The real Zombie Apocalypse

Here we are just a couple of weeks into 2016 and we already know that last year was thesecond-warmest on record in the continental United States (the winner so far being 2012); the month of December was a U.S. record-breaker for heat and also precipitation; and it’s assumed that, when the final figures come in later this month, 2015 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Even before this news is confirmed, we know that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century which, at least to me, looks ominously like a pattern. And early expectations are that this year will top last, with the help of a continuing monster El Niño event in the overheating waters of the Pacific that has only added to the impact of global warming and to fierce weather around the world. Everywhere it seems increasingly possible to see the signs of climate change: the melting Arctic; the destabilizing ice sheets in both the Antarctic and Greenland; the already rising sea levels that are someday destined to submerge major coastal cities; the disappearing glaciers(and so, in some regions, endangered water supplies); monster typhoons; severe droughts; and the burning that goes with a globally expanding fire season; the -- in a word -- extremityof it all.

With 2015 in the history books, it’s easy enough to think of our changing weather as part of that history, but that would be a mistake. Climate change, if allowed to come to full fruition, will be something else altogether -- not history, but the possible end of it. History, after all, is something we’re generally familiar with. It has its surprises, but the rise and fall of nations, of empires, even of civilizations, the coming of democracy or dictators, the rising of peoples, the failure of revolutions, and yet more autocrats, all of that is the normal course of human events. All of it is part of the ongoing record. Climate change is something else entirely. Certainly, it emerges from history, since through our industrial processes -- the burning of coal and oil -- we created it, however inadvertently (at first). But let’s face it: global warming is the potential deal-breaker for history. It threatens not just to submerge global cities, but to sink civilization itself.

Don’t think of it as a tragedy for the planet. Give Earth a few million years and it’ll do fine. If climate change does its worst, life, in some fashion, possibly even human life, will undoubtedly survive and someday once again flourish, but the environment in which our civilizations have been built and our modest history recorded, the welcoming planet we’ve known will cease to exist in any time span that is meaningful to us. That is the future reality we face in the grim zombie world of the giant energy companies and energy states that Bill McKibben describes today. It’s why organizations like the one he founded, 350.org, are so important to our future and to the literal preservation of history. Unless we ensure that the human future is powered by alternative energy, and do so relatively quickly, while keeping the preponderance of fossil fuels in the ground, we will indeed find ourselves out of history and in the midst of a climate-change version of a zombie apocalypse. Tom

Night of the Living Dead, Climate Change-Style 
How to Stop the Fossil Fuel Industry From Wrecking Our World 
By Bill McKibben