Coping With Catastrophe

This is an essay on the nonfiction book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which I had to read for my freshman seminar. Our professor asked us to write on whether or not we believe we can cope with the challenges of climate change. The essay(s) I reference are from the Kobert Reports, which you can find at http://academics.smcvt.edu/KolbertReports/ Hope you enjoy my essay and feel free to criticize constructively.

In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert gives us a gratuitous amount of evidence in favor of climate change but doesn’t state a specific way she believes climate change can be controlled or minimized. Clearly, the Earth and its climate are changing; hotter summers and strangely erratic temperatures in recent winters shows this, increasing disturbances around the world such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and droughts show this, even something as seemingly insignificant as leaves changing color earlier than they have in previous years is a clear indication that the Earth’s climate is changing. Despite all of these hints that something negative is definitely happening to this world, a fair amount of people are not working to change their ways as consumers. Without governments working with each other and the people they preside over, the climate will continue to keep changing for the worst.

A Nobel Prize-winner by the name of Paul Crutzen refers to this current age as the Anthropocene. “[The Anthropocene] was defined by one creature – man – who had become so dominant that he was capable of altering the planet on a geological scale.” (183) Within the past century or two, the human race started drastically affecting the Earth by means of industrial coal-burning, by herds of cattle bred for our burgers generating methane, by our automobiles and the like. Perhaps within the past 50 years, our carbon emissions have increased wildly. In Kolbert’s afterword, she shows a graph with time on the x-axis and the extent of ice in the Arctic sea on the y-axis. The caption beneath the graph is “The extent of perennial Arctic sea ice has continued to shrink dramatically. The rate of decline since 1979 is nearly 12 percent per decade.” (193) Kolbert also mentions on the previous page that a NASA scientist she shared camp with predicted that an Arctic ice cap would be almost gone by 2012. That’s barely two years from now. To ignore the evidence in Kolbert’s “field notes” is to condemn our future to the ramifications of our past actions as a race.

In order to try to control the damage climate change will produce, governments should take action. In Professor Walsh’s essay, he writes “People are not going to [reduce their carbon footprint] voluntarily.” Maybe people have too many things to worry about – a solid job, stable housing, college educations for their children – to worry about lowering their carbon emissions, maybe they don’t believe that their practices are continuing to add to the amount of greenhouse gases that are being generated or, maybe they are telling themselves –as Professor Walsh says – “It’s going to be okay”. What if it’s not going to be okay, what if we’re already in too deep? People need to start paying attention and taking responsibility; but how? Walsh mentions three different approaches governments could take in order to force change upon the governed and at least two could be used concurrently: cap and trade and taxing people based on whether or not what they buy produces CO2. Any action, no matter how small, will make a difference. If governments are worried about a decrease in their popularity – based on a raise in taxes or otherwise – one should raise this question: “Is your popularity as a government more important than our future as a human race?” People are elected because the majority of voters believe they can make the right decisions. It’s ignorant to worry about not being perfect, about making mistakes. Perfection comes from trial and error, so to sit around and try to come up with an idea that will please everyone is ridiculous; it’s not possible. If we don’t start trying ideas soon, we’re going to be out of time.

Kolbert quotes a global warming Q&A published in New Scientist that ends with “’How worried should we be?’ The answer was another question: ‘How lucky do you feel?’” (187) Countries have to start working together to reduce their carbon footprints because, right now, the pace of climate change has nothing to do with luck; it’s based on carbon emissions, how much greenhouse gases are floating around already, how much we’re continuing to emit and whether or not we continue linearly. We must act to change.

Without teamwork between governments and the groups they govern, the Earth will continue to heat up, glaciers will continue to melt, and our very existence as a species will continue to be at stake. It’s time to really ask ourselves: how lucky do we feel?