The Hell We Maketh Here On Earth
When it comes to climate change, why have so few people noticed making everywhere get hotter is going to be hellish? And how is it possible so few care?
CLIMATE ADVOCATES HAVE ABSOLUTELY FAILED to describe even the most obvious downside to climate change, which is how miserable it will be for so many of us to feel so hot so much of the time.
Sure. Forget glaciers; polar bears; low-lying coastal regions; wildfire ash in your children’s lungs; the spread of insect-borne contagions; degraded bio-diversity; coral reefs and the attendant fish life; agricultural yields and our water reserves. But do you really want to be a lethargic, sweaty, sticky, grumpy, mess for significant portions of your life? Do you want to be regularly unable to go outside in summertime, imprisoned for days on end? Do you want to be a shade-beggar, perpetually hunting for any scrap of covered space, bench, or table, every time you go out? Do you want your children to have chronic burn blisters from touching their playground equipment?
Have you really given no thought to anybody who has to work outside during the hotter months? Do you not care about farmers, road workers, carpenters? Those who feed and shelter you? In their heavy work clothes and boots? The sweaty forehead bands of their safety helmets? You can’t wear sandals while operating a jackhammer.
Do you really not care about hundreds of millions of city-dwellers across the equatorial band who will be heat-locked in concrete buildings, who will not be able to go outside for more than a few minutes for weeks of the year? Who will be forced to become nocturnal?
Have you heard of Jacobabad Pakistan? It’s a city of a couple hundred thousand souls where it already reaches 127ºF. These here are the coolest of times for at least the next few centuries for ol’ Jacobabad. Do you care at all about the people of Jacobabad? Of course not. But don’t worry; climate change is coming for you no matter where you hope to hide. In 2021, at only 1.1ºC warming, it reached 121ºF in the shade of a mountain town in Canada.
Do you really not care how miserable your children and grandchildren will be, let alone anybody else not immediately related to you who happens to live outside your visual field?
While we’re wasting an untold tonnage of human attention day-dreaming about how to terraform Mars into our Happy Place, ten billion fossil-fuel machines are humming along, making much of Earth more Martian — a hot, dry, barren, dusty, monotonous, lifeless dump-hole where you need to stay inside a pod every moment you exist if you wish not to die, and because it’s too hot to grow food in an actual field, you eat LED-lit poop potatoes. But hey, it’ll work, because we’ll use our boundless human ingenuity to build photovoltaics to power the Mars colony! That’s right. It’s too much of a bother to build solar power here on Earth, but it’ll be a snap on other planets farther from the sun!
Hell is not flames in the bowels of the Earth. You would immediately die in those conditions and promptly have your misery extinguished. No. Hell is a much narrower band of temperatures. In between 99ºF — where your body departs its thermal homeostasis and your lizard brain begins to subtly dissuade you from exerting yourself further by making you feel lazy and unmotivated so as to not have your muscles produce additional heat — and 105º or so, when your brain and organs cook into soup and fatally malfunction. So we should be clear what we are doing: willingly bequeathing ourselves ubiquitous, quotidian hell conditions. For our beloved children. And every generation thereafter.
Sure humans are crafty and innovative and will adapt. Of course we will. But can’t you see how much it will SUCK? Why don’t we just put in the effort to innovate now? So things don’t have to get so damaged to the point of royally sucking!
But this language is too blunt. It’s impolitic. You can’t say it. It upsets people.
Well, perhaps we should set aside our mollycoddling inability to be minimally honest or treat anybody else like a mature human being capable of the desire to not have themselves and many sentient beings besides suffer horribly. How about instead of squirmily evading basic reality, we just put in the effort to cooperate and reduce emissions fast, now. How about that? How about that, my insensate, foresightless friends?
