must have felt pretty good to be one of the very few good guys. He built the ark, supplying it with enough natural, organic food for the duration, took on board all the animals of the earth, although giving a head to start to the clean animals (and feeling pretty special since it would be a while before the lists of clean and unclean animals would be published for general knowledge). God apparently wanted the number of species, at least on land, to be stable. It seems that fundamentalists, whether then or now, don't trust evolution to allow for changing conditions.
Anyway, the floods came, the floods went. The ark landed on a mountain. There was a rainbow. God was easily pleased by the smell of burnt offerings and promised that next time he destroyed the earth, he would use something besides water. Happy ending, right. Well, no, not really.
Noah's first crop was grapes, and he got drunk and naked. And he cursed his only son who was honest enough to point out that the emperor was naked. 'Speaking truth to power' is often dangerous.
Then of course things went on pretty much the way they always do, just as they had before the flood. Now I keep hearing that once again 'the end of all flesh is come'. This time it is said that we have twenty years, and the earth will end not in water but in heat.
Now, I am not a climate change denier. Climate change is an observable, measurable phenomenon.
As recently as 20,000 years ago, the bit of rather soggy land I occupy was under ice. The climate is becoming warmer, although at a varying pace, and it does certainly seem that now it is getting warmer fast.
What I don't accept is that such change is a crisis. Human beings, as well as many other species, have been around for a good long time, and we are very adaptive. What the fearful call our corruption of the moment is carbon dioxide. But carbon dioxide is necessary for life on this planet, and as it increases, so does plant life, which absorbs it and releases oxygen. The climate is a very complex system which we hardly understand at all. It has never been stable, no more than there has ever been a stable number of species on the earth.Were that most famous group of species, the dinosaurs, unclean, while we are clean?
Nor do I accept that we must respond with radical measures that will limit the growth of well-being for everyone except the chosen few. Yes, I know, there are all those scientists who are quite happy to go along with the popular fears. Fear pays well. Ninety percent or whatever of scientists are often wrong. Advances in human knowledge are almost always made by rebellious sorts who say things like 'nevertheless, it does move.' More than ninety percent of the scientists of Galileo's time, after all, were certain, based on their best science, that the sun moved around the earth. Facts are not really determined by popular vote. I tend to distrust anyone who is willing to make bit statements about a system so complex as the climate of the earth.
If climate change continues as it is tending now--and there are some data from NASA which suggest that we are really heading into a much colder period because of a cooling in the activity of the sun--then it will displace a lot of people, and we will need more acceptance of our differences and less fear of change much more than we need more acres of solar panels, which I suspect we will soon recognize to be at least as destructive as internal combustion engines and cow farts.
If the cunning plan of the Lord God Almighty to purify the earth failed (for the documentation of that failure, read the Old Testament writings that followed the story of Noah), I doubt that the cunning plans of a truant teenager and a cocktail waitress would be more successful. Such plans almost always punish far too many innocent people. I would suggest that we need more open discussion, without Facebook demonetizing or taking down people who are brave enough to say, 'yet it still moves.' If the shit hits the fan, it will take more than some seed bank in Antarctica, almost certainly inaccessible and filled with seeds suitable for a climate which will no longer exist, but which we have built as a contemporary Noah's arc, to recover.
I am reminded of another boat besides the ark, which has also come to have a place in the literature of western civilization, a small ship indeed:
'And when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship. And there were also with him other little ships: And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow, and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?
I would suggest that there is indeed a powerful storm of fear around us these days, a storm to which almost none of us are willing to speak, a storm which few of us are even willing to name. That is why I was pleased when Patty Murray, the Senator from this little soggy bit of once-glacier-covered land on which I perch, was willing this week to name the substance that pollutes the atmosphere of contemporary American politics as fear.
But I am a foolish old man who still has faith in the ability of humanity to gather our boats together and go out into the unknown, I do not expect us to perish unless we abandon the search for knowledge and surrender to the gnawing rats of fear. But that is why when I last had a boat of my own, I named it for St. Brendan.
A footnote, being a quote from Vikram Mansharamani's essay 'Navigating Uncertainty: Thinking in Futures' in John Schroeter, ed., After Shock (Bainbridge Island, 2020), p. 15: 'Nobel Laureate Ken Arrow eloquently captured the desire for predictions in recalling his work for the US Army Air Force. Despite concluding that the weather predictions upon which his superiors relied were entirely useless (i.e., statistically random, no better than a guess), he was rebuffed, told that "The Commanding General is well aware the the forecasts are no good; however, he needs them for planning purposes."'
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