I Cannot Believe In Climate Change
Hi readers. If you’ve been following me at all, you know I’ve recently gone on quite a climate change doomer binge. I never intended my subject matter to be specialised in climate change, but that’s what has been on top of my mind for a while. How can it not be? Does anything else really matter, compared to that?
But I have a confession to make: I cannot believe in a climate change apocalypse. Intellectually, I know it’s coming. I can see that it has already begun and it is coming for me. But in my heart, I cannot believe it. Today is a beautiful summer day in my redwood forest, as it has been for several weeks. The weather was a bit up and down during Spring, which was unsettling, but both the ups and downs were still beautiful days.
The grocery store shelves remain full of an impossible bounty of delightful edibles, some healthy, some not so healthy but still scrumptious. Gasoline prices are high but tolerable, and anyway, I drive an EV. Prices of everything are going up and inflation is rising, but I’ve got my retirement nest egg and soon Social Security checks will be rolling in, so I cannot complain.
I’m 67 years old. I’ve seen bad times come and go. When I was a child, the Vietnam War was raging. A lot of young men were getting drafted and a lot were coming home in boxes. But that ended and things went back to normal.
In the 70s there was a great gasoline shortage. For a few months I could only get gas on alternate weekdays, and sometimes had to wait in line. But that ended and things got back to normal.
In the late 70s and the 80s, we experienced double-digit inflation—almost 15% in 1980. My first mortgage had a 16% interest rate! But that ended, and I’ve since had mortgages as low as 3–1/2%.
I lived through the great stock market crash of 1987, the bursting of the Dot Com Bubble in 2000, and the subprime mortgage debacle of 2007–8, also known as The Great Recession. In each and every case, the stock market recovered and things went back to normal.
You see? Bad things happen, but they end and things return to normal. Bad times come and go. That’s what life has taught me. I’m just another old person grumbling that things were better in my day, right? I cannot believe that climate change is really the end of us—the end of industrial civilization. Sure, we’re experiencing some tough times, but we’ll get through it, surely. We always do. At least, we always have.
How can I believe that climate-change is fatal, when my life is so great? I’ve seen plenty of ups and downs, like a roller coaster, and things always return to normal. Back to the embarkment platform—you know, on the roller coaster. (Sorry, trying to justify the photo.)
How can I believe it?
— Lannie Rose, August 2022
