Climate Change Will Happen to You - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 7

authors of this study argue that climate scientists have more often under-
stated the potential impact of climate change than the opposite, fearful of
coming across as alarmist or incautious in their findings.23 23
While in many contexts this bias toward caution may serve scientific
research well, in the arena of controversy over climate change it may rein-
force our belief that the situation is not that dire after all. In short, it can
feed into our sense that things are all right and will work themselves out
in some fashion. Such a viewpoint is clearly a mode of denial, even if one
who espouses it is otherwise remarkably insightful. As Parkinson herself
admits late in her topic, she is less concerned about the future than oth-
ers because she believes that “surely” inventors will create new energy
alternatives that will make fossil fuels a thing of the past, and by implica-
tion will do so in time for us to avoid the ill effects of climate change. 24
But it is naive to suggest that a solution will simply appear or that it even
if it does it will take effect immediately. Inventions take time to manu-
facture and even longer to produce on a massive scale that this occasion
requires. Only a supreme confidence, however unjustified—only a belief
in the secular equivalent of a miracle—can explain such a distaste for
talk of crisis.
All right , one might say, it's happening , we're causing it, and it may be
worse than we thought. But from what I see, it may not happen here . Ater
all, most of the images we associate with climate change depict what is
happening elsewhere—in the Arctic, for example, or around the distant
islands that will soon be swallowed by rising waters. Seldom do we see
images of the effects of climate change on us where we live. Of course, we
are aware that our summers are warmer than before, our growing seasons
longer, our climate more erratic and surprising. But so far very few of us
have been lost on melting sea ice or swamped by the rising tides.
Most of us are so used to thinking about climate change in this man-
ner that it is very difficult for us to get beyond it. Perhaps only a brutal
restatement of our situation will get us out of the habit and help us focus
on what will happen to us in our own immediate surroundings. So here
it is: climate change is devastating, absolutely powerful, undismissible,
even if in our darker, most selfish moments we might want to say “damn
the ice caps” or “the hell with Tuvalu,” even if we might wish to muter
so as no one can hear, “pfft to plankton” or “good riddance to the coral