Liza Dubinsky is a rising junior at Bates College majoring in Environmental Politics and Mathematics. She is hoping to find work in the intersection of mathematics and environmental politics by analyzing and modeling climate data and international climate crisis efforts.
Climate change isn’t a new term. In 1956, physicist Gilbert Plass published a study called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change” and in 1975, geochemist Wallace Broecker published the paper titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming”. By 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed to interpret evidence on climate change.
But the thing is, climate change hasn’t imposed itself on my life. Yet.
Perhaps that’s not what you were expecting to read, but it’s the reality for many of us. And that makes us lucky, not immune. That gives us some time, but it doesn’t postpone the future indefinitely. Most of all, it doesn’t give us an excuse to ignore the truth.
The facts have been there from the beginning and they’re not going anywhere. Current data on climate change from NASA shows that the carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere is 414 parts per million, the highest in 650,000 years. Nineteen of the twenty warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and 2019 was the second warmest. The global average sea level has risen about seven inches in the last one hundred years.
How can we continue to enable the sentiment that climate change can’t be that bad or that what we are observing is just nature running its course? Worst of all, the deep mistrust of the media and science has driven many to emphasize the disconnect between their own experience and the portrayal of the reality beyond, rendering climate change a phenomenon to simply believe in.
Still, the facts are there. I discuss them in the classroom and write papers on them. But in my immediate circumstances, they’re still just facts.
Yet for so many others, their lives are the ones I read about. According to National Geographic, of the 22,400 acres that once stood in 1955, only a 320 acre strip of the Isle de Jean Charles remains today due to sea level rise and hurricane damage worsened by climate change. One story from the Washington Post details the rising temperatures that are melting Arctic permafrost and forcing Alaskan and Siberian communities to leave lands they’ve lived on for centuries. Another article from the New York Times reports on the droughts in Guatemala that are devastating crop yields and leaving farmers without a way to make ends meet.
There’s no escape from that. There’s no turning off the news. There’s no ignoring the facts.
The facts aren’t the problem, are they? We know what’s happening. But for now, only for now, we can let that simmer in the back of our minds for a little longer. We can afford to postpone. We can afford to make plans.
But we can’t keep putting this off, we’re out of time. We’ve been out of time and I’m out of options.
Now, I suppose it’s human nature to centralize your own experience, to worry most for ourselves. The first few lines of the post-war confessional prose by Martin Niemöller, however, are: “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Communist”. The piece ends with the following: “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me”.
We must demand more, even if it’s not for ourselves.
We must believe in more than what we experience, beyond our own reality.
We must find truth in stories that are not our own and we must fight for them, in the same way we fight for ourselves.