10/19/2007: "Fire & Ice"

In the December, 1920 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” was published. http://www.bartleby.com/155/2.html “Some say the world will end in fire,” Frost said, “Some say in ice.”

Frost’s powerful poem was about desire and hate, not the world’s end: in 1920, humans didn’t yet have the capability to end the world. Nearly 90 years later, we can’t be so sanguine. Growing up in the 1950s, I first learned that we could destroy the world by nuclear war. Then in the early 1980s, we learned that global nuclear war might create “nuclear winter” -- the end of the world in ice. And now we face predictions that the world for many millions of its inhabitants will simply disappear beneath the waves as the seas rise due to global warming.

I listened to Dr. Richard Gammon speak on April 15, 2007 at a conference organized by Navigating our Future (see navigatingourfuture.org) and the students of Spring Street School. Dr. Gammon is a professor at the University of Washington School of Oceanography, an Adjunct Professor in Atmospheric Science, and Co-Director of the University of Washington Program on Environment. He is a climate scientist of the first order. In the months since his talk I have been pondering the implications of what he told us.

Earth is warming. Dr. Gammon said as a fact that mankind is responsible for most of the global warming that is happening. Scientists don’t know if mankind’s share is 71% of the global warming or 93%, he said, but he stated that it is almost certain that the acts of man are responsible for more than half of the current global warming.

By 2100 Dr. Gammon said that scientists forecast global warming of 3 degrees to 11 degrees worldwide. If global warming by then is only 3˚F – the bottom end of that range –he forecast that more than 50 million people will be displaced by rising water. Where will they go; what nation has room for 50 million refugees? Many (most?) of those 50 million people will likely die by drowning (as in storm surges from typhoons), by war as those pushed out by rising waters fight for space, by disease, by starvation, and (ironically) by thirst. 2100 is 93 years away. Some children born today will still be alive then.

That prediction of 50,000,000 people is for the very bottom of the range – a number which Dr. Gammon feels is not avoidable, that it is coming regardless of whatever preventative steps might be taken now. If we fail to take preventative steps now, he said, the temperature rise – and the many millions who will be affected – will increase much more.

50 million people? 100 million people? 400 million people? All are within the range of predicted impacts, depending upon what steps we do – or don’t – take now. Six millions Jews died in the Holocaust: these numbers dwarf those. If we are to believe what I understand to be the majority of scholars, driving our cars and heating our homes will be killing people in the future. What are we to think of all this? In his poem The Arrow and the Song, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said

I shot an arrow in the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where.

We find it easy to kill when we don’t see the victim pierced by an arrow – or a gunshot. The deaths this year at Virginia Tech were so shocking in part because we could see the bodies and watched their loved ones cry. Although millions may well die from global warming, most of them will be dying, unseen by us, in a future we hope is far off.

So what about those 50 million people, the minimum number that Dr. Gammon predicts will certainly be displaced – and many of whom will die – from global warming? What do we say to them? When we create memorials for the dead, the dead are of course past listening, past hearing, past understanding what we might have to say.

But the 50 million people – the minimum Dr. Gammon says that will be displaced by global warming even if we institute strident control measures now –aren’t dead yet. In many cases they aren’t even born yet. Unlike the dead to whom we erect memorials, they will know what we said, back here in 2007.

All I can tell you is what I’m going to say to them. Since that April 15th lecture, I’ve been working on a series of models for what I call PreMorials™. We all know what a memorial is – a tribute to those who have died in the past. A PreMorial™ is a tribute to those who are yet to die. My PreMorials™ are models for large – perhaps fifty or 100 feet -- interactive water feature landscape sculptures. The sculpture itself is laid out as an area with landscape features: hills, valleys, mountains, lowlands. In a repeating cycle, a pump gradually fills the sculpture from huge underground tanks, and over a space of hours you watch the sculpture slowly disappear beneath rising water. And then – in a symbol of hope – the water slowly drains away, revealing the landforms that had been swamped, only to have the cycle repeated over and over again. I hope to have a series of other artists will follow my lead, and that many PreMorials™ will be erected across the country and beyond.

But even if the full-size PreMorials™ never get built (they are very expensive to construct), I have chiseled my first PreMorial™ in stone. My sandstone PreMorial™ model will be here 100 years from now. The few of Earth’s citizens who see it then can read from it what they will.

Remember the stock cartoon character, the bearded man dressed in a long white robe, carrying a placard announcing ''Repent -- the world is coming to an end.'' My mother tells me I had a great-great-great grandmother who went off to live in a cave with others of her church to await an end of the world that never came. I suppose she came out eventually.

We’ve all heard various doomsday predictions. Some are science-based. For example, in 1919, meteorologist Albert Porta predicted that the conjunction of six planets would generate a magnetic current that would cause the sun to explode and engulf the earth on December 17th of that year. More often, the predictions are religion-based. For a list of “63 failed & 1 ambiguous end-of-the-world predictions from 30 CE to 1990 CE”, see http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl2.htm.

So here we are, listening to dire predictions of global warming-induced disasters. Is this, as Yogi Berra said, “like déjà vu all over again?” Just #64 on the list of failed end-of-the-world predictions?

All we can do is to decide who we trust, and hope they’re right (or in this case, wrong!). That’s what I’ve done. I trust Dr. Gammon, and the many articles I’ve read on global climate change and its impacts.

Some of you no doubt don’t believe the predictions. This article is likely to generate my usual quotient of climate change deniers, criticizing my logic and calling me a hypocrite and worse. Attacking the messenger is a tried and true tactic, and frankly it works well: I’ve been advised against writing controversial articles for fear of the effects on my law practice. But what are a few unpleasant letters compared to 50 million people? I know who speaks for the conservatives, but who speaks for those millions and millions of people?

As Popeye said, “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” With the PreMorial™ I’ve sculpted, and with the other steps I’ve taken in my personal life, I’ve made peace with myself on the issue. That is all anyone can ask for. I hope you can do the same.

What about the costs of dealing with global warming? Dr. Gammon estimated the costs at 1% of gross domestic product (“gdp”). The costs of not dealing with it? He estimated those costs at 5% to 20% of gdp. Of course, those costs would come later – when the disasters start to occur. Putting carbon into the air isn’t free, he pointed out – it is just that we aren’t yet paying the cost. As Dumbledore said in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, “Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we will face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” That time is now.

Like Wimpy in the Popeye cartoon, we’d much rather pay Tuesday for a hamburger today. Unfortunately, the Earth’s Tuesday has come much faster than we’d like.