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Living on a Smoke-Bomb of a Planet
September 11th, Climate-Change-Style
As it turns out, it's never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the red planet, or rather -- so it seemed to me -- the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a strange orange haze of a kind I had never seen before as I walked the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way to a doctor's appointment.
Oh, wait, maybe I'm a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn't on Mars. The strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best hunch now, as I try to put recent events in perspective, is that I wasn't in life as I'd previously known it. Somehow -- just a guess -- that afternoon I might have become a character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had only recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller,Jr.'s sci-fi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, last visited in 1961 at age 17. It's about a world ravaged by humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later, still barely in recovery mode.
I must admit that the streets I was traversing certainly looked like they existed on just such a planet. After all, the ambience had a distinctly end-of-the-world (at least as I'd known it) feel to it.
Oh, wait! I checked the news online and it turns out that it was neither Mars, nor a sci-fi novel. It was simply my very own city, New York, engulfed in smoke you could smell, taste, and see, vast clouds of it blown south from Canada where more than 400 wildfires were then burning in an utterly out of control, historically unprecedented fashion across much of that country -- as, in fact, all too many of them still are. That massive cloud of smoke swamped my city's streets and enveloped its most famous buildings, bridges, and statues in a horrifying mist.
That day, New York, where I was born and have lived much of my life, reportedly had the worst, most polluted air of any major city on the planet -- Philadelphia would take our place the very next day -- including an air quality index that hit a previously unimaginable 484. That day, my city was headline-making in a way not seen since September 11, 2001. In fact, you might think of that Wednesday as the climate-change version of 9/11, a terror (or at least terrorizing) attack of the first order.
Put another way, it should have been a signal to us all that we -- New Yorkers included -- now live on a new, significantly more dangerous planet, and that June 7th may someday be remembered locally as a preview of a horror show for the ages. Unfortunately, you can count on one thing: it's barely the beginning. On an overheating planet where humanity has yet to bring its release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas under any sort of reasonable control, where summer sea ice is almost certain to be a thing of the past in a fast-heating Arctic, where sea levels are rising ominously and fires, storms, and droughts are growing more severe by the year, there's so much worse to come.
In my youth, of course, a Canada that hadn't even made it to summer when the heat hit record levels and fires began burning out of control from Alberta in the west to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east would have been unimaginable. I doubt even Walter M. Miller, Jr., could have dreamed up such a future, no less that, as of a week ago, 1,400% of the normal acreage of that country, or more than 8.7 million acres, had already burned (with so much more undoubtedly still to come); nor that Canada, seemingly caught unprepared, without faintly enough firefighters, despite recent all-too-flammable summers -- having, in fact, to import them from around the world to help bring those blazes under some sort of control -- would be in flames. And yet, for that country, experiencing its fiercest fire season ever, one thing seems guaranteed: that's only the beginning. After all, United Nations climate experts are now suggesting that, by the end of this century, if climate change isn't brought under control, the intensity of global wildfires could rise by another 57%. So, be prepared, New Yorkers, orange is undoubtedly the color of our future and we haven't seen anything like the last of such smoke bombs.
Oh, and that June evening, once I was home again, I turned on the NBC nightly news, which not surprisingly led with the Canadian fires and the smoke disaster in New York in a big-time way -- and, hey, in their reporting, no one even bothered to mention climate change. The words went unused. My best guess: maybe they were all on Mars.
Been There, Done That
In fact, you could indeed think of that June 7th smoke-out as the 2023 climate-change equivalent of September 11, 2001. Whoops! Maybe that's a far too ominous comparison and I'll tell you why.
On September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and aboard four hijacked jets, almost 3,000 people died. That was indeed a first-class nightmare, possibly the worst terrorist attack in history. And the U.S. responded by launching a set of invasions, occupations, and conflicts that came to be known as "the global war on terror." In every sense, however, it actually turned out to be a global war of terror, a 20-plus-year disaster of losing conflicts that involved the killing of staggering numbers of people. The latest estimate from the invaluable Costs of War Project is: almost a million direct deaths and possibly 3.7 million indirect ones.
Take that in for a moment. And think about this: in the United States, there hasn't been the slightest penalty for any of that. Just ask yourself: Was the president who so disastrously invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, while he and his top officials lied through their teeth to the American people, penalized in any way? Yes, I do mean that fellow out in Texas who's become known for his portrait painting in his old age and who, relatively recently, confused his decision to invade Iraq with Vladimir Putin's to invade Ukraine.
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