An island of plastic trash twice the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean. In much of the Caribbean, 80 percent of shallow coral reefs are dead. By the end of this century, as many as half of the Earth’s species will be extinct.
Oh, and don’t forget: Our collective carbon emissions appear to have committed us to a future that’s about 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels. That’s hotter than the planet has been for millions of years.
Have you stopped reading this column yet? “Human kind,’’ says a bird in the first of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,’’ “cannot bear very much reality.’’ Eliot’s bird is probably right: On how many mornings have I flipped past the latest doomsday statistics and headed straight for the sports section?
And yet, in her new book “The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One,’’ eminent oceanographer Sylvia A. Earle warns, “Diminishing the diversity of life as we are now doing translates to diminished chances for our continued prosperity.’’
In “Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse,’’ Oberlin professor David W. Orr, puts things more directly. “It is clear,’’ he writes, “that we are headed toward a global disaster that has the potential to destroy civilization.’’
Maybe it’s time for all of us to start bearing more reality. Lots more.
“I know of no purely rational reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future,’’ says Orr. The vision of our greenhouse future in “Down to the Wire’’ is not one of pleasant January walks on Cape Cod in T-shirts while farms of windmills turn happily in the background. What Orr foresees instead is absolute global destabilization.
For Orr, climate change is the only issue, not one among many. Ignore it, he argues, and we’ll guarantee our own extinction. Even if we do manage to cap carbon emissions and start the atmospheric system on a path toward rebalancing itself, Orr insists that we’d better start preparing for cataclysmic droughts, repeated acts of terrorism, massive human migrations from the coasts, a Midwest unsuitable for growing wheat by 2050, and the potential inundation of New Orleans, Miami, Washington, Baltimore, and Boston (yes, Boston), along with dozens more coastal cities.
I don’t mean to make “Down to the Wire’’ sound like disaster porn; this book is nothing like “2012’’ or whatever new doomsday movie is detonating in our cinemas. Rather it’s a grave assessment of our government’s incapacity to withstand the massive challenges that lay in the decades ahead.